Starfield on PC is the best way to play - but the game still requires a lot of work

Starfield shipped on PC simultaneously with Xbox consoles and let's kick off by saying that the enhancements available, the scope for superior performance and the range of user-generated mods combine to make this the best way to play it, hardware permitting. That's not to say that this is a great PC version, however, but all the critiques laid out on this page should be viewed through that lens. Even so, it's clear that there are many issues that need to be addressed to get the game into shape.

The good news is that Starfield ships without some of the bigger issues we've seen in a range of PC games this year. Shader compilation stutter? As far as I can tell, there is none. A short pre-compilation step when you first boot the game puts paid to that. There is still some stutter, however, but it's clearly not related to the shader compilation pipeline. After experiencing so many issues with this in so many games this year, that's great news.

In terms of graphics options and the user experience, there are issues. Let's start with the settings page, which does offer a range of options to tweak with a clear path towards delivering an optimised experience. The thing is, the game does nothing to show you what changing the settings actually does, nor does it even attempt to inform you of the performance wins and quality losses in doing so. Fear not: we can help you out with optimised settings, but this required many hours of testing with a video capture device and reference to the Xbox Series X version of the game. Users won't have this insight and will be blindly making tweaks without any clear understanding of how things may or may not be improving for their particular hardware.

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