The secret is enabling Resizable BAR.
Starfield is arguably this year’s most hyped game. At this point in time, the game runs well on AMD hardware thanks to its partnership with Bethesda, but Nvidia owners haven’t gotten as much love. Though the game runs well enough, Nvidia GPUs are uncharacteristically underperforming in Starfield, and official support for Nvidia’s bedrock technologies such as DLSS are missing.
Over time things will improve, as Nvidia and Bethesda release driver updates and patches. If you don’t want to wait, there’s an interim tweak you can do yourself, and if the early testing is to be believed, it can deliver major performance boosts for Nvidia owners playing Starfield.
Okhayko at Nexus Mods (via Reddit) has posted a very handy guide that gives Nvidia owners a welcome FPS boost. The secret is to enable Resizable BAR. Resizable Base Address Register (BAR) is a PCI Express technology. AMD calls it Smart Access Memory. It allows the CPU to access all of a GPU’s memory, allowing assets to be transferred faster.