Highlights
- Starfield's technical performance has been a concern due to past issues with Bethesda releases, but a modder has already added NVIDIA's DLSS to the game, providing a potential solution.
- AMD's exclusive partnership with Bethesda for Starfield raised questions about whether DLSS and XeSS would be blocked, but AMD has stated that other solutions can be integrated. Bethesda has not commented on DLSS support.
- PureDark, a well-known modder, quickly created a mod for Starfield that adds DLSS, XeSS, and FSR2 support. However, it is important to carefully follow the instructions for implementation due to some reported issues.
Within a few hours of its early access release, Starfield received a mod that added NVIDIA's DLSS. The technical performance of Starfield has been a significant concern for those experienced in prior Bethesda releases, with memories of Fallout 76's broken launch and broken promises tempering expectations.
The announcement of AMD's exclusive partnership with Bethesda Game Studios for Starfield raised 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 while Starfield only supports AMD's FSR2 at launch, AMD has publicly stated that nothing is preventing competing solutions from being integrated into Starfield. However, Bethesda has continually refused to comment on whether support for DLSS will ever come to Starfield, even though the vast majority of PC gamers use compatible graphics cards. Yet, unofficially, there already exists a solution provided by the modding community.
PureDark is well known for their upscaling mods, introducing DLSS2, XeSS, and FSR2 support to a host of games. They have done the same for Starfield too, 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 for Elden Ring and Jedi Survivor mods applied to Starfield too. The mod is now available for free on Nexus Mods, requiring users to extract it into their Starfield folder, 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.
Starfield players 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. Starfield is 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 reason Bethesda 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 while Starfield is not a bug-free experience, it is unquestionably one of the most polished experiences ever developed by Bethesda Game Studios.
Starfield is now available on PC and Xbox Series X/S.