Starfield PC efficiency: greatest settings, FSR 2, benchmarks

Starfield units a brand new benchmark for PC efficiency, taxing even essentially the most highly effective {hardware} available on the market. To get the sport to run easily, you’ll want the very best settings for Starfield. 

That is no easy recreation, and the state of affairs on PC is much more advanced. I’ve examined the sport extensively each earlier than and after launch to assemble optimized settings, benchmark it with a number of GPUs, and examine in on upscaling help. Right here’s what I’ve discovered to date.

Greatest settings for Starfield

Starfield doesn’t have an enormous graphics menu, and the 4 graphics presets do a great job of balancing efficiency. I examined every setting individually, and practically all of them supply a slight bump in efficiency — there are only a few extraneous settings and simple wins for efficiency.

Nonetheless, I settled on an inventory of the very best settings that I really feel optimize efficiency and picture high quality. Listed below are my optimized settings for Starfield: 

• Dynamic Decision: On
• Render Decision: 75%
• Graphics Preset: Customized
• Shadow High quality: Medium
• Oblique Lighting: Excessive
• Reflections: Medium
• Particle High quality: Low
• Volumetric Lighting: Medium
• Crowd Density: Low
• Movement Blur: Off
• GTAO High quality: Medium
• Grass High quality: Excessive
• Contact Shadows: Medium
• VSync: On
• Upscaling: FSR2
• Allow VRS: On
• Depth of Subject: On

Gasp! Your eyes don’t deceive you. It’s best to run Starfield beneath native decision. As I’ll dig into with my benchmarks later, the sport is clearly designed round AMD’s FidelityFX Tremendous Decision 2 (FSR 2), and even the very best graphics preset defaults to FSR 2 working at 75% of the native decision.

It’s a bit totally different than FSR in different video games. Usually, FSR 2 contains three or 4 presets that decide your render decision. Starfield as an alternative features a slider that goes from 100% of render decision to 50%. Proper within the center at 75% is unquestionably the candy spot for picture high quality, so it’s greatest to optimize your efficiency with settings somewhat than push FSR 2 right down to its lowest level.

The largest efficiency wins for Starfield come from Shadow High quality, Volumetric Lighting, GTAO High quality, and Contact Shadows, so these are the settings to achieve for first to optimize your efficiency. Movement Blur additionally has a good affect on efficiency, so flip it off except you’re working beneath 60 frames per second (fps) and wish a bit smoothing.

As you may see within the comparability above, my optimized settings look awfully just like the Extremely preset, at the very least with the 75% render decision utilized to each. I noticed a few 15% enhance in efficiency with these settings, however I’ve tailor-made my listing in a manner that can profit much less highly effective methods.

For example, there’s the Crowd Density setting. My testing exhibits that Starfield may be very taxing on the CPU, with some scenes driving even the 24-core Intel Core i9-13900Okay to 60% utilization. Turning down this setting vastly reduces the load on the CPU, so it’s a great place to chop in case your CPU isn’t as highly effective as your GPU. Crowds nonetheless look dense even on the lowest setting, however when it’s maxed out, you may see 50 or extra folks in an space at one time.

Lastly, I need to spotlight VRS, or Variable Fee Shading. This setting is on by default, and you must go away it that manner. You might not see it at work relying on how highly effective your system is, however it might probably enhance efficiency so much on older, much less highly effective methods.

Starfield system necessities

Earlier than attending to my benchmarks, it’s price wanting on the Starfield system necessities. It’s a demanding recreation, and the system necessities again that up.

Primarily based on my benchmarks, it appears the Advisable specs are focusing on 4K at 30 fps on the Excessive preset, which renders the sport at 62% of its decision by means of FSR 2. You would additionally take a look at working the sport at 1080p with 60 fps on the similar graphics preset.

The Minimal specs look as in the event that they’re focusing on 1080p at 30 fps, once more with FSR 2 enabled. As talked about, Starfield is clearly designed round FSR 2, and that’s factoring within the system necessities closely. With the upscaling turned off, you want a way more highly effective system to keep up a steady body charge.

A few further notes right here. First, you want an SSD to play Starfield. It’s required, even on the Minimal specs. As well as, the sport requires a six-core CPU at minimal, however I wouldn’t advocate taking part in it with lower than an eight-core chip. The sport may be very taxing on the CPU in closely populated areas, and also you’ll see a giant dip in efficiency with solely six cores.

What GPU do you want for Starfield?

I examined seven graphics playing cards in Starfield to get a tough concept of what you’d want relying on the decision you’re taking part in the sport at. You’ll be able to see my outcomes above, with playing cards representing the final two generations of GPUs from AMD and Nvidia. There’s no Intel illustration right here, not solely as a result of there isn’t an official Starfield driver for the Arc A770 and A750, but additionally as a result of the sport refused to load with the cardboard in my prerelease testing.

Intel confirmed there was a difficulty, and it has launched an emergency driver replace to repair stability points with Starfield. 

Earlier than digging in, it’s vital to level out that I created a worst-case state of affairs to check graphics playing cards in Starfield. That meant ignoring FSR 2 and working my benchmarks within the New Atlantis metropolis within the recreation, the place dozens of characters are on-screen. Efficiency goes up so much whenever you allow FSR 2, as I’ll get into later on this part.

For now, you’ll want round an RTX 3070 Ti with a purpose to keep 60 fps with out FSR 2 enabled. The RX 6700 XT can also be an possibility, assuming you flip down just a few graphics settings. At as much as 1440p, each the RTX 4070 and RTX 3080 scratch 60 fps with out absolutely reaching it, whereas the RX 6950 XT passes that mark with ease.

It’s 4K the place issues are actually unhealthy, although. Even AMD’s RX 7900 XTX and Nvidia’s RTX 4080 can’t keep 60 fps at 4K with out the assistance of FSR 2. That solely leaves the RTX 4090 as an choice to play Starfield at native 4K with all the settings maxed out.

That mentioned, I did this testing previous to AMD’s launch of a devoted driver for Starfield. The patch notes declare a efficiency enhance of as much as 16%, so it’d push the sport over the 60 fps mark for the RX 7900 XTX.

I went again and retested just a few playing cards with the brand new patch, and as you may see above, it improves efficiency fairly a bit.

As talked about, every of the graphics presets in Starfield robotically flip FSR 2 on. The Extremely preset makes use of a 75% render decision, Excessive makes use of a 62% render decision, and each Medium and Low use 50%. These modifications have an enormous affect on efficiency.

Should you take a look at FSR 2 on versus off, you may see the RTX 3080 can simply hit above 60 fps at 4K with the Excessive graphics preset, nevertheless it struggles to keep up above 40 fps in any other case. The disparity on the Low and Medium presets is much more obvious, with FSR 2 providing practically double the efficiency.

That comes at a serious value to picture high quality, although. As you may see within the comparability above, each the Low and Medium presets endure from important aliasing within the background, in addition to a serious drop-off in sharpness (take a look at the blue flag and the overhanging tree).

Equally, within the scene above, you may see the indicators on the constructing present far much less element on the Medium and Low presets. There are modifications to shadow and lighting high quality between modes, nevertheless it’s the low render decision of those decrease presets that actually kills the expertise.

Is 8GB of VRAM sufficient for Starfield?

VRAM issues are distinguished amongst trendy video games, however fortunately, Starfield doesn’t have numerous points. Even at native 4K with all of the graphics turned up, the sport by no means consumed above 8GB of VRAM. That was true for playing cards together with the RTX 4090 with its huge array of 24GB of VRAM.

It’s not a giant concern right here. As well as, I didn’t discover any stuttering or hitching on GPUs with 8GB of VRAM, which has been a major downside in video games like Resident Evil 4, The Final of Us Half One, and Hogwarts Legacy. 

Does Starfield have Nvidia DLSS?

At launch, Starfield doesn’t have native help for Nvidia’s Deep Studying Tremendous Sampling (DLSS). AMD is the unique PC accomplice for the sport, however regardless of that, the corporate says the developer is free so as to add DLSS if it chooses.

That hasn’t occurred but, although it’s potential DLSS help will come sooner or later. Fortunately, modder PureDark has already launched a mod that provides DLSS and Intel’s XeSS to the sport. There’s additionally a free mod that provides Nvidia’s DLSS 3.

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