Bethesda has a history of making demanding AAA games set in immersive open worlds. Starfield is the latest, and can best be described as Skyrim in space. Open world games put heavy demands on developers and gaming hardware because the increased scope dramatically increases difficulty for everything involved. While Starfield gameplay appears relatively bug free, its graphics performance has attracted attention because AMD cards tend to punch above their weight. With that in mind, let’s examine a particular scene.

We analyzed this scene using Nvidia’s Nsight Graphics and AMD’s Radeon GPU Profiler to get some insight into why Starfield performs the way it does. On the Nvidia side, we covered the last three generations of cards by testing the RTX 4090, RTX 3090, and Titan RTX. On AMD, we tested the RX 7900 XTX. The i9-13900K was used to collect data for all of these GPUs.