PSA: Starfield Needs an SSD to run properly
Way back in June, I posted an article stressing the importance of installing Starfield on a Solid-State Drive(SSD), as opposed to the commonly used Hard Disk Drives (HDDs).
It seems that I have failed to heed my own advice, in a way. After some serious thought into whether or not it was worth it to play Starfield, I decided to pre-purchase the game. After hours of downloading and installing the game, I started to play…
I started to notice a lot of glaring issues, from slow loading times to the game failing to play audio and respond to mouse/keyboard/controller input. At first, I thought the slowdown was from playing through my Steam Link app on my TV, but once I was playing Starfield at the lowest settings, 1280×720 resolution, and still getting horrendous performance, I knew that something was wrong.
After about 4 hours of struggling through the first part of the game, I decided to do some troubleshooting.
As it turned out, a lot of my Steam games were being installed to one of my high storage HDD drives. Which is great for holding hundreds of gigs of game data, but not so much in the case of Starfield.
Starfield is among the first of many modern PC games that are now required to be installed to a SSD for optimal performance.
Once I migrated my game’s folder over to my SSD, the difference in performance was literally night and day; not only was my game able to load up much faster, but I can run the game at medium settings and my 2560×1440 resolution monitor. I haven’t really adjusted many settings, as I do have an older graphics card.
Helpful Tip: Open up Task Manager in Windows and go to the Performance tab to view any Disks you have installed on your machine. This is a quick way to determine whether a disk is HDD or SSD.
Below are the minimum and recommended specs for running this game, as per the Steam store page:
Minimum Starfield PC Requirements
- OS: Windows 10 version 22H2 (10.0.19045)
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6800K
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 5700, NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 125 GB available space
- Additional Notes: SSD Required
Recommended Starfield PC Requirements
- OS: Windows 10/11 with updates
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, Intel i5-10600K
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080
- DirectX: Version 12
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 125 GB available space
- Additional Notes: SSD Required
Anyways, I hope this quick little blurb helps anyone who might have been having issues. Keep in mind that the official release of Starfield is on Sept 6, so until then, if any bugs and issues are discovered, hopefully those that are reported will be fixed in a Day One patch.
Until next time, have fun and happy gaming!
~ Ken