It may just scale with mem bandwidth. Here's a shot from my machine in comparison to the video below. 1080p, 50% FSR2, still on max settings otherwise, 13900k@5.8, DDR5 8000. 13900k was sucking down 200w. Doh.
View attachment 311724
No, you punched your GPU load to sub zero, look at that image, its a blur/jaggy fest from 1999.
So you now have 142 FPS and a shit looking image. This only confirms further that you're not CPU limited at all, but rather its graphics/logic intertwined in some unholy marriage of inefficiency.
Any sane hardware logic doesn't apply here, hardware doesn't scale proper on Creation Engine, it hasn't done that ever. All you know is that many assets in the block you're moving around in means terrible performance, and with Starfield they managed to make it even more messy and harder to work around since it also hits the graphics pipeline.
I think a lot of the clogging on graphics is due to LOD and overall geometry, something Creation Engine isn't particularly good or efficient at. Remember draw distances under Skyrim and prior, if you looked across the river in vanilla you'd be looking at ultra low res texturing and trees were a few stakes with blurbs of green on them. Now look at Starfield's geometry. It wants to look modern so models are overly complex and more 3D less bump mapped; that is a graphics component added onto the 'asset problem' that Creation Engine runs into. Basically now you have the Fallout 4 city center situation anywhere there is a complex model in view. And that's also why ultra low res (which kills all those nice rounded shapes, look at your screenshot) gets you 142 FPS on the same CPU.
