Here's how Starfield runs on Steam Deck and desktop Linux

Starfield brings even my desktop to its knees. I couldn't imagine for a second that's actually playable on the Deck. oO

I've been running it happily on my RX 5600m PRIME setup and it's been pretty solid on medium on my external 4k monitor. getting >30fps pretty much all the time.

Turns out I'm running on Mesa 23.2.0_rc2, which might explain why it just seemed to work fine for me.

I'll try mesa git out to see if that helps in any way.

I would just lock my frames to 30. Smoother experience and less battery draw.
But overall this seems playable. I also think performance will be better over time cause valve and Bethesda are working on steam deck performance.

Sections of New Atlantis are the only areas I've seen sub 60FPS @ 1440P maxed out (no FSR) on my system.

Edit: Kernel 6.5 + mesa-git

It honestly has me eying an AM5/DDR5 + 7800X3D upgrade but I think I'll wait for the inevitable performance fixes as the 5800X3D should be able to hold me over until I upgrade my rig for Fable (self-imposed goal).


Last edited by drlamb on 4 September 2023 at 10:31 pm UTC

Ok, feedback on running it on Mesa git.
Yes, it's definitely more performant.

BUT

I'm having glitches all over the place, so I'm downgrading to mesa 23.2rc2 again.

No issues on 23.1.6 mesa - mix of mostly high and some medium settings 1440p 60-85fps native no fsr (6900xt/5950x)

Whew, I'll wait for Nvidia improvements & at least 1 game patch before buying. Let's hope the game gets more post release attention by devs & publisher than Hogwarts Legacy


Last edited by based on 5 September 2023 at 4:50 am UTC

Hopefully soon those tireless members of the community will have it running. May we never forget their service to our entertainment. 🫡

Sections of New Atlantis are the only areas I've seen sub 60FPS @ 1440P maxed out (no FSR) on my system.

Edit: Kernel 6.5 + mesa-git

It honestly has me eying an AM5/DDR5 + 7800X3D upgrade but I think I'll wait for the inevitable performance fixes as the 5800X3D should be able to hold me over until I upgrade my rig for Fable (self-imposed goal).

I'm on AM5 7900X3D (and 6900 xt) believe me it is not very good at all (New Atlantic 1440p Ultra with optimization mods from nexuxmods, falls to 50 fps constantly and struggles to maintain 60 with 99% GPU load with occasional 70-90 fps in close quarters.. though gpu is under-volted and power-limited and cpu is not overclocked either.. turning on FSR gives me a mighty [up to] 6 fps more lol). This game is absolutely not optimized and is a disaster (so a normal 2023 AAA release). AMD get your money back lol!

Sections of New Atlantis are the only areas I've seen sub 60FPS @ 1440P maxed out (no FSR) on my system.

Edit: Kernel 6.5 + mesa-git

It honestly has me eying an AM5/DDR5 + 7800X3D upgrade but I think I'll wait for the inevitable performance fixes as the 5800X3D should be able to hold me over until I upgrade my rig for Fable (self-imposed goal).

I'm on AM5 7900X3D (and 6900 xt) believe me it is not very good at all (New Atlantic 1440p Ultra with optimization mods from nexuxmods, falls to 50 fps constantly and struggles to maintain 60 with 99% GPU load with occasional 70-90 fps in close quarters.. though gpu is under-volted and power-limited and cpu is not overclocked either.. turning on FSR gives me a mighty [up to] 6 fps more lol). This game is absolutely not optimized and is a disaster (so a normal 2023 AAA release). AMD get your money back lol!

I think your expectations are just plain weird. Don't play on Ultra. Look at the Hardware Unboxed tuning guide, you can get quite a bit of extra performance by tuning some of the settings and it will look nearly identical.

I am actually impressed at how well the game runs considering the hardware I have.

Sections of New Atlantis are the only areas I've seen sub 60FPS @ 1440P maxed out (no FSR) on my system.

Edit: Kernel 6.5 + mesa-git

It honestly has me eying an AM5/DDR5 + 7800X3D upgrade but I think I'll wait for the inevitable performance fixes as the 5800X3D should be able to hold me over until I upgrade my rig for Fable (self-imposed goal).

I'm on AM5 7900X3D (and 6900 xt) believe me it is not very good at all (New Atlantic 1440p Ultra with optimization mods from nexuxmods, falls to 50 fps constantly and struggles to maintain 60 with 99% GPU load with occasional 70-90 fps in close quarters.. though gpu is under-volted and power-limited and cpu is not overclocked either.. turning on FSR gives me a mighty [up to] 6 fps more lol). This game is absolutely not optimized and is a disaster (so a normal 2023 AAA release). AMD get your money back lol!

I think your expectations are just plain weird. Don't play on Ultra. Look at the Hardware Unboxed tuning guide, you can get quite a bit of extra performance by tuning some of the settings and it will look nearly identical.

I am actually impressed at how well the game runs considering the hardware I have.

yeah nowadays a game merely "running" is considered "good enough" by majority of ppl thanks to repeated disastrous game release one after the other. People have no expectations at all.

IMO in 2023, 120 FPS should be considered "good". And real 120 not fake frame/upscale clown fiesta.
On top of that, Starfield looks by no means justify its hardware demands. Nowadays only $1K+ GPU owners can truly enjoy "smooth" pc gaming due to lack of care on game devs' side to optimize. Not to mention Intel/Nvidia owners disaster.

Sections of New Atlantis are the only areas I've seen sub 60FPS @ 1440P maxed out (no FSR) on my system.

Edit: Kernel 6.5 + mesa-git

It honestly has me eying an AM5/DDR5 + 7800X3D upgrade but I think I'll wait for the inevitable performance fixes as the 5800X3D should be able to hold me over until I upgrade my rig for Fable (self-imposed goal).

I'm on AM5 7900X3D (and 6900 xt) believe me it is not very good at all (New Atlantic 1440p Ultra with optimization mods from nexuxmods, falls to 50 fps constantly and struggles to maintain 60 with 99% GPU load with occasional 70-90 fps in close quarters.. though gpu is under-volted and power-limited and cpu is not overclocked either.. turning on FSR gives me a mighty [up to] 6 fps more lol). This game is absolutely not optimized and is a disaster (so a normal 2023 AAA release). AMD get your money back lol!

I think your expectations are just plain weird. Don't play on Ultra. Look at the Hardware Unboxed tuning guide, you can get quite a bit of extra performance by tuning some of the settings and it will look nearly identical.

I am actually impressed at how well the game runs considering the hardware I have.

yeah nowadays a game merely "running" is considered "good enough" by majority of ppl thanks to repeated disastrous game release one after the other. People have no expectations at all.

IMO in 2023, 120 FPS should be considered "good". And real 120 not fake frame/upscale clown fiesta.
On top of that, Starfield looks by no means justify its hardware demands. Nowadays only $1K+ GPU owners can truly enjoy "smooth" pc gaming due to lack of care on game devs' side to optimize. Not to mention Intel/Nvidia owners disaster.

nowadays huh? All I care about is that I'm enjoying it.

Is it super optimized? I doubt it, but Bethesda (the RPG Bethesda, not the old-Id Bethesda) was never good at making games run incredibly smoothly, their specialty is in building large complex worlds. Starfield is a lot less buggy than anything they released since Fallout 3.

And the Nvidia/Intel "disaster" you're talking about seems to be:
* The game is not even technically "out" yet. So this is technically still early access.
* Yes, they probably didn't do a thorough check on Intel GPUs, as they seemingly left Intel to fix the issues by themselves.
* They clearly tested on Nvidia on Windows, and involved them because Nvidia released fixed drivers mentioning Starfield a week early. Why is under performing? Apparently because Nvidia has been re-allocating software devs from GPU divisions to AI divisions. Also Nvidia is much more interested in playing the blame game with their "AMD Being anticompetitive again" marketing. (which is complete nonsense)
* Nvidia on Linux, seems the 535 drivers broke tons of stuff, so that's entirely on Nvidia as well.

So, just enjoy the game. Or keep on trolling if that's your fancy.

I'm an nvidia user who is obsessed with all things set in space, so yes I'm extremely disappointed I can't get this running yet.

While I don't think it'll be fixed very quickly because it seems to be a driver issue (thinking order months not order days or weeks), I am cautiously optimistic that it'll just get fixed one day and we'll pretty much all forget about it being unplayable on linux, just like has happened with nearly every other game. As an anecdote, I have a list of steam games, out of my 700 strong library, called "borked", meaning unplayable on linux. Currently I have exactly 1 game in that list: starfield. Granted I've not tested every game I own, but I have by now played *hundreds* of games on linux and all work, mostly without any issue. It might seem remarkable that such a highly anticipated game happens to be the one that doesn't work, but keep in mind, most games these days come out on one of about 3 game engines, this is a brand new in-house job so lots of opportunities for the devs to do "weird" things that break the drivers or vkd3d that you simply don't see on e.g. UE.

Also we should keep in mind that if past bethesda games are a precedent, starfield is likely extremely complicated from a programming standpoint and initially (or always? see skyrim) quite buggy. So, as frustrated as I am I can't play right now, I think it's probably just fine to wait for things to shake out and play in a month or 2 after a whole bunch of driver, vkd3d and game-specific stuff has been patched.


Last edited by ExpandingMan on 5 September 2023 at 4:26 pm UTC

You're running mesa from git to get VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute for optimal performance.

I suppose it's going to make its way to mesa 23.2 that is around the corner.


Performance is disappointing so far, in the 90s with the low preset but it looks straight out of 2004. medium preset cannot hold 60 fps.
Ryzen™ 9 3900X + RX 5700 XT, Linux 6.4.12-zen1-1-zen + mesa 23.1.6

Let's wait 6 months for Starfield to enter Beta, as is the norm with Bethesda

Or just wait till after the first run through of BG3.

Ok, feedback on running it on Mesa git.
Yes, it's definitely more performant.

BUT

I'm having glitches all over the place, so I'm downgrading to mesa 23.2rc2 again.

Yeah, I ran into this with `mesa-tkg-git` on Arch Artix, ended up building Mesa 23.2-rc3 myself just now. 23.1.6 is I think missing that important Vulkan extension (sub-20fps), while 23.3.0/-git has all sorts of flickering artifacts and eventually a hard lockup.

So far a good 45-70fps at 1080p Low on my laptop in New Atlantis, so totally playable. Just got to play a bit more to validate the stability. ;p

You're running mesa from git to get VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute for optimal performance.

I suppose it's going to make its way to mesa 23.2 that is around the corner.


Performance is disappointing so far, in the 90s with the low preset but it looks straight out of 2004. medium preset cannot hold 60 fps.
Ryzen™ 9 3900X + RX 5700 XT, Linux 6.4.12-zen1-1-zen + mesa 23.1.6

Turns out the game is also heavily CPU limited. I'd recommend you watch and apply the tuning guides from Hardware Unboxed, their optimal performance settings is basically slightly better than Medium graphics that runs 20-30% better. Then you can also bump up render resolution a bit to make it just that little bit crisper.

The gist is for Medium, bump up "Indirect Lighting", "Crowd Density", "Grass Quality" and then bump down "Volumetric Lighting", "Motion Blur", "Contact Shadows".
I had to bump down "Reflections" as well as indoor scenes that have a lot of reflections really struggled on my system (which is basically like yours, just 20-30% weaker overall)

Then I could bump up render resolution from 50% to 60% and it definitely looks better for about the same performance than Medium preset. (This is for 4k screen on Renoir + RX5600m laptop, if your render resolution is 1440p you should probably bump render scaling to 70% for a crisper image)


Last edited by grigi on 7 September 2023 at 9:27 am UTC

On Fedora 38 Silverblue, using Steam as a Flatpak, with an AMD 7900 XTX, I had to set a custom launch option:

RADV_PERFTEST=gpl %command%

Starfield has been running flawlessly once I set that variable (for Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries). Without it, it should show the copyright screen and crash as soon as it tried showing the Bethesda logo, regardless of Proton version.

I have the graphics set to ultra, with the only modification to disable dynamic resolution. (Having that turned on would cause weird shadows.) It works fine with FSR2 on and off, but I've left it on.

I'm using Proton Experimental, which looks like the Steam-selected default at the moment.

I haven't tried running it on the Steam Deck yet.

Starfield is the first major release where I noticed that my GTX 1080 doesn't meet minimum requirements.. And it has graphics from 10 years ago. Good job Todd, good job.

Fortunately, from what I understood the game is not that good anyway.

Fortunately, from what I understood the game is not that good anyway.

I wouldn't say that. It's an overhyped game, and it basically just barely meets expectations.
Meaning its a good game, but has flaws.

My GPU is technically below minimum spec and I'm playing it fine, though. But it is an AMD gpu, which seems to be a blessing for once.