DOUBLING the FPS in Starfield on the Steam Deck | Deck Dive

hello everyone and welcome back to the channel Starfield as I'm sure you know is bethesda's latest modding framework and as per usual performance near release has been abysmal despite this I've played every second of my save file on the steam deck and today I'm going to share my findings so you can enjoy your playthrough as [Music] well first up is the news I mentioned it in my last video but I'm back in the us and now I even have a real editing station I just wanted to take this section to ask you for your help first I'll be rapidly iterating on my setup here so please let me know if you have any problems with the videos and hopefully I can address them quickly secondly I'd like to ask you to consider my patreon if you enjoy the content since moving back to the US I started doing content creation almost fulltime and patreon is what helps me be very strict about which content I make and which sponsors I accept it also gets you some cool benefits like behind the scenes content content polls adree viewing a patron only section in the Discord and even a custom steam deck boot animation thank you for your consideration and back to the regularly scheduled programming before getting into the benchmarks let's go over the testing methodology all testing was done on two steam decks running the Steam OS beta 3.5.1 version 3.5 was chosen rather than the stable channels 3.4 because of the much better CPU performance the first deck used for most of the testing was running on BIOS version 118 the second deck used for overclock testing was running BIOS version 116 both decks used the following versions of software proton experimental 8.0 d223 1010 Mesa 2330 ddel and vkd3d 2.10.0 my overclocked steam deck is at 4 4 GHz on the CPU 2 GHz on the GPU and running at 20 watts it is also fitted with a PTM 7950 pad and the JX vented back plate so keep that in mind when comparing to my overclocking results also a quick note about overclocking on steo 3.5 and the new bios revisions I'm aware that my overclocking process no longer works and I'm currently testing a new way to do so this video has results using the new process but I'm not ready to share it yet I would expect a video about it relatively soon regarding the testing itself though the primary testing location is the new Atlantis Spaceport District since it has a little bit of everything but I've also checked the following locations thoroughly the introduction and tutorial mission on CR Sidonia on Mars the dog fights in the list for families Mission and a dense forest Planet the new Atlanta Spaceport has elements of each of these locations namely large sight lines some vegetation and complex geometry particle effects during ship takeoff and large amounts of AI to hit the CPU heart the exact route was loading in next to my ship then walking through the UC checkpoint up the stairs walk by the bar and then end by the tram which takes approximately 60 seconds without further Ado let's get into the Baseline right off the bat we have what I'll call suboptimal numbers even on low we can't hit an average of 30 FPS and Ultra can barely even manage 14 on top of that stuttering is pretty severe with low being the only preset to manage a double digigit 0.1% low we clearly have our work cut out for us so let's find the bottlenecks first up is CPU load which is definitely High the low and medium presets have an average load of about 85% whereas high and Ultra have a much lower load this suggests that the CPU is the bottle neck on Lower settings and the GPU is the bottleneck on the higher settings speaking of the GPU we can clearly see here that I was right on with my guess while low and medium hover around the 85 to 90% utilization Mark the higher presets basically Max it out during the majority of the test two things are interesting to note here first the downward spikes in the last half of the test seem to be Universal when looking at the footage we can see that the first of these occurs during a really bad stutter When approaching the tra from the bar area and it happens every single time the second of the stutters occurs when stopping next to the tram where you can see the performance absolutely tank while the game tries to swap old assets out prior to boarding the second thing to note is that neither the CPU or GPU are being fully utilized during the duration of the test on low or medium settings despite the horrible performance this made me think that there must be a memory bottleneck on the lower settings so let's check it out looking at the memory usage we can see that the deck is throwing basically everything it has at Starfield between 13 and 14 GB of memory used here it's pretty clear that the GPU won't have anywhere near the memory it needs which explains the stutters fortunately for us this means that either the swap res siiz and cry utilities or increasing the vram could be a viable candidate for improvement so I'm excited to check those out in a bit as we can see the performance here in Starfield is just bad so we're going to focus on the low and Med medium presets during the bulk of the testing then use what we learned to maximize gains on higher settings later lastly before moving on the next few tweaks will be adjusting the minimum vram or Uma frame buffer and using cryo utilities too if you don't know what either of those are I highly recommend checking out the video on screen now and in the description below after this one is done and you'll see why over the next few minutes all right let's get back to the testing first up is 4 GB of VR Ram which we can see doesn't do much for averages but increases the 97th percentile by 6% and 4% for low and medium respectively the lows on the low preset are actually 2 FPS lower with the 4 GB of vram and within a single frame on medium overall 4 GB of vram is a bit of a wash on its own but we'll see why we covered it in a bit next up is adding cryo utility 2's recommended settings into the mix which we can see brings us our first gains paired with the 4 GB of minimum vram we see a 3% and 5% boost to both averages and 97th perenti results as well as a minor boost to 0.1% lows on both presets it's not a huge difference but just these two small changes would let us lock to 30 FPS more consistently in busy scenes so it's a welcome difference all the same as these are our best results we'll use them as a baseline going forward the next thing I wanted to try is the steam deck Essentials mod mod which does everything from compress the textures to fit into the steamex vram to change the frame rate of the in-game animations for a more fluid experience installation is pretty simple and can be done completely on the deck all you need to do is to go to the Nexus page linked on screen and in the description below then download all three files on the files page from there start with the textures file and follow the instructions in the readme inside at the time of recording I simply had to move the files in the Starfield directory folder to the Starfield installation folder and the files in the documents folder to the location on screen now note that all relevant locations are listed in the readme so don't hesitate to read it and copy and paste the relevant paths next do the same for the I Oni tweaks file you downloaded in these upcoming tests I use the ultra performance option then lastly do the same for the animations file after all three are installed you just need to do one more thing which is to delete the existing Shader cache for Starfield to do so just go to the folder on screen now and delete everything in there don't worry nothing is really lost here since it only contains the shaders that valve built your save games are safe and with that you've installed the mod completely here we can see why we went through all the trouble while the visual quality of the game definitely takes a hit it performs much better the averages increased by 25% and 38% while the 97th percentile result results increased by 18 and 31% for low and medium respectively despite that the lows barely budged clearly signifying that loading stutter is a major problem with Starfield no matter the assets used with these much better results let's search for some new bottlenecks the CPU load looks identical so nothing here but the GPU load is much lower with the mod active clearly showing that it's doing its job and making Starfield much easier to run on that note the GPU power consumption lowered drastically sometimes more than 60% I also wanted to test the I on ey option marked quality since the visual hit was pretty severe on Ultra performance fortunately even using the much nicer looking quality option we have still retained a large amount of our performance gains so we'll have to keep it in mind for later as a quick note I'll be removing the cu2 and 4 GB of vram labels from graphs for the remaining of testing they were still used but I want to keep the graphs readable going back to the performance in seeing the loading lag spikes I thought that they might be caused by the dynamic resolution scaling feature so I tried disabling it to my surprise not only did the averages in 97th percentile results rise but even the lows on the low preset I don't have any definitive proof of this but I believe that the scaling is actually a pretty costly process and doesn't help us when using the mod as most textures are already very small from here on out these results are the new Baseline next up I wanted to see if disabling temporal anti-aliasing or TAA would help with either frame rates or the fuzziness in the image you can disable TA by editing your Starfield custom. in the documents folder that we extracted to earlier and then adding the following text under the display heading I would really like this toggle to be in game since I don't like how fuzzy TAA makes the image but this will have to suffice for now performance was a mixed bag with low getting worse lows and medium getting slightly better lows that said if you hate the soft edges that TAA gives then this change is amazing next up is overclock testing and a reminder that I'm running at 4 GHz on CPU 2 GHz on GPU and a wattage of 20 overclocking results were definitely better than stock but not as high as I'd hoped which really goes to show how much computer you you need to get a single frame out of Starfield in this case we saw averages increase by 3% and 4% and the 97th percentile results increased by 1% and 2% the lows on the medium preset increased by 177% and 15% but the lows on the low preset were nearly identical to recap our video thus far we were able to increase the average performance by 26% on the low preset and a huge 46% on the medium preset unfortunately the lows just don't budge and there doesn't seem to be anything to be done aside from a game update but I'm very happy with the average and 97th percentile gains looking at the high and Ultra presets we can see that even the lows were improved significantly the high preset more than doubled average frame rate and 97th percentile while the lows improved by 45% and 34% the ultra preset also doubled the averages in 97th percentile and increased lows by 51 and 35% as a final illustration of how much performance we were able to gain here's the high preset running better than low did without any tweaks overall I'm very happy with the performance we're able to gain here and my only wish is that Bethesda would fix the stuttering present during asset swaps before I go to the settings section here are some other things that I [Music] tried [Music] the only thing to note is that there won't be any overclocked profiles here today since we saw very minor gains even with a major overclock aside from that there will be four options to choose from so let's get right into it first up is the performance preset where we prioritize getting as many frames as possible regardless of visual quality if you want to go as fast as Bethesda did while backstepping away from Fallout 76 then use these settings [Music] second is battery saver where we try to limit the power drain so you can play away from an outlet for as long as possible if you want your battery to last longer than the Starfield menu animations use these settings [Music] third is quality where we strive to get the best quality possible on the deck if you want to experience the universe in its full NASA Punk Glory then use these [Music] settings [Music] fourth and last is docked where we set the resolution to 1080P and push the deck to make the best docked experience possible if you want to share your adventures on the big screen or maybe a portable projector use these [Music] settings [Music] all right everyone that's it for this video as always don't forget to like the video like Barrett likes chunks comment on whether you think Starfield just works or if it's another mod framework put out by Bethesda subscribe to the Church of God Howard and gaze at his Almighty Holiness and ring the bell to be alerted when I post my next video this isn't a joke I just want you to know when it goes live I'd like to take a moment to thank all of my patrons YouTube members and super thanks for the amazing support it has literally kept me fed this last month and I cannot say enough kind words about all of you on another note it was very refreshing being able to work on another deck dive after all this time and I look forward to doing some more soon as for what's next over the coming weeks I'd expect some highly anticipated videos and with that teaser I'd like to say thank you all for watching and have a great [Music] day

Channel: CryoByte33

Views: 22,349

Keywords: steam deck, starfield

Id: O5MiVEle_fE

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 21 2023