Summary
Within a few hours of its early access release,Starfieldreceived a mod that added NVIDIA’s DLSS. The technical performance ofStarfieldhas been a significant concern for those experienced in prior Bethesda releases, with memories ofFallout 76’s broken launch and broken promises tempering expectations.
The announcement ofAMD’s exclusive partnership with Bethesda Game Studios forStarfieldraised questions about what said “exclusivity” meant in practice, some fearing that NVIDIA and Intel would have their upscaling technologies, DLSS and XeSS, blocked from the highly anticipated title. It turns out that whileStarfieldonly supports AMD’s FSR2 at launch, AMD has publicly stated that nothing is preventing competing solutions from being integrated intoStarfield. However, Bethesda has continually refused to comment on whether support for DLSS will ever come toStarfield, even though the vast majority of PC gamers use compatible graphics cards. Yet, unofficially, there already exists a solution provided by the modding community.
RELATED:Starfield Dev Explains Decision to Have the Game Feature a Silent Protagonist
PureDark is well known for their upscaling mods, introducing DLSS2, XeSS, and FSR2 support to a host of games. They have done the same forStarfieldtoo, and it barely took one hour. In a Patreon post, PureDark explained that the mod was completed so quickly because the overwhelming majority of code used forElden RingandJedi Survivormods applied toStarfieldtoo. The mod is now available for free on Nexus Mods, requiring users to extract it into theirStarfieldfolder, install a plugin, and ensure the placement of a few specific files. There have been a few issues raised by some trying to implement the mod, so prospective users should be careful to follow the instructions carefully.
Starfieldplayers should also bear in mind that if the existing FSR2 does not improve performance, it is unlikely that this mod would change that. For those with an NVIDIA card,DLSS is simply the better option, but dramatic changes should not be expected.Starfieldis likely to be a CPU-limited game for many meaning that players may be bottlenecked no matter how powerful their GPU is.
Starfield’s technical makeup is one reasonBethesda decided to lock the game at 30 FPS on consoles, which was confirmed in June shortly after a widely praised presentation of the game. Fortunately, reviews thus far have largely concurred that whileStarfieldis not a bug-free experience, it is unquestionably one of the most polished experiences ever developed by Bethesda Game Studios.
Starfieldis now available on PC and Xbox Series X/S.
