Starfield PC requirements: Minimum & recommended specs

See if your PC is up to snuff – and find out whether Starfield will run on the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally.

By Cole Luke

Published: Thursday, 20 July 2023 at 12:00 am

Starfield is almost here and, as such, Bethesda has revealed the Starfield PC requirements with minimum and recommended specs.

But this raises as many questions as it does answers, as there is still a lot of uncertainty about what sort of performance these specs will net us and if it will be able to run on the Steam Deck or Asus ROG Ally.

Further muddying the field is AMD dancing around whether or not upscaling technologies such as DLSS and XeSS will be featured in the game.

Players are concerned as it is an AMD-sponsored title and their own FSR2 solution is typically regarded as being the weakest of the three temporal upscalers.

DLSS 3 frame generation has been enabling lower-end RTX 4000 series of cards to pull off astonishing feats and would open the door to higher-refresh rates for budget PC gamers – but the jury is out regarding this, too.

To give us a better idea, we’ll look at the equivalent PC specs of the Xbox Series S and X, which have confirmed performance profiles.

Additionally, we will see how scaleable this is down to handheld systems like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally. It would be great to play some Starfield when we’re on the go with our favourite handheld gaming PCs while wearing the snazzy Starfield watch.

Minimum requirements to play Starfield on PC

The minimum PC specs for Starfield are as follows:

Annoyingly, this doesn’t say what kind of experience we can expect – whether it be 1080p at 30 frames per second or something else.

The performance profile of the Xbox Series S is 1440p at 30 frames per second with FSR2 upscaling, so we can look at its equivalent PC specs to see if this is what Bethesda has in mind.

The Series S’s CPU is actually more akin to the Ryzen 2700X, which is more powerful than what they’ve listed here. This might be because the Series S shares memory between the CPU and the GPU, where PCs have their own memory pools.

The GPU equivalent is more akin to an RX 5500 XT or RTX 2050, however. Because it is able to share memory from a pool of 16GB, it can use much more VRAM than the 4GB available to these cards, making it much more useable despite being very similar spec-wise.

As such, PC users will need a GPU with enough VRAM and the RX 5700 and 1070 Ti both have 8GB of VRAM.

If you aren’t sure how your graphics card stacks up against the RX 5700 or GeForce 1070 Ti, these are broadly equivalent to the RX 6600 and Nvidia RTX 2060 Super.

With all that to consider, the minimum specs listed will probably offer an experience similar to the Series S, though if you are playing at 1080P, you might see frame rates closer to 60 – especially when using FSR2.

Recommended specs to play Starfield on PC

The recommended PC specs for Starfield are as follows:

Similarly to the minimum spec sheet, we don’t actually know how these specs translate into actual performance.

What we can deduce is that the Xbox Series X is broadly equivalent to a PC equipped with a Ryzen 3600 (which is listed in the spec sheet) and an RTX 3060 Ti – this being fairly similar in performance to the RTX 2080, which is again what they recommend.

On the Xbox, however, we are getting a 4K experience locked to 30 frames per second with FSR2, which is typically not the preferred level of performance for PC users, as mouse input feels pretty sluggish.

These specs will almost certainly allow you to reach 60 frames per second and higher at 1080P and potentially 1440P – especially when using FSR2.

Will Starfield run on the Steam Deck?

Todd Howard told the Kinda Funny Games Xcast hosts that they will be implementing a big font mode for the smaller screens used by portable gaming PCs, such as the Steam Deck, but crucially stopped short of saying whether or not it would run on the system.

We think that the Steam Deck might be able to run Starfield at 30 frames per second using FSR2 performance mode – though the game may look a little fuzzy as a result. On the small 7-inch display, however, it will be harder to pick out visual flaws.

We looked at the specs of the little machine to figure out whether it would be able to run at all.

The Steam Deck has a custom AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) that is a hybrid between different generations of technology. The CPU has 4 Zen 2 cores but uses an RDNA 2 integrated GPU that is only featured on Zen 3+ CPUs.

The CPU is somewhat equivalent to a Ryzen 5 2400 and the GPU is something akin to a GeForce 1050 or AMD RX 570, which is decidedly lower spec than the minimum recommended specifications for Starfield.

It is worth keeping in mind that the Steam Deck has a resolution of 1280×800, so its little APU can go a long way as it doesn’t have to reach the same 1080p that most PC gamers play at – but it has half the amount of CPU cores as the Series S, so it may struggle with CPU-intensive tasks such as keeping track of all your stolen sandwiches.

This might result in the game being a bit stuttery when there are lots of physics calculations taking place or when loading large chunks of data – like when you land on a planet.

Being an AMD-sponsored title, though, the game will most likely have a good implementation of FSR2, which will give the Steam Deck more of a fighting chance.