In our current age of gaming, it’s a fine line to walk between framerate and graphic fidelity. This is especially true in a Bethesda Softworks title like Starfield, where you have a ton of interactable objects. Once you throw in the many NPCs that you can talk to, it’s easy to see how certain areas in Starfield can be quite taxing on your hardware. In an effort to ensure a smooth gameplay experience, developers typically lock framerates to prevent massive FPS drops. That leads to an important question: Will Starfield be locked at 30fps?
Starfield FPS lock on Xbox Series X|S
Starfield will in fact be locked at 30fps on Xbox Series X|S. After the Starfield Direct and Game Director and Executive Producer Todd Howard of Bethesda Game Studios confirmed the 30fps lock for Xbox.
“I think it’ll come as no surprise, given our previous games, what we go for. Always these huge, open worlds, fully dynamic, hyper detail where anything can happen,” Howard told IGN. “”And we do want to do that. It’s 4K in the X. It’s 1440 on the S. We do lock it at 30, because we want that fidelity, we want all that stuff. We don’t want to sacrifice any of it.”
So to summarize, Bethesda made the decision to focus on a steady 30fps framerate while still ensuring graphic fidelity for Starfield. Instead of increasing the lock to 60fps on the Xbox Series X, the decision was made to increase its resolution to 4k. Meanwhile, the Xbox Series S will run at 1440p. Regardless of which Xbox model you have, the framerate will be locked at 30fps.
Will Starfield be locked at 30fps on PC?
Starfield will not be locked to 30fps on PC. After clarifying the framerate lock for consoles, Howard went on to boast the optimizations in Starfield that have allowed it to run at a higher framerate on PC.
“Fortunately in this one, we’ve got it running great. It’s often running way above that. Sometimes it’s 60,” Howard told IGN about Starfield’s performance on PC. “But on the consoles, we do lock it because we prefer the consistency, where you’re not even thinking about it.”
As is standard with PC releases, I’m sure you’ll be able to change various video settings based on your PC hardware. However, it appears those with the PC to handle it can go way over 30fps, even potentially past 60fps. For those with lower-end machines, you will surely have the option to lower settings and perhaps enable vsync to lock your framerate if need be to prevent massive framerate drops.
