Important NVMe issue

[zanity]

Everyone knows now that Starfield needs flash storage (NVMe and SSD), and that Beth wasn't joking about this requirement. But what almost no-one seems to know is that Beth messes up the NVMe file access code or uses directstorage without admitting the fact. Most people will have zero issues with their NVMe, but a bunch of us had extreme issues resembling an HDD install of the game.

 

My mid-speed NVMe was seeing between 60-100MB a second in Starfield, yet works perfectly in every other game (none of which use directstorage). I spent a literal age trying everything to fix the issue. Then I found the answer than no-one on Steam or Reddit seems to know about.

 

Turns out I had an SMI NVMe driver installed- the correct driver for the controller used. Turns out that Bethesda can't work with this driver. Turns out Bethesda needs the default Windows NVMe driver. The Windows driver that I imagine MS has fully tested with directstorage.

 

Loads of people see this issue in the form of delayed speech in the game (and actually their loading times are more than 4 times longer than they should be). Many of these people re-installed the game on their internal SSD drive (a much slower device of course), and saw their problem fixed. Internal SSD drives use generic SATA drivers.

 

If anyone sees a Starfield gamer reporting terrible performance on their NVMe drive, rather than accusing them of having installed the game on a HDD, perhaps you'd be kind enough to suggest they check their NVMe driver in Device Manager, and try switching to the Windows driver.

 

The Windows driver is Stornvme.sys, and is located in the default drivers section of the Windows 10 install.

 

Sorry this isn't directly mod related, yet it kinda is since many early mods in Beth games address performance issue, and this is a massive performance issue, made worse by the replies to those having the problem stating the problem doesn't exist in the first place.

 

PS I appreciate the Directstorage explanation is speculation, BUT the unique steaming approach taken by this game exactly matches the known streaming methods used by the PS5, and the PS5 streams straight from flash just like Directstorage is designed to do. Games that load rather than stream from flash had zero problems on my system with my SMI driver. And Directstorage was very controversial in Forespoken when the game admitted it was an option. And Microsoft, of course, own Bethesda, and wants to uses all of its 'modern' coding/hardware methods.

[blackbirddown]

Do you know how to switch the Windows driver for an SSD in the device manager? I've been experiencing the similar issues with my SSD running Starfield in that it runs like an HDD. Constant stuttering is the largest issue.

 

I've checked my driver for the SSD and it is Windows drivers, but not StorNVME.sys. I've attempted to change the driver, but am unable to figure it out and wasn't able to find a resolution on the web.

[zanity]

Hi- sorry no. The SSD will be either on SATA, or some sort of 'tunnel' protocol if you use it via an external USB connection. Many people report external SSDs do very poorly, though that may be down to their caddy controller chip.

 

Your Internal SSD, as far as I know, always uses a standard Windows SATA driver, thought in reality that is probably either an Intel or AMD driver in disguise depending on your motherboard/CPU.

 

My opinion is this. Starfield is using Directstorage, and using it incorrectly. When it works, fine. When it doesn't, I think on some systems it successfully falls back to normal file access methods, which are probably almost as good. For you and I, I think the game maintains a faulty Directstorage method, which is why our fast storage devices act like slow HDDs. NVMes have unique drivers, SATA devices have a generic one.

 

The more coders hack into Starfield, the morre terrible they discover the code to be. Just yesterday a modder discovered FSR was not using a negative LOD setting for textures correctly, resulting in all scaling solutions using low rez, and these blurry textures. Beth coders cannot even read the manual and apply the correct coding methods for AMD's own FSR.

 

Directstorage use should always run 'sanity' speed tests on a system, and if the discovered flash memory is running clearly too slow, Directstorage should be switched off, and direct flle access used instead. We know that Directstorage doesn't 'just work' no matter how much Microsoft tries to claim it does. The first game to publicly use it- Forespoken I think- was a PR disaster for Directstorage (hence the 'good' reason MS and Beth might not want to talk about its obvious use in Starfield).

 

But it gets worse. People like you and I are accused in forums of having actually having installed the game on a HDD by mistake, and Bethesda loves this- blaming the customer, not their own lousy faulty code. I was lucky enough to have the technical skills to track down the issue- but it wasted a ton of my time. All the advice I've seen given to you SSD users in forums and online is an insult- your SSD should just work- full stop. It would in every other game, as I'm sure you've experienced.

 

And it gets worse again. Todd is one arrogant blowhard. He NEVER fixes his mistakes, unlike every other game dev I know. For Todd, fixing a mistake is acknowledging a mistake, and he never does that. MS should have given him and his mates the boot when they bought Zenimax, like how Todd gave Carmack the boot when he bought iD.

 

The mainstream media is praising Starfield to the skies, for agenda reasons, and it sold relatively well. So after a series of lousy flops for Beth, the pressure is off with this 'win', which leaves anyone with issues up a creek without a paddle. And the deterioration of all game related forums when it comes to finding troubleshooting advice is just terrible. I'm sure you've seen people asking the same question as you, stating they installed on an SSD, and 90% of the replies said "didn't you read the requirements? you must use an SSD".

 

PS the bandwidth (data speed) given to any SATA device on a modern PC is a complicated issue with respect to everything else that uses the main system bus. When only that SATA device is used, one should usually see the approx 500MB/s no issue. But in reality that SATA connection is sharing bandwidth with other SATA connections, your Motherboard expansion slots (not the GPU), and the USB connections in ways that are very complicated. The latest AMD motherboards are so expensive because they massively improved the bus capacity for all the ports.

 

We gamers are used to thinking only about what is active in our system when we game. You are unlikely to be gaming off a drive AND moving large video files to and from it at the same time. But Microsoft's 'clever, clever' new stuff (which is always worse than the old ways, and far buggier) seems to go deep into the computer's whole bus subsystem. This is fair enough on the Xbox console, where everyone's hardware and drivers are the same, but on the PC any potential gain is offset by compatibility issues. Like how MS loves to hibernate your PC by default, but a ton of PC hardware simply fails when coming out of hibernation, so every tech expert always sez "switch hibernation off".

 

Oh, and a last thought. When you have stuttering, you don't even know if it is an issue of storage speed without further investigation. The 'tell' is the sound sync, but the save load is also a flag. So if your save game takes longer than 20 seconds to load, and every time you speak to an NPC their faces move silently for 4-ish seconds, then the speech kicks in, you are having load speed issues.

 

However general stuttering in the game could be anything. GPU too weak. Bad GPU drivers. The ownership of an Intel GPU, or a bad Intel CPU. Really slow single channel RAM. Other stuff running in the background. Beth has made it really hard for most people to troubleshoot.

[alucrad90]

Why not updated you PC?

 

A PCIE 4.0x4 NVME ssd could be up to 7000m/s

Even the pcie4.0x2 ssd used by XSX is nearly 3500m/s

[RyanLightning]

Wow...I hope Bethesda fixes this and soon. Hopefully Bethesda won't leave this to mod creators to fix like they did the majority of the problems in Oldrim.

[zanity]

QUOTE Why not updated you PC? A PCIE 4.0x4 NVME ssd could be up to 7000m/s Even the pcie4.0x2 ssd used by XSX is nearly 3500m/s

 

You couldn't make this up. A complex and detailed post explaining why NVMe speeds are failing in Starfield for many people, and the Reddit/Steam 'brain-trust' poster sez "why you install on HDD- duh- update your PC and use an NVMe- doh"

 

Mind you, internet experience proves that the percentage of people that can parse and even understand a single paragraph is remarkably low. Yet many of these same people are convinced they have genius levels of understanding in many topics. If they've bought an expensive computer component, they are suddenly specialists in all areas of computer science.

 

Of course Beth wants a legion of such uniformed users to drown out the voices of the people having genuine problems with the game. I've used the Internet forever, and watched the consequence of everyone moving online. Every forum is awash with random griefing, organised griefing, and posts from people who are ill-informed bu think themselves well-informed. A few years back, every problem with your PC would apparently be fixed by buying a more powerful PSU- when the mob gets behind a pseudo-technical 'answer' the result is hilarious to watch.

 

Me- I want companies that have massive resources to be held legally liable for their mistakes and omissions- by which I mean Beth should be obliged to spot errors in its code and fix those errors in short order.

 

Here's a sad story about flash storage. For years, samsung had a stellar rep with its flash SSD and NVMe devices. Yet consistently users had failures and data corruption. Samsung blamed the users, of course. After more than two years it transpired that samsung had a fatal bug in its firmware that guaranteed every one of their devices would corrupt data after a certain number of over-writes. How much pain, distress and lost time was caused to all the customers of Samsung? Yet for two years, Samsung's QA consisted of gaslighting their customers, and pointing the unhappy ones to the fantastic reviews their flash devices received on all the influencer web-outlets. Got a Samsung 970/980? Better check to ensure the firmware is updated.

 

A good engineer at samsung could have fixed the issue after the first user reported the problem- or better the same engineer could have been thrashing the device in a lab with continuous random writes to see how the flash cells responded under heavy use. He/she would have then spotted the data corruption issue. Likewise Bethesda should have read about users having issues with their NVMe drives, and got a fix out within a couple of days.

[ianpatt]

I'm not sure about the issue you're running in to, but I can confirm that Starfield does not use DirectStorage. It would need to ship with two DLLs (dstorage.dll and dstoragecore.dll) that are not included with any DirectX installation.

[NoobVFX]

so there's no way to fix this but wait for Bethesda?

[gederf]

starfield loads MAX 400 MB/s on NVMe 7000MB/s SSD starts the fastest

 

skyrim 8K loads MAX 1000 MB/s on NVMe 7000MB/s SSD looks the best

 

fallout 4 4K loads MAX 400 MB/s on NVMe 7000MB/s SSD starts the slowest

 

Windows 11 Stornvme.sys

Edited September 23, 2023 by gederf