News Intel Drops Third 'Starfield' Driver as Bethesda Claims A770 Doesn't Meet Min Specs

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Intel Arc owner for around 10 months here. There seems to be some misinformation and misconception here so I will try to clear them up:

1.
GPU minimum requirements are generally not a question of "muscle" but technologies support.
Intel Arc A770 support Shader Model 5.1
Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti support Shader Model 6.2

Starfield seems to use a version above 5.1 and Intel scrumble to add functions used by Starfield to make shaders work correctly.
I don't know where you read that Arc only supports Shader Model 5.1 but it is false, because in order to support DirectX12 Ultimate it has to support at least Shader Model 6.5. Additionally Wikipedia lists the Shader Model as 6.7, while TechPowerUp lists it as 6.6.
And while I'm already at it, your number for the GTX 1070 Ti is also wrong, because it also supports DirectX12 Ultimate, which means that it has to support at least Shader Model 6.5 too. (It actually supports 6.7)

2.
Intel tried to cut corners on so many ways (ie not DX9 native support) and now they pay the price by trying to fix EVERYTHING through driver updates (1.2Gb driver - wtf)!
For around 6 months now the driver size has been between 600-700Mb, which is pretty much the same as AMD and NVIDIA drivers.. When Arc launched the drivers were indeed around 1.2Gb, but Intel addressed the driver size fairly quick.
Also I think Intel didn't implement DX9 native support to cut corners, but because the don't have a 20+ year backlog of drivers with DX9 support and it just does not make sense to add it now, when there are barely any new games coming out that use DX9 and you can put the effort instead into more important things like driver stability and support for modern games.

3.
Buy a crap GPU, get a crap experience.
that's omitting the fact those GPUs have been nothing but trouble since they were released.
A friend of mine recently got a Radeon RX 7600 and in the first week it had more problems than my Arc A750 on it's first week in early December. Arc GPUs are by no means crap, when they came out they had the best media engine on the market, ray tracing was competitive with NVIDIA and ahead of AMD and the same is valid for XeSS. Besides Intel didn't cheap out on VRAM bandwidth like both NVIDIA and AMD do nowadays. Since I have my Arc GPU I only experienced 2 games that didn't work, and every other game ran great, except for a few stutters in the first few months, which got fixed with driver updates. Outside of gaming I only had a problem with the GPU not detecting my second monitor at first, which I was able to fix after plugging it into my iGPU once. So far my experience with Arc has been pretty good.
 
Intel Arc owner for around 10 months here. There seems to be some misinformation and misconception here so I will try to clear them up:
Thanks for the clarifications! Much preesh. And welcome to the forum. : )
Glad to know you've had a pretty good experience with Arc. Just out of curiosity, what were the two games that didn't work?
 
I don't know where you read that Arc only supports Shader Model 5.1 but it is false, because in order to support DirectX12 Ultimate it has to support at least Shader Model 6.5. Additionally Wikipedia lists the Shader Model as 6.7, while TechPowerUp lists it as 6.6.
And while I'm already at it, your number for the GTX 1070 Ti is also wrong, because it also supports DirectX12 Ultimate, which means that it has to support at least Shader Model 6.5 too. (It actually supports 6.7)
Sorry I stand corrected. Many users have Windows 10 and not always with the last version (https://community.intel.com/t5/Grap...-feature-level-support-confusion/td-p/1485817).
Starfield use DirectX 12 Agility SDK which does not depends on system updates but driver updates (dx12 library is packaged with the game).
 
one store here doesnt even stock Arc any more, havent seen one on their shelves for at least a couple of months now ... which cant be a good sign, if its not because they cant get them...
 
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The hardware is fast enough, Intel just needs to get all the gears in order to handle the game and it will be fine.

It will probably be a good thing since once the guys who adjust drivers get it going they will know how to do it for future games and it won't be an issue.
 
What the heck did that support guy smoke? Also, by all accounts, ARC GPUs aren't crap - thanks @Kirai for the technical info above and user experience - and there is no good reason for them not to be supported. As others stated, by that logic, quite a few other cards shouldn't be supported either due to low market share, and almost every other game runs fine. Plus, it doesn't need a genius to see that something is very wrong with Starfield's optimization, considering that performance on Nvidia cards is also hot garbage. And that doesn't even touch lacking feature support, which I blame AMD for equally. Yeah, no, this game is a hard pass.
 
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"No eyebrows". I find it almost hilarious that somehow the driver is making the eyebrows disappear.

How can something like this even happen? There must be something really wrong with the implementation. Stuff like eyebrows shouldn't change due to a driver. Something is really out of whack here!

And the 770 should be on pair with a 1080ti, definitely better than a 1070ti.
 
This is not just a one-off game, this is going to be a repeat performance from Intel going forward. They will be chasing game bugs on those lousy cards until one day they say enough.
 
I mean, "Skyrim in space" doesn't really sound as big a selling point when you stop to realize that Skyrim, which was never a vehicle of technical or gameplay innovation to begin with, is already 12 years old. There are some things people expect today that weren't even a thing back then, and no, I do not necessarily mean microtransactions.
Actually, Bethesda was among the first companies to implement microtransactions in games even before Skyrim, way back with Oblivion. When the game first launched, they provided the option to purchase horse armor for a few dollars. Just armor for your horses that increases their HP. And it supposedly sold fairly well, despite there being a lot of negative criticism from those not wanting to see content stripped out of a single-player game to be sold on the side.

That being said, this is a far cry from Bethesda's Oblivion launch, which I got on DVD on launch day without issues whatsoever.
Oblivion definitely had it's own fair share of problems. Most were not game-breaking, although some could be, like NPCs randomly falling to their deaths through bridges or getting launched through the air upon loading a save file. And performance was definitely questionable on nearly all PC hardware of the day, generally unable to even maintain a steady 30fps on most systems with what was then considered modern hardware. And there were graphical issues everywhere, including major pop-in of objects, and distant terrain textures at launch that could best be described as "pea soup". At times, the game could actually look pretty great, but it often tended to look rather janky and broken in motion.

What bothered me the most though was that all sorts of major game systems felt half-finished and botched together in Oblivion. Sure the game offered lots of classes to play as, but many of them were largely unplayable. For example, I initially started playing as a thief archer that specialized in acrobatics, which you would think would be a reasonable role to play as. Except there were barely any usable stealth mechanics in the game. And since the choice of role caused me to level up just from running, jumping and swimming, with the perks being related to those tasks, it wasn't long before the game's broken level scaling caused the enemies to become extreme damage sponges, without providing any sort of increased damage output to counter it, especially with the game's weak bows. And sure, the perks let me jump onto the roofs of houses and sprint away from enemies, but that provided no real benefit to actually getting through the game's content. There was nothing to do on house roofs aside from running into invisible walls everywhere, while the broken enemy pathfinding caused enemies to keep running in place against the walls of the building in a futile attempt to reach me on the roof, while I slowly pecked away at them with 30 arrows to the head. They didn't even allow you to enter buildings through upstairs balconies, despite them having upstairs interiors, which might have at least provided some benefit to the jumping perk.

They also allowed you to pick up and place any small objects in the world, but that system was completely broken too. You could freely jump up on a table in a tavern and kick everyone's food onto the floor, and no one sitting around the table would care in the least, just watching you trampling their meal. But as soon as you lift one worthless strawberry off the floor to set back on the table, everyone in the room freaks out and starts running around yelling "Stop! Thief! You won't get away with this! Guards! Guards!". Then a psychic guard immediately teleports in through the door with the line "Stop right there criminal scum! Nobody breaks the law on my watch!" And if you refused to pay a huge fine, they would chase you to the ends of the earth trying to kill you, and every guard in every city would immediately know about your criminal rampage of picking up a piece of fruit off the floor to set back up on a table. Even just picking up a piece of clutter that the physics system decided to randomly drop off a shelf could have a mother and her daughter that you just rescued come after you with knives. This broken crime system of course made actually playing the role of a thief impractical as well.

I found it shocking how broken much of Oblivion's game systems were, at least if you tried to do anything beyond the most common roles like warrior or mage, and how out of touch the game's 94 metascore felt. I picked up the game at launch to use with a new graphics card I got the week before to replace one that had failed, but vowed to never get a game at launch after that, since reviews couldn't really be trusted, and you are often effectively just paying extra to be a beta tester for an unfinished product. And those major gameplay issues never got fixed by the developer. Eventually, mods would address them, but those took a while, like the one that fixed the broken crime system for picking up objects that didn't come out until a few years after the game's launch. And a lot of these essential mods would have conflicts with one another, or in some cases create further performance issues, requiring one to spend significant time testing them, and hope that one of their 80 installed mods wouldn't bring the whole installation crashing down. I spent more time testing and debugging mods for the game then actually playing it.

It's probable that Starfield might actually be better than Oblivion in terms of performance, level of polish and core gameplay systems not being broken, but standards for open-world games tend to be a lot higher these days too.

The games not S tier visually.
The games got more loading screens than some decade old games. (having to load ur tiny spaceship or having to load a city store that is a small room with a vendor when you loaded entire city already? like wtf)
The games got input delay for just looting items.
The abundance of loading screens and the lack of the ability to fly freely between planetary bodies seems bizarre for such a big-budget production when you consider that games like No Man's Sky were allowing for seamless planetary landings in a procedurally-generated universe before production on Starfield even started. It undoubtedly disappointed a lot of people that free space travel wasn't available in the game when there had already been precedence for it for years. It was a similar situation with Cyberpunk, where people naturally drew comparisons to the sandbox gameplay in games like GTA that had been doing it far better for well over a decade. Game systems that were expected just simply weren't there, which seems unacceptable for games with massive budgets trying to pitch themselves as "AAAA" gaming experiences. They need to at least make sure that they are on par with what existing games are doing.
 
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"No eyebrows". I find it almost hilarious that somehow the driver is making the eyebrows disappear.

How can something like this even happen? There must be something really wrong with the implementation. Stuff like eyebrows shouldn't change due to a driver. Something is really out of whack here!

And the 770 should be on pair with a 1080ti, definitely better than a 1070ti.
That's how 3d models work, they are not one complete thing, they are like a statue where every single piece is individual and they all have to be shown at the same time and be moved in unison, if one of the pieces fails to get to the gpu or the gpu doesn't know what to do with the piece then you get issues.

assassins5.jpg
 
Actually, Bethesda was among the first companies to implement microtransactions in games even before Skyrim, way back with Oblivion. When the game first launched, they provided the option to purchase horse armor for a few dollars. Just armor for your horses that increases their HP...
Yeah, but back then that wasn't something that was expected. I remember the horse armor kerfuffle and how shocked people were back that a gaming company had the sheer gall to charge for something so ridiculous as that.

With you for the rest of your Oblivion criticisms, though. I, too, spent more time creating and installing mods to fix the stuff I didn't like than actually playing the game (which I never finished). By the time Fallout 3 – a.k.a. Reskinned Oblivion with Guns, Crappy Slo-Mo, and Even Crappier Writing – came out, I got so annoyed at Bethesda for so thoroughly ruining my favorite franchise that I never finished or really felt comfortable with any of their games since then. Not really surprising, either, considering how similar they all still look and play nearly two decades after Oblivion. Starfield looks like something I'm willing to give a shot, but since I'm no longer in a habit of helping huge gaming corporations fix their bugs for free, I'll wait for the inevitable expansion, tons of quality mods, and that ship armor DLC you know is coming sooner or later. So, three to five years?
 
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