According to Bethesda's support team, PC players playing Starfield using an Intel ARC GPU might have problems running the game as Intel's GPUs don't meet Starfield's minimum system requirements.
Several days ago, ahead of the global launch of Starfield, Intel released its new Arc GPU driver, which resolved a lot of game-breaking bugs within Bethesda's new hit title. While the new driver set addresses various issues, some PC players using an Intel Arc GPU are still reporting some crashing issues within Starfield. Unfortunately, those asking for support from Bethesda might be disappointed to learn that Bethesda Support seems to suggest that Intel ARC GPUs don't meet the game's minimum system GPU requirements. As such, the support that Bethesda can offer is limited. We've included a message log from Bethesda Support about the issue below:
"I see that you have an Intel(R) Arc(TM) A770 Graphics Card. This does not meet the minimum requirements of an AMD Radeon RX 5700, or NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti", the message from Bethesda Support reads. "Since you do not meet the minimum system requirements for running this game, the troubleshooting steps we can provide are limited, as some troubleshooting steps could potentially cause damage to your system."
Now, this is interesting because, as far as we know, the performance of the Intel Arc A770 GPU is well above that of an AMD RX 5700 and Geforce GTX 1070 Ti. Might be that Bethesda's support team isn't aware of the specifications and performance of all the GPUs out there, but this is plain out not accurate.
As covered yesterday, Bethesda's Starfield Director Todd Howard said that the team optimized for PC, and those claiming this isn't the case, should consider upgrading their system. "We did, it's running great", Howard said when asked in an interview about PC optimizations. "It is a next-generation PC game. We really do push the technology, so you may need to upgrade your PC for this game, but it's got a lot of great stuff going on and the fans are responding awesome."
Starfield is out now globally for PC and Xbox Series X|S. Earlier today, Bethesda announced that its new sci-fi RPG has become the company's biggest launch of all time - more than six million players have already played the game across all platforms. Yesterday, Xbox head Phil Spencer revealed that Starfield surpassed one million concurrent players across PC and Xbox Series X|S (Game Pass included) - impressive stats for sure.
