Did *Starfield* on PS5 flop? The visuals impress, but the lag is so bad it forces a restart.

To get straight to the point, I wouldn’t really recommend rushing to buy the PS5 version of Starfield right now. If you and your roommate are taking turns on one console, and it starts dropping frames and then freezing as soon as you enter a city, the mood will blow up as instantly as when the dorm loses internet—seriously, it’s a huge buzzkill.

This time, Digital Foundry tested the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions of Starfield a few days after launch, and the verdict is pretty complicated. In short, the visual foundation is still there, and the sense of immersion is too, but performance swings and stability issues are extremely obvious. The biggest dealbreaker, especially, isn’t whether the image looks blurry—it’s whether the game might suddenly crash.

On the standard PS5, the 60fps performance mode renders internally at around 1080p and also uses variable rate shading to reduce the load. Indoor scenes can mostly hold 60fps, which is at least respectable; but once you get to a large city like New Atlantis, the frame rate can drop straight to 30fps. It’s like waiting in line at the cafeteria when everything is moving smoothly, and then suddenly the ten people in front of you all decide to add extra dishes—the whole rhythm falls apart instantly.

If you care more about stability, then the standard PS5’s 30fps quality mode is actually the more reliable choice. This mode looks clearer overall, with better shadows and draw distance, and the resolution is close to 1440p, while still staying stable in dense urban areas. Compared with the Xbox Series X, the standard PS5 is actually pretty close overall, though in the most demanding spots, the Series X still averages about 5 more frames.

The PS5 Pro sounds powerful on paper: it offers 7 presets plus custom options, allowing for 24 possible configurations in total. The menu looks a lot like a university elective system—flashy and complicated. Performance mode targets 60fps, but the resolution drops to native 900p. Smoothness does improve, and in some scenes it can even run nearly 10 frames faster than the Series X. The problem is that the first-generation PSSR upscaling introduces obvious flickering and dynamic noise, so the image cleanliness is not particularly pleasant.

Also, after enabling system-level PSSR 2, clarity and stability improve somewhat, but vegetation and environmental shadows still have issues. The PS5 Pro also has an exclusive enhanced mode that pushes the resolution to 1800p, improves shadows, vegetation, and reflections, and locks the game to 30fps. If you have a 120Hz display, you can also try the 40fps target mode, but in cities it will usually still drop back to 30fps. It’s kind of like agreeing to queue ranked as a full five-stack, only for someone to suddenly go AFK every time—great in theory, harsh in reality.

The most outrageous part is the stability. DF directly called it out: during testing, both the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions crashed frequently, and sometimes even froze completely, leaving the only option to force-restart the console. This kind of issue is far more serious than simple frame drops, because it’s not just about the experience being a little worse—it completely flips the table on your gameplay flow. The report also mentioned that it wasn’t this severe on Xbox at launch, but that the Series X version now has new stuttering issues in certain scenes as well.

Beyond frame rate and hard crashes, this version of Starfield also has middling HDR, poorly designed settings, broken vertical sync, and parameters that fail to save correctly. To put it bluntly, it’s not unplayable, but it feels a lot like a group project that still hasn’t been fully revised: the framework is there, but the details are falling apart everywhere. DF’s final takeaway was also very clear: this version has potential, but right now it’s still rough, more like a compromised build waiting for future patches to save it.

My buying advice is simple. If you really want to play Starfield on PS5 right now, the standard PS5’s 30fps quality mode should be your first choice, since at least the stability and clarity feel more like a finished product. PS5 Pro players also shouldn’t get too carried away by the idea of a “more powerful console”; unless you’re willing to keep tweaking modes yourself, it’s very easy to end up in that awkward situation of “a huge pile of settings, but barely any better experience.” If, like me, you value a relaxed and stable experience that still lets you chat and play with friends, then honestly, I’d recommend waiting this one out. Let Bethesda sort out the patches first—otherwise, instead of laughing with your squad, you’ll end up dying laughing at the restart screen first.