Starfield’s sun doesn’t shine on AMD graphics cards

Starfield players have discovered that the game doesn’t render the sun if you have a Radeon AMD graphics card. 

Despite being partnered with AMD Radeon, it looks like there’s a bug that is causing a small, but noticeable graphical issue pertaining to several of the game’s suns (via PC Gamer). One player took to Reddit to bring attention to the problem, explaining that if you travel to the dayside of any moon without an atmosphere, you’ll find that the sun isn’t shining at all. 

User Yoraxx showed photos of what the sun should look like on a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics card compared to the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT. The Nvidia card demonstrates how the sun should be shining and it looks beautiful, but with the AMD card, there’s absolutely nothing to be seen.

Dear AMD Card User, from r/Starfield

The player mentioned that this issue also applies to planets with an atmosphere, showing even more in-game screenshots of how sun should be rendered. For AMD cards, from the planets’ surfaces you’ll see an illuminated skybox, but no sun. 

“Your game does NOT render the sun,” they said. “There will be light and shadow effects, but you’re out of luck to ever see the sun, no matter the planet or moon with/without atmosphere.”

Although it’s unconfirmed at this time, they noted that this could be a problem for some newer AMD 6000 and 7000 Series GPUs. Several users have responded explaining that they too have experienced the issue, with one player saying: “People, please upvote this post, so that Bethesda can see it and hopefully deliver a fix in the near future… It sucks that so many didn’t even notice this, it’s a total immersion-killer for me and for many others.”

Another user has said if the bug doesn’t get resolved any time soon, they could always wait for a mod. 

Game director Todd Howard has confirmed that the game will receive official mod support sometime next year, but in the meantime, players are already busy building some impressive mods right now. 

For more, check out our guide for the best graphics cards and if you’re looking for something to test with your current GPU, here’s our best PC games of 2023.