our “60 FPS” guide to optimize performance on PC
It’s the big release of the year: Starfield will soon be in the hands of millions of players. Bethesda’s space RPG is rather demanding in terms of graphics resources, but a few adjustments can help you improve fluidity. Follow our guide.
Bethesda’s new creation works on a well-known technical base: the engine Creation Enginewhich was able to rotate Skyrim or Fallout 4, here updated in a brand new version. We are therefore on a completely new technical base with numerous developments in rendering, physics, light and even AI. The only major absentee, the ray tracingwhich could have increased the load on our machines even more.
Even bigger development: Starfield uses procedural generation for its cities and planets, with new artificial intelligence routines for NPCs (non-player characters). The game is therefore obviously demanding on the graphics card, but also the processor which should not be disregarded if you want to play Starfield in the best conditions.
We have taken a look at the settings and their impact on the performance of the machine to help you reach 60 FPS on PC, while consoles are limited to 30 FPS.
Your Windows Settings
First of all, it is important to ensure that your system is at least optimized. We are not talking to you here about the configuration necessary to run Starfieldbut many Windows settings related to your processor as well as your graphics card.
Starfield is above all a graphics-intensive game, so make sure it runs at full power. For Nvidia card owners:
- Go to the Nvidia Control Panel and then click “Adjust picture settings with Preview” in the 3D Settings category in the left column.
- Check the option “Use advanced 3D image settings” if it is not done yet.
- Still in the left column, click “Manage 3D settings” to display a range of parameters. We advise you here to activate at least to check ” Prioritize maximum performance to keep your graphics card running at full speed under all circumstances.
You can activate this option only for games installed on your machine via the tab “Program settings”. AMD does not have such an option at the moment.
We also invite you to clean up your programs running in the background, which can unnecessarily increase the processor load on the system. Games like Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart showed better stability after this step. Check the taskbar for the different icons displayed near the Windows clock. Quit programs that don’t seem useful to you and check that they don’t launch at startup. To do this, right-click on the taskbar, open Task Manager and go to the “ Startup apps to disable anything you don’t need.
Update your graphics drivers
It seems obvious, but don’t forget to update your graphics drivers. Nvidia and AMD promise gains of up to 15% with these new versions, you would be wrong to deprive yourself of it. Nvidia provided its drivers “ Game Ready ” ForStarfieldwith version 537.13 while AMD has just released its drivers optimized for gaming with version 23.8.2.
Display settings
As always, we advise you to carefully check the display settings before changing other graphics options. You have to make sure that everything matches your own configuration. Here, we have never seen more summary:Starfieldseems to detect without fail your screen resolution as well as its refresh rate when you activate the ” Windowed full screen » (what we recommend).
The option Dynamic resolution will allow you to change resolution depending on the performance of the game on your machine when you use the option toupscaling . We’ll tell you more about it in the dedicated section further down in this article.
Further down, you will find the option for Vertical Synchronization, which we advise you to leave deactivated, unless you observe image tearing phenomena ( tearing ). If your screen is compatible, we will always advise you to favor the settings of G-Sync at Nvidia and FreeSync at AMD, to be activated in their respective control panels.
Graphics Settings
Shadow quality
Shadows in video games are always an effective setting to lower to improve your performance and sometimes with minimal impact on image quality. Here, the parameter influences in particular the anti-aliasing of these shadows which could, depending on the areas, be heavy for the rendering. It is especially indoors that you will see a drastic performance gain, around 5 to 10 FPS depending on the area. Adjustment ” Intermediate» seems to us to be an excellent compromise between image quality and performance.
Impact on performance: Pupil
Our recommendation: Intermediate
Indirect lighting
This setting influences so-called indirect lights, those light rays that bounce off one surface to illuminate another. Indirect lighting is a component of Global Illumination and theoretically injects realism into the light of a scene. Starfieldnot using ray tracing For its Global Illumination engine, this setting is not as resource heavy as it could be. Depending on your machine, a medium or high setting will save you some FPS.
Impact on performance: AVERAGE
Our recommendation: Intermediate or High
Reflections
The reflection settings in Starfielddo not seem to us to have a heavy impact on performance, you can easily push them to the limit. Their quality is felt especially on the water and you will only gain a handful of FPS by reducing them to the minimum setting.
Impact on performance: Weak
Our recommendation: High or Intermediate
Particle quality
There is no reason not to leave this setting at maximum here, it generally has very little impact on performance.
Impact on performance: weak
Our recommendation: Pupil
Volumetric lighting
This adjustment concerns the different lighting which creates the impression of a luminous volume, in particular when the light passes through smoke or a window. These effects are relatively resource-heavy and can give you a few extra FPS in some interiors. We therefore advise you to lower this setting a little, especially since the visual difference is not drastic.
Impact on performance: AVERAGE
Our recommendation: Intermediate or High
Crowd density
The crowd in Starfieldis never very supplied, including in the big cities. However, if your processor is not the most recent, we advise you to lower this setting. Leave it at maximum if your CPU supports it.
Impact on performance: AVERAGE
Our recommendation: Weak
Motion blur
This is the famous motion blur (or Motion Blur ) which is and remains a personal preference. The setting does however have a slight impact on performance in Starfield we therefore advise you to deactivate it.
Impact on performance: 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. The GTAO notably influences the quality of shadows linked to static objects. Below Intermediate, however, the performance gains are less, so we advise you to stay at this setting level, which will also allow you to maintain a certain quality of shading.
Impact on performance: Pupil
Our recommendation: Intermediate
Grass quality
Here you can adjust the density of the grass and its quality. We didn’t notice a huge impact on performance, especially in forest environments, you will gain 1 or 2 FPS by setting it to high.
Impact on performance: Weak
Our recommendation: Pupil
Contact shadows
This setting concerns a particular type of shadows, contact shadows, which can affect both your character and exterior scenes. We are talking especially about the shadows of the different elements of your suit, or the stones and leaves on the ground. Again, the impact is felt especially in forest or rocky environments like many planets. It can cost you between 3 and 5 FPS depending on certain areas without the visual difference necessarily being felt. You can therefore lower this setting to Intermediate or even low.
Impact on performance: AVERAGE
Our recommendation: Intermediate or Low
Upscaling
This is where you can get a significant performance boost. The upscaling technique used is important. CASE forContrast Adaptive Sharpeningis just a simple sharpening filter while FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) is AMD’s priority scaling algorithm optimized here forStarfield. Once enabled, you will have access to resolution scaling options as well as dynamic resolution.
We advise you here to choose the FSR solution, a bit less efficient, but with a much higher image quality. In order to preserve this, you will have to choose a resolution scale, which will be the internal rendering resolution. The more you lower the setting, the more the algorithm will work on a low resolution with a greater scaling. You gain in performance, but will lose in rendering quality. A setting of 60-80% seems to us to be a good middle ground between the two, especially if your graphics card is running at full throttle.
The sharpness setting also depends on your machine as well as your screen; we advise you to test it in dense environments such as interiors or on rocky ground.
Impact on performance: Pupil
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 to enable Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS inStarfieldfor a more or less noticeable difference.
VRS (Variable Rate Shading)
THEVariable Rate Shadingis supposed to improve performance by reducing shader quality intelligently, depending on the scene and user perspective. The gain will be more noticeable on older machines while the difference in image quality will be imperceptible, so we advise you to leave it activated.
Impact on performance: AVERAGE
Our recommendation: With
Our results
Without scaling, our simple changes to graphics settings allowed us to gain around ten FPS in the middle of a city and in certain dense interiors. You can double this gain by activating the FSR, with some concessions to be made on image quality, especially in motion. But, in the heat of the moment, we guarantee you won’t see any difference.
Globally,Starfieldis an intensive game for the graphics card, but good news: 8 GB of video memory will be more than enough for you, even in 4K. It’s already that.
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