Even the fastest SSDs you can buy might not be good enough for Starfield which makes upgrading your PC a little harder

But Todd Howard says it's optimized and you should upgrade anyway

What you need to know

• For as good a game as Starfield is at its core, the PC gaming community hasn't all been too thrilled with its performance. 
• A YouTuber has run some tests with a PCIe 5.0 SSD that shows even the absolute fastest storage you can get still isn't enough. 
• After many took exception to Bethesda's Todd Howard saying we should just upgrade our PCs, what exactly are we supposed to upgrade to?!

Starfield is certainly the hot topic in gaming land right now and while a lot of it is fun (it is, after all, a good game at its core), the PC gaming community has been poking and prodding at the game quite a bit. This latest video that has surfaced shows something pretty remarkable, and that's a suggestion even the absolute fastest storage a consumer can buy right now isn't necessarily enough for this game. 

Surfaced on Reddit, the video from Compusemble on YouTube shows Starfield being played on a system with a brand spanking new, ridiculously fast PCIe 5.0 SSD. And yet, the system is still hitting the wall. 

The video below demonstrates what seems to be happening with the "traversal stutter" and that it might not just be down to your CPU when it occurs. 

The testing in the video suggests that in some larger cities in Starfield, SSD usage is hitting 100%, followed by a drop in GPU usage and then stuttering. To think a PCIe 5.0 SSD is being maxed out is pretty crazy. More curious is that the throughput is apparently far below the maximum that the SSD is capable of, and a comparison is drawn later with Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. Here, the throughput is higher, but SSD usage is much lower. 

Presumably, per Todd Howard's "upgrade your PC" approach, we're going to need as yet unreleased hardware for Starfield? 

Jokes aside, it's interesting data. There's also another thread on Reddit which summarizes some other interesting information that could allude to another reason behind disappointing PC performance.

It does feel like Starfield's PC version has been a bit of an afterthought, and I think it'd be fair for a lot of PC gamers to feel a little hard done by. Those with the absolute most powerful beastly rigs are probably having a great time, but the rest of us, aka, the masses, do have legitimate reasons to feel disappointed. Trust me, I'm an Intel Arc user, I feel all the pain. 

While we wait for PCIe 6.0 SSDs, so we can upgrade our rigs to handle Starfield, it would be nice if instead of sound bites from the developer, we got some kind of commitment to make the game better. I don't know about you, but I'd definitely prefer that. 

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