Starfield PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide
Optimised Settings for Starfield
Starfield is a game that has limited options for performance scaling on PC. Moving from Ultra to Low settings can only deliver roughly 45% performance gains when upscaling options like FSR 2 are discounted. This means that most PC gamers will need to rely on upscaling to achieve high framerates in Starfield, as there are no magic settings that will deliver huge performance gains on their own.
Having tested Starfield’s graphical settings, we have created the list below of “optimised” settings for Starfield’s PC version. These settings enable strong performance gains while keeping visuals are close to Ultra as possible. These are the graphical settings that we recommend for Starfield, and if you still need higher framerates you should utilise the game’s FSR upscaler. to boost your framerates further.
In the below screenshots we were running Starfield at 4K on a Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card using Starfield’s Ultra Preset without FSR upscaling and with our optimised PC settings (also without upscaling). Below, you can see framerates improve from 29 FPS to 38 FPS, which is a performance gain of over 30%.
Visuals, both screenshots look almost identical, with the only difference being minor changes to the game’s lighting.
(Ultra Settings VS OC3D’s Optimised Settings)
  
In our second set of screenshots we can again see no major changes to Starfield’s visuals, but framerates are increased from 32 FPS to 37 FPS, a 15.6% performance gain. As you can see, the impact of our optimised settings for Starfield will differ significantly on a scene-by-scene basis.
(Ultra Settings VS OC3D’s Optimised Settings)
  
Optimised Settings Tested Â
Below, you can see how Starfield’s performance changes when moving from Ultra settings to our optimised PC settings on a variety of graphics cards at 1440p. All GPUs see a large uptick in performance, though most of these GPUs still need the addition of upscaling to achieve 60 FPS framerates at 1440p.
