Starfield players with AMD Ryzen CPUs report frequent crashes

Bethesda's Starfield launched on Tuesday, and it has already exceeded one million concurrent players across all platforms today, according to the CEO of Microsoft Gaming. While the video game is getting exceedingly popular, some players with AMD Ryzen CPUs are reportedly not having the best experience.

Starfield players on Reddit are reporting the game keeps crashing, forcing their PCs to reboot. Most of the users reporting these crashes are playing the game on AMD Ryzen-powered PCs. However, there have also been a few cases of the game causing reboots on Intel machines as well. For one, the player who tipped us off about this issue was playing the game on an Core i7 13700k with a RTX 4090 GPU.

The player told us:

I've got an i7 13700k with a 4090 and have similar reboot crashes to what's being described. The first happened when Barrett gave me the watch, and the second is when I talk to a certain NPC in New Atlantis who asks me to get her a coffee from TerraBrew. That one seems to be reproducible. I also had another crash on the first planet Kreet when walking around, possibly from panning my view too quickly.

The crashes appear ironic considering AMD is Starfield’s exclusive PC partner. AMD’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of its Computing and Graphics Group even said:

We have worked hand-in-hand with Bethesda Game Studios to optimize Starfield for both Xbox and PC with Ryzen 7000 series processors and Radeon 7000 series graphics.

A Redditor who got in touch with Bethesda’s technical team was told a possible fix for the crashes. The alleged email response from the support team read:

We ask that you test the game in a clean boot environment with all non-Microsoft programs completely disabled. Note that this includes disabling antivirus programs as well. The only exception to this is the Steam client, as this must remain enabled so you can launch and run the game for testing purposes.

Note that this Redditor already tried a clean installation of the graphics card drivers but that did not resolve the issue. Bethesda might fix the crashing issue with an upcoming patch.

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