Terrain Geometry Bug

[mccoyed]

I have a Ryzen 5 3600 and a brand new 6800xt and I am experiencing some kind of texture loading bug, I don't know.

I noticed it on the first planet but believed it was standard texture pop-in. On Kreet, the effect follows me as I move around. It's basically an issue of textures on the ground going transparent or "cracking" into visible seams. I've seen this kind of thing before but I don't know the technical term, if any, or how to fix it or what might be causing it in a game.

This is what I've tried:

- Multiple Restarts of game
- Full Steam reinstall
- Shader reset via AMD Adrenalin
- Various in-game display settings (we all know by now how sparse these are)

None of this has had any effect at all. The issue persists and it is the same. I did not have any issues like this during the intro excepting what I mentioned above when I first stepped out. The fact that the opening area is on a huge platform means I didn't see much terrain anyway and the caves, interiors, and buildings/construction elements were all fine.

On Kreet, the issue makes the game unplayable. It's like the old issue with the lighting system floating around your character, making shadows change as you move around. Except in this case, it's like the game can't decide how to render the geometry and textures.

In some cases, I can see right through the ground.

Normally, I'd be super patient because a) new release and b) BGS game but I've hunted around for a few hours now (waiting for reinstall) and NO ONE else seems to be reporting anything like this. Only FPS issues and HDR issues which are sadly standard gaming problems now. This feels deeply broken in a different way and I'm hoping someone can help me.

EDIT:

After an additional hour troubleshooting, I last resort rolled my display drivers back (I was using AMD's latest driver, the one released today) and it fixed this issue. This confirms it was a driver problem and may have been a borked installation on my end. I will still be waiting to update haha.

I hope this helps anyone else who might encounter this problem but it SHOULD be extremely rare. Cheers.

[Death By Droid]

Originally posted by bspawn:

I found a workaround that reduces the problem.

In the ini settings for render quality settings (low.ini, medium.ini etc in the starfield program folder) under [Terrain]there is the setting "fTerrainDisplacementErrorThreshold=1".
I changed 1 to 0.1 and now the gaps in the terrain mesh are rendered at a larger distance and are less noticeable.
For it to take effect you have to re-apply the quality setting in the display settings menu. Or you add it to StarfieldCustom.ini in documents\my games\starfield\

[Terrain]
bEnableStochasticTiling=1
bEnableStochasticTilingDominantPlane=0
bEnableTerrainPlanarMapping=1
fTerrainDisplacementErrorThreshold=0.1

There is another setting that also seems to affect the distance where the gaps show up: in Starfield.ini (in program folder) under [General] there is uExterior Cell Buffer=36. I think the number must be the square of a whole number (e.g. 7x7=49, 8x8=64) and increasing it increases the distance where the gaps show. Increasing it too much probably costs a lot of performance.

Much Much better! Thank you for your time and service to us the players!!! Cause, you know, can't have the company getting paid fixing it..... LOL.

I have contacted Bethesda support, I'll update here when I hear anything back from them.

[mccoyed]

It's a bug of some kind. Nowadays, with settings in game, in your GPU, often in your monitor, as well as MS's consistent issues w/ drivers on Windows 10/11... it's a complicated time to be a PC gamer. But there's hope. I DID fix this completely on my end w/ a driver rollback (using DDU to wipe my system clean of GPU drivers first).

And look, guys, I almost don't wanna say this but please make sure you're running this off an SSD. Say what you want about BGS but they did clarify this ages ago and have not been confusing about the expectation that Starfield be installed on an SSD. If you're using an HDD, you're gonna have a bad time. A lot of people don't seem to be aware of this judging by how many "everything was fine when I moved the game to an SSD" posts there are online.

[J-Man84]

Originally posted by InfraRed:

i am also having the same issue on a 6700 I've tried everything i got on my laptop that has a 3060ti and looked to see if the issue was happening and it wasnt.. Update: Fixed, but I’ll update here for anyone with the same issue. In AMD Adrenalin, ensure all gaming->graphics settings are set to “use application settings” and then reset the shader cache. I believe the issue was the AMD driver forcing its own tessellation method on the game, breaking some of the textures. i give credit to
ZincNut on reddit for this i was lucky enough to stumble upon his post and it fixed the issues at hand hope this helps all

Thank you, my AMD Adrenalin tessellation mode was on override, have now set it to "use application settings" and it has fixed this issue for me, much appreciated.

[bspawn]

Originally posted by InfraRed:

Update: Fixed, but I’ll update here for anyone with the same issue. In AMD Adrenalin, ensure all gaming->graphics settings are set to “use application settings” and then reset the shader cache.

Can confirm that tessellation mode to "use application settings" *and* reset shader cache solves the problem.

I first tried that setting without resetting shader cache and was going to comments it did not work (after all geometry is not a shader...) but after reset shader cache it does work.

So if anything the bug is that Starfield does not enforce the correct tessellation setting (maybe it can't), or at least warn the user about the tessellation mode being incorrect in the driver configuration.

[Empire]

I solved it completely by using AMD cleanup tool to wipe adrenaline/drivers, then complete reinstall drivers

[mccoyed]

Glad there's been progress with workarounds for this bug. I am not surprised to see it's a random AMD feature. I wouldn't have known to check for that so a driver reinstall fixed it for me, probably by reverting the setting back to "Use Application". That or there's also a driver issue mixed in here somewhere (judging by how fast a new driver came out, I bet it's a column A column B situation).

[Death By Droid]

Originally posted by InfraRed:

i am also having the same issue on a 6700 I've tried everything i got on my laptop that has a 3060ti and looked to see if the issue was happening and it wasnt.. Update: Fixed, but I’ll update here for anyone with the same issue. In AMD Adrenalin, ensure all gaming->graphics settings are set to “use application settings” and then reset the shader cache. I believe the issue was the AMD driver forcing its own tessellation method on the game, breaking some of the textures. i give credit to
ZincNut on reddit for this i was lucky enough to stumble upon his post and it fixed the issues at hand hope this helps all

Yup, looks like this was the case. This fixed it for me as well. Thank you!!

[Ryukenwulf]

Tessallation to application mode not AMD and should fix it, make sure to click RESET CACHE at the bottom in Adrenalin as well

[mccoyed]

Now if I could figure out how to fix the tearing/flicker on certain surfaces and lights... I think it's just FSR2 though and I'm not gonna bother with mods yet. No setting seems to affect it except using Freesync, but when I do that (Asus VG27A 27") there's something wrong with the refresh and most of the screen starts flickering as if brightness is rapidly being adjusted.

Funny thing is, I had nearly all the same bugs in Fallout 4 as I've had in this game haha. Not a single crash though.

[David]

Thanks for all. Solved. Rx580 user.

[Mr. Mackey]

Switching this off solved this issue for me
https://imageupload.io/Xor9aZsDt1WTuT4