Starfield Graphics Optimization Guide & Benchmarks, Settings Comparison, & Performance Mods

Lol I wish my workplace would have the level of quality of information about my job that you do about stuff.

Even with a 6800XT, 7600X and fantastic memory, a grassy field on ultra caused my GPU to thermal throttle after about an hour of running around on the planet. Granted, I have a smaller case with good ventilation, but it is not the best. So, after letting the system cooldown for a couple minutes before reloading the game, the quality was set to low right away and never had that issue again. Surely the setting can be turned to medium or high. Rest of the specs are all set to ultra.

I won't buy or play that game with the identity politics in it!

You need to OPTIMIZE You don't have a state of the art pc already? Plebiscite. Todd says this game isn't for you!

I really don't want starfield to be added to the test suite.
It's just not a very good game. 7 hours in and I'm honestly done... It's as complete as I'm willing to make it, and I'm embarrassed having spent so much money on it.

So... Starfield can run on Medium and look the same. Thanks Bethesda!

I am currently a laptop gamer unfortunately due to life requiring me to sell the PC set up I used to mainly play on. And I am using a Dell G15 5515 Ryzen Edition. The only thing I have done to it is add another 8gb stick of ram for a total of 16gb. I was sad to see that I was sitting on 20fps and the game just looked so terrible and I made 1 single change so far and that was to the render resolution. On the lowest preset, it is set the lowest it can go to 50. I went to 75 and holy crap I can now lock 60fps in most areas but my average is 45-50. I am looking forward to trying this video's suggestions but I am not going to be working with any mods so I will post the results as soon as I finish this video!

Alrighty, Made a few changes and I am getting the same FPS at a minimum but the game looks so much better. Nothing above medium for the changes I made but render resolution is now at 100%. It appears that a lot of these settings just make everything run more efficient on medium which is good news.

I prefer Adoring Fan thumbnail, but oh well.

A770 16gb

At 2k I get the same 30-45 fps no matter what settings I use , fsr seems to do nothing at all.
I still have to disable hyper threading on my i9 and it crashes every ten minutes.

At this point Intel has probably done everything possible, it's up to Bethesda to fix their mess.

Ask not what your GPU can do for the game but what the game can do for your GPU.

- John F. Kennedy on Starfield optimization, probably.

it plays okay on my computer but the audio sucks so bad, there is always a 3-4 second delay before the audio kicks in.

"In this bottle full of bub" absolutely sent me

i turned indirect lighting to low and i thought i was playing a PS2 game

@gamersnexus I want to say thank you for the years of support. i'm on my second PC build using your tests and i've been happy with them both.

GTAV, 2015...?!?!!

Sweet

Using a 6950XT with an i9 9900K should I be worried about cpu bottlenecks here? I suspect not as the i9 might be old but is still fairly powerful.

Yet im unsure since my game in new atlantis runs at about 60-75 fps average with the settings from this video

I know they might be at another place in the city etc. but It seems to not drop below 60 at least.

EDIT: Yeah the game runs like shit, cant believe a 6950xt cant maintain at least 80fps at 4k 65% render scale on medium/high settings

I hope Steve sees this, would be very cool haha.

I'm 41, and I'm really enjoying having a lot of disposable income and still have time to play. It's such a treat to play with a top-of-the-line system :)

Life is good and so many great games to chose from.

Are you se german regierung?! Viel blabla um nichts.... Die Engine ist Murks. Fertig. Ende. Es muss optimiert werden seitens Entwickler. Punkt.

It is still baffling to me that i get like 40 fps on RDR2 on high on my GTX1650 but barely 24 fps on Starfield.

This game is beyond unoptimized

There is just not enough image increase to go beyond medium settings for most people. Medium looks really good still and a low to medium end gaming computer can easily run medium settings.

i had to turn dlss off on my 1080 TI rig, it was crashing the driver. i guess 1000 series might be "too old for new stuff"

RIP 1080Ti?

your thumbnail designer needs a raise now.

medium shadows look way better than high in almost any of the cases except the coffee table imo. that's really bizarre, but I guess I know what setting to use now

can i just say im freaked out that steve has grey hairs?

Just gotta chime in; LOVE the way you're testing the settings via baselines with the charts. Great work Steve & GN!

What should I set the bumpscosity to?

Game looks like Daggerfall and performs like quadruplet Microsoft Flight Simulator.
But hey, the game becomes decently fun to play after suffering the 1,000 terrible playtime in it. How about waiting those 1,000 hours for the community to fix it first.
An over 200 million usd AAA title, and that's the best they come up with. Fallout 76 is under a better light thanks to Starfield now. Gamers deserves better.

I'm running Ryzen 7 5800X with an RX 6700(brand new build), and I'm crashing playing Starfield on the first load in screen, crashing on the 2nd load screen on Baldur's Gate 3, freezing trying to use Cinebench GPU performance test BUT I CAN PLAY CP2077 on medium and high settings?!?!?!?! How? Why? bad card? temps are normal and everything. All drivers and updates are complete. (win10) Please, help, I don't get it. Just spent around $900 on upgrades just to play these titles and now I'm dead in the water here. (I get farther into the game and past load screens using my old RTX 1060 on low settings.)(Yes, I use the driver uninstaller software between GPU swaps.)

Only thing I can think of w/ particles are particle weapons on ships, grenades, or particle weapons (Heavy Fuse/Light Fuse ammo type). Try that maybe?

Holy shit the indirect lighting thing is a real hing that bothered me hard. Thanks sm guys, for real!

Couldn't find it in the club with the bottle full of bub :(

Where is the Asus ROG Matrix RTX 4090 review ? Has not been uploaded yet ? I cannot find it in here :/ .

Please keep doing these types of content! I like this a lot and I enjoy your approach more that others like Digital Foundry who seem to focus on consoles these days.

BethPie is the best ini editor program for Bethesda games

I bought this game, then Titanfall 2 happend. Starfield, I might see you in 6 months or so.. I really hope you got some well deserved updates until then.

The only optimization guide out the should be to teach the game devs how to code. Please no more of these vids...let's see that sexy anechoic chamber being put to good use!

Less shoplifters=better.

so good

You cant optimize this crap game, it uses a 20 year old engine and looks like a xbox 360 game. this must also be the only game where low looks identical to ultra and give the same bad performance.

Even at high and ultra some of these scenes look like dog shit.

That thumbnail made me go watch more @willburger oblivion aitism cat videos.

using 5600x + 7800xt on 1080p. can someone summarize GN's recommended settings

Starfield is a great game that runs for shit

The error bars in your graphs make me happy :)

When you spend most of the time in the Ship Builder, you don't need optimization!

Starfield isn't my kind of game, but I like the content around it because it shows how the engine behaves. And going off Bethesda's track record with engines, I'm gonna take a wild guess and say Elder Scrolls VI is probably going to be this one.