The arrival of any highly anticipated console game brings with it a staggering level of expectation, especially when it’s a first-party exclusive – like Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield. Looking back at the various pre-launch controversies, one of the biggest was the decision to cap the game at 30 frames per second when the majority of games released on Xbox Series X are attempting to target 60fps. With the final game in our hands then, the question is this: what are the chances of a performance mode on Microsoft’s most powerful console? It’s the first order of business in a DF Direct Special you’ll see embedded a paragraph or two under these words.
Back in June, Bethesda confirmed the 30fps cap on consoles, with Todd Howard going on the record to say that “We prefer the consistency… I think it’ll come as no surprise, given our previous games, what we go for – always these huge, open worlds, fully dynamic, hyper detail where anything can happen.” Howard also mentioned that when the frame-rate cap is not in place, Starfield can run at up to 60 frames per second, according to the content.
So, how can we put this to the test? We built a unique PC designed to broadly match the capabilities of the Xbox Series X console. Recently, we reviewed the AMD 4800S Desktop Kit – a China-only OEM product based around the actual Xbox Series X SoC. The GPU portion is disabled, but we do get the CPU element, paired with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. There are faster clock speeds than Series X and more available cores to games, but far more of a limitation is the GDDR6 memory, typically used for graphics cards, not CPUs. Check out the full review because it throws up some fascinating results. Xbox Series X’s CPU is indeed a Zen 2 processor, but it acts in very different ways to something like a Ryzen 5 3600 or Ryzen 7 3700X.
