Starfield recently got its first expansion pack in the form of Shattered Space. The post release DLC explores the origins of “House Va’ruun” and the “Great Serpent” as worshipped by its followers. The expansion doesn’t improve the visuals or mechanics in any way, but we felt that it was the right time to test the various graphics settings of Bethesda’s latest RPG. We used a vanilla “Steam” copy of the game without any visual or graphical mods.
Windows/System Settings to Optimize
- Enable Resizable BAR.
- Turn on Game Mode.
- Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
- Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
- Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
- Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
- Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
- Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.
Starfield PC System Requirements
Starfield has modest requirements for a game released in 2023. The CPU-side specs are relatively tamer, requiring a Core i5-10600K or a Ryzen 5 3600X for an optimal experience. On the graphics side, you should have a Radeon RX 6800 XT or a GeForce RTX 2080 alongside 16 GB of main memory, and 125 GB of SSD storage for tolerable loading times.
Minimum Specs:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6800K.
- GPU: AMD Radeon RX 5700, NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti.
- RAM: 16 GB.
- Storage: 125 GB SSD storage.
Recommended Specs:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, Intel Core i5-10600K.
- GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080.
- RAM: 16 GB.
- Storage: 125 GB SSD storage.
Contents & Testing Methodology
- The “Ultra” graphics preset was chosen as the reference point at 4K “native.”
- We tested the game areas known as “New Atlantic City” and “Cydonia” as they tend to be most performance-intensive on account of the high NPC density.
- Benchmarks at a glance:
- Resolution and graphics presets.
- Shadows and reflection quality.
- Ambient Occlusion and crowd density.
- Indirect lighting and particle quality.
- Texture filtering and grass quality.
- VRAM usage.
- CPU bottlenecks.
- Optimized graphics settings for Starfield.
- Hardware setup used:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
- Cooler: Lian Li Galahad 360 AIO.
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
- Motherboard: MSI MPG B650 Edge WiFi.
- Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
Starfield: Resolution & Graphics Presets
Starfield is immensely CPU-bound at the ultra-quality preset, including at 4K (given you’ve got a high-end GPU). We observed nearly identical framerates (102-103 FPS) on our GeForce RTX 4090 across 1080p, 1440p, and 4K using the highest graphics settings, without upscaling or frame generation.
Switching the graphics presets helps, albeit slightly. From roughly 100 FPS at “Ultra,” the average framerates rose to 105 FPS at “Medium,” and 110 FPS at “Low.” It’s important to note that the default quality presets enable FSR 3 at varying quality modes, regardless of your hardware. Therefore, the ultra preset uses FSR 3 “Quality,” the high preset reduces it to “Balanced,” and so on.
Shadows & Reflection Quality
Starfield features standard “shadow-map” based shadows and contact-hardening shadows (likely the ones from AMD’s FidelityFX libraries). Unlike many of NVIDIA’s implementations of the same technology, the latter is highly performant even on GeForce GPUs. The performance hit varies from 1-2 FPS on an RTX 4090 at 4K.
Standard shadows cost up to 7 FPS, with most of the performance gain coming from stepping it to the “Low” setting. The remaining three options perform about the same.
Starfield features cube-mapped and screen-space reflections, the latter being used sparingly. Consequently, the associated performance hit is minimal, mostly less than 5 FPS on average.
Ambient Occlusion & Crowd Density
Starfield uses an open-source ambient occlusion algorithm GTAO (Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion). It produces similar or superior results than NVIDIA’s HBAO+ when paired with temporal anti-aliasing which seems to be the case here. The performance hit is minimal, except at the “Ultra” setting where it increases to 4%.
Crowd density is one of the most taxing settings in densely populated settlements like “New Atlantis,” “Akila City,” and “Cydonia.” The framerates drop by up to 10% at the highest setting in these areas.
Indirect Lighting & Particle Quality
Starfield uses a low-grade form of indirect lighting (global illumination) that improves visuals at the cost of slightly low framerates. The FPS hit varies from 3-6%, depending on whether you’re indoors (higher) or outdoors (lower).
Particle quality is another graphics setting that subtly impacts performance. It adjusts the quality of particle effects like energy beams, embers, etc.
Texture Filtering & Grass Quality
Texture filtering or anisotropic filtering is highly performant on modern hardware, costing a couple of FPS for sharper, and more detailed textures. It’s best left at 8x or 16x.
Grass quality sets the density and draw distance of grass patches. It can have a particularly high-performance impact (~10%) on planets with dense vegetation or grasslands.
The remaining settings, including “Volumetric Lighting,” “Motion Blur,” “Variable Rate Shading” and “Depth of Field” have a non-noticeable impact on performance even in geometry-heavy regions.
Upscaling & Frame Generation
Starfield features AMD FSR 3, NVIDIA DLSS 3.7, and Intel XeSS 1.3, the first two supporting frame generation in addition to upscaling. Since most mid-to-high-end setups will be CPU-bound, only frame generation can offer substantial performance gains in major NPC hubs.
DLSS upscaling boosted performance by 20%, regardless of the preset. Further enabling frame generation granted an additional 56% FPS uplift when using the “Performance” preset. Frame generation (without upscaling) offered a 20% bump in framerates, somewhat alleviating the CPU bottleneck.
Starfield: VRAM Usage
Starfield uses 7 GB of graphics memory at 1080p and 1440p, using the “Ultra” quality preset. The same settings at 4K increase the VRAM usage to 7.8 GB, and disabling upscaling further pushes it to 9.34 GB. In conclusion, you’ll need an 8 GB GPU to run Starfield at “Ultra” at any resolution (without pop-ins or stutters).
Starfield: CPU Bottlenecks
Starfield is plenty CPU bound even at 4K and above. We observed a GPU-Busy deviation of 10-15% at 4K, with all the graphics settings maxed out. A little lower than expected, but that’s just the average. That figure can go much higher during certain sequences.
Reducing the graphics settings makes the game even more CPU-bound. The GPU-Busy deviation increased to 35% at the “Low” quality graphics preset at 4K.
QHD or 1440p maintains a deviation of ~20%, while 1080p increases it to 30-40% which can be particularly hindering in NPC-crowded areas.
Best Graphics Settings for Starfield 2024
| Optimized Settings | High-end | Midrange | Low-end PC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 4K (3840×2160) | 1440p (2560×1440) | 1080p (1920×1080) |
| Target FPS | 90 FPS/144 FPS | 90 FPS/144 FPS | 90 FPS |
| Shadows Quality | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra |
| Contact Shadows | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra |
| Reflection Quality | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra |
| Texture Filtering | 16x | 16x | 16x |
| Indirect Lighting | Ultra | Ultra | Medium |
| GTAO Quality | Ultra | Ultra | High |
| Crowd Density | Ultra | Ultra | Low |
| Grass Quality | Ultra | Ultra | High |
| Particle Quality | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra |
| Volumetric Lighting | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra |
| Variable Rate Shading | Off | On | On |
| Motion Blur | Off | Off | Off |
| Depth of Field | Off | Off | Off |
| Upscaling | DLSS/FSR Quality | DLSS/FSR Quality | FSR Quality |
| Frame Generation | Off (On for 144 FPS) | Off (on for 144 FPS) | On |
| CPU | Core i7-13700K/Ryzen 7 7700X | Core i5-12600K/Ryzen 5 7600 | Core i5-12400 AMD Ryzen 5 3600 |
| GPU | RTX 4070 Ti Super/RX 7900 XT | RTX 4070/RX 7800 XT | RTX 3060/RTX 3060 Ti/RX 6600 |
| Memory | 32GB (dual-channel) | 16GB (dual-channel) | Less than: 16GB (dual-channel) |
