Starfield, hmmm
The game is beautiful, even at the lowest graphics settings. But it is highlighting the need to upgrade to take it in in all its glory.
If you’re a gamer, then no doubt you have heard of the latest release from Bethesda, Starfield.
I didn’t buy it, but since I am a subscriber to Game Pass on PC, it became available this morning. I checked the minimum requirements, and my system passes – barely.
What the hell, I looked at the disk space requirements – gulp – 139GB. I have enough space, so I mashed the “install” button and went for a walk of my dog.
After that, it was almost installed1, requiring maybe an extra 5 minutes.
I find up my audio interface (so I wouldn’t have to use headphones) and fired it up. Alas, it took about 20 minutes to construct the shaders needed (not a big deal, it is an “only one time” event) and then I was dropped into the starting screen.
I played for about 30 minutes, and it was pretty good. It does run at the full 1440p resolution (2K), but it only runs with all the graphics settings set to low. I got through the first mining operation “training” found the artifact that triggers the galactic exploration, met Barrett, fought the pirates off, and then left the planet to begin the real exploration.
Yet, the experience was suboptimal. I fired up the graphics performance widget (Nvidia tool) and it was showing a consistent 43-45 frames per second rendering2 and the graphics were tearing on the redraw.
This is not strictly because of my computer, but instead it is due to the graphics card I have (also known as a GPU).
My rig is non-standard. It is an Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing) compact form factor, and the case can only house s very short graphics card. At the time the only one I could buy for it was a GTX1660S card, made by Asus. That is a 1000 series card, pre-ray tracing generation, and for most of my current games, it is fine. Starfield, well, it runs. It is OK, but I do need more oomph.
Alas, there aren’t many options. There is an RTX2080 card for it, but it is rare (read: expensive") and it is 2 generations behind the current crop of offers.
Boo.
The other option is to buy a case that gives a little bit more room to work. Cooler Master makes one just for the NUC9 that provides the ability ro add a GPU that is up to 2.5 slots thick. But what cards are there?
Fortunately, Asus’ website lets you sort their offers by card thicknesses by slots and 2.5 yields a pretty solid selection.
Alas, it is time to open the wallet, close my eyes, and pull the trigger. I went for a RTX 4070 Ti, 12G card, tailored to creators (that means that it has all the performance, but none of the flashy LEDs that the kids these days jizz over). It should arive un a week or so.
Now, to order the case. That is only $179, and includes the power supply. Transplanting the NUC card should be trivial, and then adding the GPU will be easy.
I was going to have to do this anyway, as the other game that I ordered, the new Forza Motorsport, will also slaughter my ancient (circa 2018) graphics card, when it is formally released on October 7th.
This way, I will be 100% ready on day one for Forza, if only poorer.
In the way back time, the thought of downloading 130 GB of data would have been a huge nope, but today it is not a huge stretch. For the record, that is about the equivalent of 30 full resolution HD movies… For one game.
We are totally spoilt. Back in the mid 1990’s when hardware 3D acceleration became a thing, we killed our bank accounts to buy the next generation, all to achieve 30 frames per second. Now if it is less than 60 FPS, we whine.