It’s the big release of the year: Starfield will soon be in the hands of millions of players. Bethesda’s space RPG is quite demanding in terms of graphics resources, but a few adjustments can help you improve the fluidity. Follow our guide.
Bethesda’s new creation is based on a familiar technical base: the Creation Engine, which could run Skyrim or even Fallout 4, updated here in a brand new version. We are therefore on a completely new technical basis with numerous developments in rendering, physics, light and even AI. The only major flaw is ray tracing, which could have increased the load on our machines even further.
Even bigger development: Starfield uses procedural generation for its cities and planets, with new artificial intelligence routines for NPCs (non-player characters). The game obviously places high demands on the graphics card, but also on the processor, which should not be ignored if you want to play Starfield under the best conditions.
We’ve taken a look at the settings and how they affect the machine’s performance to help you achieve 60 FPS on PC while consoles are limited to 30 FPS.
Your Windows settings
First, it’s important to make sure your system is at least optimized. We’re not talking about the configuration required to run Starfield, but rather Windows settings that affect your processor as well as your graphics card.
Starfield is, above all, a graphics-intensive game, so make sure it’s running at full power. For Nvidia card owners:
- Go to Nvidia Control Panel and then click “Adjust image settings with preview” in the “3D Settings” category in the left column.
- Activate the option “Use advanced 3D image settings” if it’s not ready yet.
- Still clicking in the left column “Manage 3D Settings” to display a range of parameters. We recommend that you at least activate the “Prefer maximum performance” option here so that your graphics card runs at full speed under all circumstances.
You can only enable this option for games installed on your computer via the tab “Program settings”. AMD does not currently have such an option.
A setting that we at Nvidia always advise you to activate
We also invite you to clean up your programs running in the background, as they can unnecessarily increase the system’s processor load. Games like Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart have shown better stability after this phase. Check the taskbar for the various icons that appear next to the Windows clock. Quit programs that don’t seem useful to you and make sure they don’t start at startup. To do this, right-click on the taskbar, open Task Manager and go to the Startup Applications category to disable anything you find unnecessary.
Update your graphics drivers
It seems obvious, but don’t forget to update your graphics drivers. Nvidia and AMD promise profits of up to 15% with these new versions, it would be wrong to forego this. Nvidia has released its Game Ready drivers for Starfield with version 537.13, while AMD has just released its gaming-optimized drivers with version 23.8.2.
display settings
As always, we recommend that you review your display settings carefully before changing other graphics options. You need to make sure everything matches your own configuration. Here’s a bigger summary we’ve never seen before: Starfield seems to correctly detect your screen resolution and refresh rate when you enable full screen in window mode (which we recommend you do).
Source: Bethesda
The Dynamic Resolution option allows you to change the resolution depending on the performance of the game on your computer when using the upscaling option. We will tell you more about it in the dedicated section later in this article.
Further down you will find the vertical sync option. We recommend that you leave this disabled unless you notice tearing phenomena in the image. If your screen is compatible, we always recommend that you prefer the settings of G-Sync on Nvidia and FreeSync on AMD and enable them in their respective panels.
Graphics settings
Shadow quality
When gaming, reducing shadows is always an effective setting to improve performance, and sometimes with minimal impact on image quality. The parameter particularly influences the anti-aliasing of these shadows, which can be difficult for display depending on the area. Especially indoors, you’ll notice a drastic increase in performance, on the order of 5 to 10 FPS depending on the area. The “Medium” setting seems to us to be an excellent compromise between image quality and performance.
Performance Impact: Pupils
Our recommendation: In between
Indirect lighting
This setting affects so-called indirect lights, i.e. light rays that are reflected from one surface to illuminate another. Indirect lighting is a component of overall lighting and theoretically allows you to add realism to the light of a scene. Since Starfield doesn’t use ray tracing for its Global Illumination engine, this optimization isn’t as resource intensive as it could be. Depending on your machine, you may gain some FPS with a medium or high setting.
Performance Impact: AVERAGE
Our recommendation: Medium or high
reflections
The reflection settings in Starfield don’t seem to have a major impact on performance; you can easily push them to the limit. Their quality is particularly noticeable on the water and you only gain a handful of FPS when you reduce them to the minimum setting.
Performance Impact: Weak
Our recommendation: High or medium
Particle quality
Here there is no reason not to leave this parameter at the maximum, it generally has very little impact on performance.
Performance Impact: weak
Our recommendation: Pupils
volumetric lighting
This adjustment concerns the different lighting that creates the impression of a luminous volume, especially when the light comes through smoke or a window. These effects are relatively resource intensive and can give you a few extra FPS in certain indoor environments. We therefore recommend that you lower this setting slightly, especially since the visual difference is not significant.
Performance Impact: AVERAGE
Our recommendation: Medium or high
Density of people
The crowds in Starfield are never very big, even in big cities. However, if your processor is not the latest, we recommend that you lower this setting. Leave the value at maximum if your CPU supports it.
Performance Impact: AVERAGE
Our recommendation: Weak
Motion blur
This is the famous motion blur (or motion blur), which is and remains a personal preference. However, the setting has a slight impact on performance in Starfield, so we recommend that you disable it.
Performance Impact: AVERAGE
Our recommendation: Without
GTAO quality
Ambient Occlusion is another setting that can save you 4 to 8 FPS depending on the scene, whether indoors or outdoors. GTAO particularly affects the quality of shadows associated with static objects. However, below Medium the performance gains are smaller, so we recommend you stick with this level of adjustment so that you can maintain some quality of shading.
Performance Impact: Pupils
Our recommendation: In between
Grass quality
Here you can adjust the grass density and quality. We didn’t notice much of a performance hit, especially in forest environments you might gain 1 or 2 FPS if you set the setting to High.
Performance Impact: Weak
Our recommendation: Pupils
Contact Shadows
This setting applies to a specific type of shadow, contact shadow, which can affect both your character and outdoor scenes. This is mainly about the shadows of the different elements of your suit or the stones and leaves on the ground. Here too, the effects are particularly felt in forests or rocky environments, as on many planets. Depending on certain areas, it can cost between 3 and 5 FPS without the visual difference necessarily being noticeable. So you can lower this setting to medium or even low.
Performance Impact: AVERAGE
Our recommendation: Medium or low
Upscaling
Here you can achieve a significant increase in performance. The upscaling technique used is important. CAS for Contrast Adaptive Sharpening is just a simple sharpening filter, while FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) is AMD’s priority scaling algorithm optimized here for Starfield. Once activated, you will have access to resolution scaling as well as dynamic resolution options.
Here we recommend that you choose the FSR solution, slightly less efficient but with significantly higher image quality. To maintain this, you must select a resolution scale, which is the internal rendering resolution. The further you lower the setting, the more likely the algorithm is to work at lower resolution and larger scale. You gain performance but lose render quality. A setting of 60-80% seems to us to be a good middle ground, especially when your graphics card is running at full speed.
The sharpness setting depends on both your device and your screen. We recommend that you test them in dense environments such as indoors or on rocky ground.
Performance Impact: Pupils
Our recommendation: Without, if you can do without it, FSR with a resolution scale of 60 to 80% for a performance gain of around ten FPS.
Note that there is now a mod that enables Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS in Starfield, which makes for a more or less noticeable difference.
VRS (Variable Rate Shading)
Variable Rate Shading is intended to improve performance by intelligently reducing the quality of shaders depending on the scene and the user’s view. On older devices the gain is more noticeable, while the difference in image quality is imperceptible. We therefore recommend that you leave the function activated.
Performance Impact: AVERAGE
Our recommendation: With
Our results
Without scaling, we were able to gain around ten FPS in the middle of the city and in certain densely populated indoor areas by simply changing the graphics settings. You can double this gain by enabling the FSR, although some concessions must be made in image quality, especially in motion. But we guarantee you won’t notice any difference in the heat of the moment.
Overall, Starfield is a graphics-intensive game, but good news: 8GB of video memory will be more than enough for you, even in 4K. That’s it.
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