Reddit users have discovered a new bug in Starfield where the game won’t render entire stars when running on an AMD Radeon GPU.
The Case of Missing Stars In Starfield On AMD Radeon GPUs, Nothing Game-Breaking But Definitely Immersion-Breaking
So a user on Reddit posted on the Starfield subreddit that there was a problem in Starfield when running the game on an AMD Radeon GPU. The issue is very simple, the game just won’t render a star in any solar system when you are at the dayside of a moon or even any planetary object. The issue only occurs on AMD Radeon GPUs and users with the Radeon RX 7000 & RX 6000 GPUs are reporting the same thing.
Starfield Missing Stars When Running on AMD Radeon GPUs (Image Source: u/Yoraxx)
Starfield With Star In The Skybox on an NVIDIA GeForce GPU (Image Source: u/Yoraxx)
The issue is that the dayside of any planetary body or moon needs a source of light that gets it all lit up. That source is the star and on any non-AMD GPU, you will see the star/sun in the sky box which will be illuminating light on the surface. But with AMD cards, the star/sun just isn’t there while the planet/moon remains illuminated without any light source.
Now while this isn’t a game-breaking bug, it definitely leads to a less immersive experience. I am almost 100 hours into the game and I know for a fact that watching the star in the distant space can look absolutely gorgeous within the Starfield. It is one of the factors that make this game so visually immersive and fun to roam around the multitude of planets.
There’s also another example where the game rendered an illuminated skybox but didn’t include the star on a standard planet.
The user also reported that he was able to resolve the issue by simply swapping in his AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT GPU with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. It should be remembered that Bethesda and AMD partnered together to optimize the experience for Ryzen and Radeon GPU owners. The game runs incredibly well on Radeon GPUs versus the competition but bugs like these are a major over-sight. Once again, it won’t break the game since the issue only got reported now despite over 300K users playing the game on Steam (current concurrent numbers).
It is likely that Bethesda might roll out a patch for the game to address this issue or if they are a bit late, then there’s always the modding community which has been hard at work pumping out large amounts of optimizations and performance-specific mods since the game released. I have been using the DLSS Frame-Gen mod in the game which runs great and so far, I am loving the game & all the time I have put into it.