Starfield - HDD or SSD; Bad Performance Fix

Source: Starfield, Developer: Bethesda Softworks

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Long awaited game from famous Todd Howard (Bethesda Game Studios), Starfield, is right around the corner, but some people who have bought Premium edition of the title can already start exploring the space. Being a mix of experiences from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4, all dipped in retro-futuristic space sauce, the production attracted thousands of fans. One experience from aforementioned games is missing though – Starfield lacks all the (in)famous bugs that Bethesda games have on their launch… and not rarely long after it too. There is one thing that can spoil players’ fun while exploring the universe – poor performance and long loading times. What’s causing it? How to fix it? Check out this text.

• Bad performance fix in Starfield
• HDD vs SSD

Bad performance fix in Starfield

It is never fun when you launch a new game, and its loading times are suboptimal. This is the scenario for some players who bought Starfield and chose to install the title on Hard Disk Drive (HDD) instead of Solid-State Drive (SSD).

Installing the game on HDD can lead to many problems in the game that can be irritating at best and immersion-breaking at worst. The first obvious thing that you will notice will be long loading times. You may experience stutters or freezes while entering new locations, during exploration or while the new parts of the terrain are loading. Those issues are irritating but not game breaking. The most dreadful thing is audio desync that can completely spoil your game experience.

There is unfortunately not much that can be done about it other than installing the game on SSD. Starfield requires SSD even in its minimum system requirements. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t be able to play on HDD, though you will have to stomach many problems related to that.

HDD vs SSD

More and more AAA games require SSD nowadays. We want to have our games prettier, with ultra-high resolution, and fast loading. This unfortunately cannot be done anymore with HDD drives. The amount of data required to be moved from your drive to GPU and RAM is getting bigger and bigger, and there is a limit of what HDDs can deliver.

The good news is that the prices of SSDs are relatively low, and the tendency is falling. Even if you are building a budget system, SSD shouldn’t be that much of additional cost, yet the effect of using SSD instead of HDD can make one of the biggest differences when it comes to system feeling of “fluidity” and snappiness. Even the current console generation has already adapted Solid-State Drives, so most of the game developers will be creating games with such specifications in mind.

Hard Disk Drives are still a valid storage option, but like tape drives way back when, they are taking the role of cheap and capacious magazines for documents, photos, and so on. Unless you are on a very tight budget, consider either buying or upgrading your storage solution to SDD. That can save you a lot of headaches in the future.