Starfield’s optimization has been a major point of contention in the community in the past few weeks, with widespread crashes and performance issues ailing the game’s launch. While Todd Howard believes it’s the players’ hardware that is to blame (thanks, TheGamer), a new report says the real reason could be different. A new discovery by Vkd3d developer Hans-Kristian Arntzen sheds some more light on the crashes and performance issues players have been facing in Starfield. Vkd3d is the library that Starfield and a lot of other games use to implement Direct3D 12 API on top of Vulkan. In a new pull request (which is equivalent to an update for software, in simpler terms), the developer highlights that Starfield has a number of inefficient ways of handling things which can cause performance issues. While the developer’s comments are quite technical and might not make sense to you unless you’re into that sort of thing, Redditor Nefsen402 has simplified the whole thing.