Starfield textures not loading, missing or glitched (workarounds inside); New Atlantis low quality graphics being criticized

Here’s the crux of the article in video form:

Starfield players are experiencing an issue where the textures are not loading properly or appear glitched. Due to this, the gaming experience has been negatively impacted over the past few days.

By looking at the reports (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10), it appears that players were initially able to enjoy a smooth gaming experience even with high graphics settings. However, after some time, multiple issues began to surface.

They claim that the game’s textures do not load properly and that audio keeps dropping completely. Gamers have also noted instances where the texture and terrain would appear stretched and distorted.

They contend that the issue becomes particularly severe in urban areas as all the textures in their vicinity appear in terrible form. As per the allegations, they can’t even switch weapons as the graphics fail to load completely.

In addition to this, some have noticed that the textures glitch out while exploring the open-area planets as well.

And astonishingly, players are experiencing such issues even when they have installed the game on their SSD or transferred the files to a new disk.

Hello I played a lot on day 1 and had no issues even had most of the graphics turned up to high with 5700 xt but now a couple days later I am getting textures not loading and audio dropping completely has anyone else had this and been able to fix it?
Source

Gamers are perplexed as they can run other graphically demanding games like Destiny smoothly on their systems.

One of those impacted says that the graphics remain glitched even after running the game on both Windows and Linux.

Notably, this is happening even when their system is equipped with a high-end graphics card with plenty of VRAM.

Flickering textures/blocky shadows bug after messing with nvidia control panel. Issue won’t go away.
Source

Another asserts that even though the in-game NPCs appear with high-quality details, the background is rendered in low resolution.

Fortunately, we have come across some workarounds that might help solve your problem. Those who have AMD graphics cards installed on their devices can try tweaking the ‘Tessellation’ option to use the ‘Application Setting’.

If this doesn’t help solve your problem, then delete the ‘Pipeline.cache’ file from the ‘C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Starfield’ directory.

NVIDIA users can also try adjusting the graphics settings as mentioned here. As a last resort, uninstall and reinstall the graphics drivers on your system and run the game.

Some gamers (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8) complain that the graphics in the New Atlantis area are of poor quality.

They say that the visuals become blurry, the frame rate stutters, and the textures are rendered in very low quality, almost resembling clay-like surfaces.

As per the claims, the poor graphics are especially noticeable when one gazes at the green trees outside the lodge or at the water outside the MAST.

I am not kidding, New Atlantis textures and the water effects – it looks like a game from 1999. KOTOR or something. This game deservedly for those 7/10 reviews. I’m going to play it all the way through because I waited so long for it and who knows it might get better but, it feels like Starfield should’ve been released 10 years ago.
Source

Understandably, players are wondering why this specific area suffers the most from such issues.

Some believe that the lack of proper tessellation makes all the buildings, streets, and walkways appear disappointingly flat in New Atlantis.

They claim that tessellation is crucial for adding depth and detail to graphics.

I don’t think the game’s lighting, textures, foliage, etc, look bad at all, but what is making this game look so flat and bad at times is the lack of Tessellation. Everything is literally flat.
Source

One of those affected contends that the textures are poor, the lighting is inadequate, and the overall visual quality appears drastically outdated in comparison to the rest of the game.

Unfortunately, Bethesda has not officially responded to the matter. But we are hopeful that it will address the gamers concerns soon.

That said, we’ll keep monitoring this topic and update this story whenever we come across anything noteworthy.

Note: We have more such stories in our dedicated Gaming section, so be sure to follow them as well.

Featured image: Starfield.

PiunikaWeb started as purely an investigative tech journalism website with main focus on ‘breaking’ or ‘exclusive’ news. In no time, our stories got picked up by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and many others. Want to know more about us? Head here.

We stand out from the tech-media crowd because we break news stories; we mainly bring you stuff that you won’t find anywhere in the mainstream tech media. Our stories have been picked up by some of the world’s most popular websites and media outlets—more info is available here.