this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
337 points (92.2% liked)

Games

16672 readers
825 users here now

Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)

Posts.

  1. News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
  2. Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
  3. No humor/memes etc..
  4. No affiliate links
  5. No advertising.
  6. No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
  7. No self promotion.
  8. No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
  9. No politics.

Comments.

  1. No personal attacks.
  2. Obey instance rules.
  3. No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
  4. Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.

My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.

Other communities:

Beehaw.org gaming

Lemmy.ml gaming

lemmy.ca pcgaming

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Traversal is technically possible yes, but it’s not possible to traverse at a speed which would be feasible or fun, indicating that their engine isn’t capable of unloading and loading new assets in fast enough as you move around. Probably the same reason that even Neon needs to be hard split in half instead of just unloading the assets from the part of the city you’re not at at the moment.

Speeds that the above mentioned mod adds. Until CK is added the debate of switching of one space map to another seamlessly is useless, since the current implementation is missing the hook to load the next map whilst the same hook is implemented between ship take off and space (even when player is not at the helm). Yeah, but New Atlantis is much bigger and allows the player to boost pack from the MAST top floor to another skyscrapers roof and then get down to commercial level and trade stuff without any load screens, at least on PC.

And bruh blaming the S with no information is asinine when not a single other game struggles with traversal on it, including massive open world’s like GTAV, Cyberpunk, Flight Simulator and even other space sims like NMS.

Expect of course if there were dev stories related to it sprinkling out periodically, latest being from Baldurs Gate 3 devs: https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-dev-shows-off-the-level-of-optimization-achieved-for-the-xbox-series-s-port-which-bodes-well-for-future-pc-updates/

It's worth noting that out of all the platforms that Larian has developed its masterpiece for, the Xbox Series S is probably the most restrictive. This is because it only has 8GB of high-bandwidth memory, to store the game while running and use as VRAM (the remaining 2GB gets used for system functions).

The graphs start at the beginning of September, with the game using just over 5.2GB for general game RAM and around 3.5GB for VRAM. By November, though, Larian had shaved this down to 4.7GB and 2.3GB respectively. The RAM reduction is a pretty decent 10% drop but the reduction in VRAM usage is a massive 34%.

Other devs have stated these: https://www.gamesradar.com/xbox-series-s-could-bottleneck-some-next-gen-games-developers-suggest/

Gneitling pointed to the "almost non-existent" RAM increase from current-gen systems to Xbox Series S as a major pain point. Also "it always scaled on PC" is nonsense. Every AAA game in the past decade or so has their assets made once so they run on min spec. Increasing sample counts a bit here and there for high settings isn't what you could truly have done with more power. Min spec matters.

The article has many such remarks from other devs as well. So why couldn't the segmentation of Starfield be because of Xbox Series S? Keep in mind the latter article is now roughly three years old.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

Because Larian specifically struggles with local co-op, not with loading new sections of the map.

As I've said, Cyberpunk runs perfectly fine on the S while loading in more geometry faster on the fly, and it's far from alone in that. Starfield's limitations are clearly a result of Bethesda's ancient engine and not hardware limitations since other devs using different engines can accomplish what they failed at on the same hardware.