I don't have a potato PC and I agree, the first city was an eye opener for what blandness + lower than expected fps + wtf is this looks and feels like lol. Also the bar area on Key is the same, not much going on, not much AI doing random things, all scripted repeating movements, so why is it 76fps here, then the moment you step out of the bar it's 100-120fps?!The only change is a loading screen so clearly something is a miss, the bar is only one room, the outside of the bar is a sprawling area filled with more stuff and procedral generation so arguably the outside of the bar should show lower fps not higher. There are definite performance optimisation issues at play.
As we have discovered from various links and graphs etc, there is a definite performance issue going on regardless of the hardware you have. If you have stats on display, it's obvious, but if you have a VRR monitor with higher end hardware then everything is smoothed out and it's unlikely to be noticed as the lowest range fps is high enough anyway.
The game needs that rumoured 15GB day 1 patch on the 6th. I've only just been mentioning these fps dips etc and not much more than that because said patch is supposedly happening.
A funny observation: This game has zero foliage interaction, walk into the area those farmers on New Atlantis are taking car of the crops and stuff and you will see 2d static maps of all the waist height greenery, walk through it and you're basically clipping through all that foliage, none of it reacts to your movements or anything.
Sideline that with let's say Horizon Zero Dawn, a game that came out years ago on console and is now on PC too, with supremely reactive dense vegetation and foliage that reacts to your every move on a near per-strand basis.... Leaves a lot of questions wanting to be asked as to where that $400 million budget was being truly utilised. These are things no reviewer has really mentioned yet.
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I also feel that many who have invested their keen interest in this game for so long are either blind to or just ignoring the obvious issues in favour of the issues people are noting. It's fine to approach the game that way but it's also not fine in that if this becomes a trend then devs will see it as ok to continue this way too. Normalising bad optimisation means they know they can get away with it. Cyberpunk only did a 180 turnaround because of the absolutely massive savagery from the online community, it went from the potential downfall of CDPR at one point to becoming a massive profit and now ranks in the top of reviews etc for what it is and will likely get even higher after patch 2.0 and Phantom Liberty launch this month. LIkewise The Last of Us would not have seen the many patches it did if the community didn't speak up and hold to account the issues. Take a look at the mouse camera judder that game had, they never fixed it for Uncharted and basically abandoned it, yet for Last of Us they fixed it, and now a patch for Uncharted exists that also sorts it because of the complaints made by the masses. Otherwise it would have remained just like Uncharted, forgotten.
Just because Starfield is a massive game with cool worlds to explore and been in work for "25 years" (they claim), doesn't mean the issues should be allowed to slip through is all I'm saying.
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