In the time since AMD announced its exclusive partnership with Starfield, the company has worked at warp speed to promote the game and plant its flag firmly in the middle of the Bethesda RPG. Its latest efforts include suggested Starfield PC specs with team red hardware, and they’re a bit suspect.
The suggested specs are split into three categories: 1080p, 1440p, and 4K (dubbed ‘Heroic’, ‘Epic’, and ‘Legendary’, respectively). Funnily enough, even the 1080p section seems to feature some of the latest hardware, including an AMD Ryzen 5 7600 processor, AMD Radeon RX 7600 graphics card, and an AM5 motherboard with an A620 chipset. AMD says these are the “perfect entry specs for 1080p gamers to experience great visuals and framerates.” Well, you can’t say it’s wrong, exactly, but we suspect you can get all that at 1080p without having to fork out for current gen hardware.
The ‘Epic Experience’ kicks things up a notch, suggesting an AMD Ryzen 7 7700X CPU, AMD Radeon RX 6800 series GPU, and a B650 chipset will get you “max visual settings and high fps” at 1440p. Again, that’s technically right, but seems a tad over the top.
Not compared to the ‘Legendary Experience’, though. These include AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor, AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT pixel pusher, and AMD X670 motherboard, and supposedly guarantee “the absolute best Starfield experience,” in 4K. Again, that’d surely get you a premium experience at 4K.
But, why on earth would you need to bump up the motherboard recommendation to do that? An AMD A620 chipset would surely do just fine. AMD has done nothing to explain why you’d need an AMD X670 to reach a solid frame rate. Of course, a great CPU is always useful, but again, we don’t think AMD can justify recommending a Ryzen 7 7800X3D for 4K, when you could easily get by without needing something so powerful and, erm, expensive.
This all adds up to what seems like an attempt by AMD to promote its latest hardware, rather than an actual performance guarantee resulting from testing. The Starfield system requirements don’t require the best gaming CPU or even the best graphics card on the market, and certainly nothing on the level of this team red hardware.