Starfield is finally in our hands, and we’ve put it through a series of tests on PC to bring you optimized settings and performance.
Starfield sets a new benchmark for PC performance, taxing even the most powerful hardware on the market. To get the game to run smoothly, you’ll need the best settings for Starfield.
This is no simple game, and the situation on PC is even more complex. I’ve tested the game extensively both before and after launch to gather optimized settings, benchmark it with several GPUs, and check in on upscaling support. Here’s what I’ve found so far.Best settings for Starfield
Starfield doesn’t have a massive graphics menu, and the four graphics presets do a good job of balancing performance. I tested each setting individually, and nearly all of them offer a slight bump in performance — there are very few extraneous settings and easy wins for performance.
Still, I settled on a list of the best settings that I feel optimize performance and image quality. Here are my optimized settings for Starfield:
Dynamic Resolution: On
Render Resolution: 75%
Graphics Preset: Custom
Shadow Quality: Medium
Indirect Lighting: High
Reflections: Medium
Particle Quality: Low
Volumetric Lighting: Medium
Crowd Density: Low
Motion Blur: Off
GTAO Quality: Medium
Grass Quality: High
Contact Shadows: Medium
VSync: On
Upscaling: FSR2
Enable VRS: On
Depth of Field: On
Gasp! Your eyes don’t deceive you. You should run Starfield below native resolution. As I’ll dig into with my benchmarks later, the game is clearly designed around AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2), and even the highest graphics preset defaults to FSR 2 running at 75% of the native resolution.
It’s a bit different than FSR in other games. Normally, FSR 2 includes three or four presets that determine your render resolution. Starfield instead includes a slider that goes from 100% of render resolution to 50%. Right in the middle at 75% is definitely the sweet spot for image quality, so it’s best to optimize your performance with settings rather than push FSR 2 down to its lowest point.
The biggest performance wins for Starfield come from Shadow Quality, Volumetric Lighting, GTAO Quality, and Contact Shadows, so these are the settings to reach for first to optimize your performance. Motion Blur also has a decent impact on performance, so turn it off unless you’re running below 60 frames per second (fps) and need a little smoothing.
As you can see in the comparison above, my optimized settings look awfully similar to the Ultra preset, at least with the 75% render resolution applied to both. I saw about a 15% increase in performance with these settings, but I’ve tailored my list in a way that will benefit less powerful systems.
For instance, there’s the Crowd Density setting.
