A rumor is circulating online that claims to have exposed some major programming faults in the code of Starfield, the latest sci-fi RPG from Bethesda. The rumor alleges that these faults are the reason behind the performance issues that many players have experienced with the game, and that they are not related to the hardware requirements or the graphics settings.
How the Alleged Starfield Programming Faults Were Discovered
The rumor originated from a Reddit post by a user named nefsen402, who shared a link to a GitHub page of Vkd3d, a project that translates DirectX 12 graphics API to Vulkan, an open-source alternative. Vkd3d is used by some players who want to run Starfield on Linux systems, which do not support DirectX 12 natively.
According to nefsen402, one of the developers of Vkd3d, who uses an alias, discovered some strange things that Starfield is doing to the GPU drivers while working on a new version of Vkd3d.
The Strange Things Starfield Allegedly Does to GPU Cards
According to the reddit post, in a pull request submitted by the developer on GitHub, he explained what he found out about Starfield’s code and how it affects the game’s performance. He stated that Starfield does not allocate its memory properly, where it does not match the CPU page size. This causes the game to crash randomly if the GPU drivers cannot handle this.
He also stated that Starfield misuses a DirectX 12 feature called ExecuteIndirect, which lets the game render complex scenes with less CPU usage. However, Starfield does not give correct hints to the GPU drivers about what the ExecuteIndirect calls will do, leading to bubbles in the command queue. These bubbles make the GPU stop and start its work again, resulting in performance losses and lag.
Furthermore, he claimed that Starfield makes several ExecuteIndirect calls one after another instead of grouping them together, which worsens the problem. It’s not clear if the giant NPC glitch is related to what the developer described.
The Reddit post by nefsen402 quickly gained traction, and sparked a heated discussion among the gaming community. Many players expressed their frustration and disappointment with Bethesda for releasing a game with such alleged programming faults. They insinuated that Bethesda is being lazy and incompetent, and of not caring about their customers or their products.
They also criticized Bethesda for not acknowledging or addressing these issues, and for blaming the hardware instead of their own code. Gamers are not happy that the open source community was able to come up with their own temporary fixes to make the game run smoother, and made their fixes available to the public, yet Bethesda doesn’t seem to be doing anything to fix the alleged underlying issues with their own game.
Bethesda has not yet responded to the rumor, or commented on the alleged programming faults in Starfield’s code. The company has been silent on social media since the game’s launch, except for announcing some minor bug fixes and thanking the fans for their feedback. It is unclear whether Bethesda is aware of or working on these issues, or whether they will ever address them publicly.
