Despite AMD being the official PC Starfield partner, Reddit users have been experiencing a major rendering bug that only seems to affect AMD Radeon GPUs. Put simply, this AMD GPU Starfield stars bug means some big stars simply aren’t rendering on rigs rocking AMD Radeon RX 7000 or 6000-series graphics cards in certain conditions.
A major aspect of Bethesda’s space exploration RPG is, well, exploring space, and discovering secret worlds hidden amid the stars. Nothing breaks immersion like the random disappearance of enormous balls of boiling gas!
In a popular Reddit post titled ‘Dear AMD Card User,’, u/Yoraxx details this disappearing star bug that seems to only plague AMD Radeon GPUs. They give the example of traveling in-game to ‘the dayside of a moon without atmosphere,’ and looking out into the sky. They first show a picture of the skybox in that scenario rendered with an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT, which looks normal enough until you see the same skybox rendered with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. The results are stark.
The latter picture is the same but for the presence of an enormous, shining star, complete with a lens flare JJ Abrams would be proud of, which was totally absent from the RX 7900 XT version. u/Yoraxx goes on to give another example from a planet with an atmosphere, where the results are the same.
Apparently, the light and shadow effects are still present as if the sun is there, but the celestial body itself just doesn’t appear. u/Yoraxx speculates that “this is likely to be a problem with ALL newer AMD 6000 and 7000 Series cards.”
We reached out to AMD for comment and are awaiting a response from the company.
Considering the embarrassment this could cause to both AMD and Bethesda if this story were to get major traction, it’s likely Bethesda will fix this issue in an upcoming patch, or AMD could fix it in a later driver. Alternatively, the companies could leave it up to the modding community, which has done excellent work on Starfield already. Check out this guide to the best Starfield weapon mods if you fancy giving your guns some major firepower upgrades.
Still looking for more? While a good Starfield wiki can be a handy source of information, our new Starfield Database goes further, offering you daily news, searchable databanks, and even interactive tools.