Starfield and AMD have now revealed their recommended build for Starfield on PC to get that much coveted 4K performance metric.
As reported by Tech4Gamers, AMD themselves recommend you get a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Radeon RX 7900 XT.
AMD’s partnership with Bethesda on Starfield means that Bethesda will work with AMD directly to make sure that they get first support and compatibility with their technologies, such as FSR 2.0 and V-Cache.
Of course, this goes without saying, but for gamers to assemble a build with a 7800X3D, you basically have to upgrade to the AM5 chipset and its corresponding architecture.
This means dropping either your current Intel build, or the older and long popular AM4 chipset based architecture. Any AMD based computer you bought or assembled with parts older than 2022 are too old for this CPU and you simply have to upgrade.
While PC gamers may be rightly unhappy that Bethesda signed this partnership with AMD in the first place, it’s a smart choice on AMD’s end. Steam surveys have consistently indicated that gamers are still not upgrading to AMD’s new chipset, and the company needed that incentive to get more of them to do the switch. Starfield might just be enough to get that going.
In fact, AMD’s recommendation for 1080p gaming is also an AM5 based CPU, the Ryzen 5 7600. Of course, this one will clock as the more reasonable choice, not just for budget, but to avoid potentially higher power bills from such high end CPU power.
But for what it’s worth, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is not the most high-end or powerful gaming CPU that AMD has on the market right now. It actually has a unique feature set that makes it a unique recommendation, thanks to the addition of 3D V-Cache, that is, additional cache that has been added directly to the computer die.
So, if other AMD CPUs require you to switch to Game Mode to get it to use its components properly to run games, that isn’t necessarily with the 7800X3D. All of the chip’s 96 MB of L3 cache can be directly accessed by the 8 cores. What that translates to, in plain English, is a processor that can run games better than more powerful and expensive competitors.
One does wonder just how well optimized Starfield will be on less powerful builds, and especially on AM4 chipset based computers. Hopefully Bethesda does not dedicate all that work on the high end of AMD’s computers.
