Bethesda’s Todd Howard says Starfield is optimized for PC, but a lot of players disagree

There’s no doubt Starfield is one of the best releases of 2023, but players are having a tough time playing it on PC, with many switching to Xbox.

Despite all the feedback, Bethesda’s director and executive producer Todd Howard defended the game’s optimization for PC and said players might need to get a new rig in an interview with Bloomberg on Sept. 6, the day of Starfield‘s worldwide release.

“We did [optimize Starfield for PC], it’s running great,” Howard said. “It’s a next-gen PC game and we really do push the technology so you may need to upgrade your PC for this game, but it has a lot of great stuff going on and the fans are responding awesome.”

Unfortunately, a lot of PC players don’t share the sentiment. Even if we ignore the fact that Starfield doesn’t run well in mainstream PC parts a lot of casual gamers have, which many consider an issue already, people are also having performance problems running Starfield on next-gen GPUs like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 and CPUs like the Intel i9-13900K.

The community was already complaining about how Starfield performs on PC, and it’s making more noise now after Howard denied there’s an issue.

With the way the Starfield experience on PC is going, Bethesda will likely have to update the game soon despite Howard saying it’s already been optimized. In the meantime, you can try to fix some performance issues with a few tips.