During the recently live-streamed Xbox Games Showcase, Bethesda showed more than a handful of titles and add-ons coming our way, like Fallout 76 Atlantic City, The Elder Scrolls Online Necrom, and the 30-fps belle of the ball, Starfield. But leaving aside the frame rates from the Xbox Series X|S, let's focus on the frames you'll be getting on your good ol' trusty PC.
While Starfield had release dates before, it went through a couple of delays, so it'll be in shipshape condition by the time it finally comes out on September 6 on the current generation of Xbox and PC. That's right, no PS5, at least for now.
Bethesda's space exploration game has been through the wringer before, but now it's in the middle of another 30 fps (frames-per-second) online scandal, much like Redfall that came before it.
Starfield's Game Director, Todd Howard, confirmed and defended that it will run at 4K 30 fps and 1440p 30 fps on Xbox Series X and S, respectively. Because Xbox hasn't been consistent with their 1st party releases nor the quality they ship at for the past two and a half years, players were understandably upset at the performance limitation.
At the same time, there's still the question of how it will run on PC. While no official frame rate limitation was given at the time of writing, it wouldn't surprise anyone if they cap it at 60 fps, no matter what hardware you're packing.
If this is the case, at least modders will save the day by getting busy with "releasing the frame rate," as they did with other past Bethesda games.
Now, in terms of what actual specs you need to run the game, hold on to your britches 'cause it won't be a cheap ride. Starfield's scope is massive, spanning over 1,000 generated planets, meaning its world or Universe is enormous, to say the least.
On top of it all, it even remembers where you last put your sandwich, which requires a bit of computing power and an SSD. Apparently, it's not too friendly with old HDDs, so you'll need an SSD with at least 125GB of space to play it. The faster, the better.
Aside from that, your PC can hit the minimum requirement list with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel Core i7-6800K CPU paired with an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti graphics card. Regarding RAM, having at least 16 GB of DDR4 would be best.
Suppose you want to get friendly with the recommended requirements. In that case, you'll need at least 16 GB of RAM with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X or Intel i5-10600K processor and an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 GPU to go with the rest of the hardware.
The bad news is that we have no official word on the resolution and frame rate these configurations will hit. Still, it's safe to assume that the minimum would run Starfield at 1080p 30 fps, while the recommended will get you up to 60 fps at Full-HD.
As always, with graphical fidelity leaps in gaming, the bigger the jump, the higher the requirements to run it on a PC. This is unfortunate for those who can't play at 30 fps anymore because, just like Obi-Was Kenobi, the PC is our only hope for a buttery smooth 60 frames-per-second future.
At least until Xbox Series X Pro arrives, which will start the fidelity vs. fps debacle all over again.
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