Starfield GPU Optimization, The Best Settings to Tweak on PC!

foreign [Music] welcome back to how to unbox today we're going to go through every setting in Starfield and tell you which settings are worth turning to ultra and which are worth turning down to improve performance that's right optimization guides are back and there's no better title to talk about right now than Bethesda game studios hotly anticipated title Stafford on PC is an interesting release there are areas of the game that are visually stunning there are areas of the game that look pretty average there are areas that run really well and there are areas that don't and it's not always the worst looking areas that perform better with such a vast number of planets and all sorts of different environments from the interior of buildings and space combat to forested outdoor areas and Barren wastelands most Gamers will have quite a varied experience Vista also haven't done an especially amazing job of the PC version with several features that I would class as critical in a modern AAA title being absent native HDR support and fov slider gamma settings and of course nvidia's dlss upscaling all not found in the PC version even though HDR for example is available on the Xbox version so it seems like the console version received most of the attention there's also a few weird setting choices like the omission of any texture related options and a heavy focus on fsr2 upscaling across the various presets in today's video I'm going to look at all the games built-in quality options and show you what settings to use for the best mounts between visuals and performance in some of the more demanding areas of the game this is specifically a GPU optimization focused video so we're mostly concerned about improving GPU limited performance rather than addressing CPU performance which is likely to come in a future video from us for that we are benchmarking with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 a mid-range to mainstream GPU that's representative of many systems and is in a performance class that needs optimization we could have used something like an RTX 4090 but with that card you may as well crank everything to ultra so today's guide is focused on improvements for mid-range Gamers however as I said we are looking at GPU limited optimization so the CPU used for testing is the AMD ryzen 7 7800x 3D with 32 gigabytes of ddr5 6000 cl30 memory on msi's MPG x670e carbon Wi-Fi motherboard this keeps a GPU limit firmly in place though again we'll assess CPU limited optimizations later all game visual captures that you'll see throughout the video are taken on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 the beefy Asus Rog strix model and that's so we can provide High frame rate 4K quality comparisons we recommend watching this at YouTube's maximum 4K quality mode we're only going to be looking at footage and comparisons from the first two hours of the game up until you reach the first major settlement to avoid any spoilers this is an exploration game after all and I'm sure you'll want to discover everything for yourself rather than having it shown to you in this video and before we get into things each quality setting is split into a visual and performance section the performance data is captured in a benchmark pass that's designed to give you a look at the impact of a setting on typical game performance rather than spot checking FPS numbers which isn't as accurate or representative of typical gaming we've used two areas for benchmarking one in new Atlantis and one in a forested area which is some of the most GPU intensive areas we've found playing the game however like I said Starfield is a varied game so performance improvements will differ depending on where you are we feel testing in the most intensive areas sets a good foundation for the rest of the game first up a discussion on vram usage Starfield plays well on cards with 8 gigabytes of vram or higher and even six gigabytes at lower resolutions even on an RTX 4090 we rarely saw vram usage exceed 8 gigabytes so it seems the game is working hard to keep virram usage below this level rather than scaling up to fit the buffer of higher end gpus this is great use for gamers with mid-range gpus that are mostly 8 gigabytes these days the game runs fine even up to 4K though whether an 8 key GPU has the performance for 4K gaming is another question there's also no texture options so you don't even get a choice to dial things back while this is great for many GPU owners that have been forced to stay on 8 gigabytes due to the choices of GPU manufacturers it's pretty clear playing the game the compromises this has made to visual quality there is quite a variety of texture quality in the game ranging from good without being amazing to downright awful especially viewing some objects at a mid to close distance LED viewing distances are also not amazing when looking at vast open air areas compared to other recent games there's no Ray tracing either a setting that typically increases vram usage this leaves me a bit disappointed as owners of higher end gpus with 12 gigabytes or more of vram could definitely have benefited from an Ultra HD texture pack type of setting in the game texture scaling is practically non-existent which isn't ideal for owners of say an RTX 4090 with 24 gigabytes to use there's four main presets in the game which adjust the main settings as well as the render resolution and all apply fsr2 by default Ultra at 75 resolution scale high at 62 percent and medium and low both at 50 this has quite a significant impact on visuals even without looking at the other differences at 4K both high and Ultra look okay but there's a pretty drastic decrease in image stability and detail along with an increase in Jagged edges when using medium and low take a look at this element for example and how much more aliased it looks on medium and low now let's turn off FSR on the medium preset and compare that to the default medium preset with 50 render scale pretty large difference in visual quality here's another example showing a significant loss of detail from their default render scale options that's not to say that resolution scaling is perfect with high or Ultra either in some areas I spotted noticeable stability issues even without moving which is a common artifact with fsr2 these issues are removed when you change the upscaling option to off which appears to revert to a native TAA presentation for those after the best visual quality using the ultra preset with fsr2 disabled is definitely the way to go and for those after medium or low you'll see significantly better image quality if you increase the render resolution after applying those presets and I should note here that everything has been tested with Dynamic resolution off to allow for consistent results at the same resolution outside of resolution scaling there isn't a massive difference between the ultra and high presets so for most Gamers that just want to use presets as always I'd recommend High over Ultra Shadow quality is lowered slightly as are a few other effects the biggest difference is in foliage draw distance the high preset curls a bit of grass in some areas though if there's no grass around you probably won't notice this medium drops all the previous settings one notch again so further reductions to Shadow quality effect quality Reflections and draw distance the image doesn't have as much depth as Ultra but this preset is still highly usable provided you increase the render resolution as that has by far the biggest impact on the image meanwhile the low setting drops everything again Shadows become noticeably weaker and foliage draw distance is hit big time the world is much flatter with this setting as things like ambient occlusion get dialed back but I have seen much worse low settings than in Star fuel so for those with weaker Hardware you'll still get a lot of the environment details and Ambiance that you would get on higher settings in terms of performance in the city of New Atlantis using the default presets that include resolution scaling I saw a 26 advantage using High over Ultra 66 using medium over Ultra and 85 using low over Ultra that's almost 2x scaling though it's clear that much of that gain is made through dropping the render resolution with fsr2 disabled the high preset is now just 14 faster the medium preset 32 percent faster and low just 47 faster which probably won't be sufficient for most Gamers for example if you're only achieving 40 FPS in the city dropping from Ultra to low without also dropping the render resolution will see you fall just short of 60 FPS which isn't great in the forested area I tested the performance differences are much larger the default presets see a 58 gain moving from Ultra to high and 99 gain moving from Ultra to medium and a huge 152 percent gain from Ultra to low given these are some of the most intensive areas we've found so far mid-range Gamers should definitely be using the high preset at most with that upscaling high delivers a 29 Improvement in this area versus Ultra and medium a 43 Improvement these are the two obvious presets to use for most Gamers Ultra just isn't worth it individual performance impact is Shadow quality so let's look at how visuals differ Shadow definition is the sharpest on Ultra and a bit blurry on high medium looks very similar to high while low C Shadow detail drastically reduced while Ultra does look best I think High doesn't hurt the experience all that much and you'd see similar Shadow quality that high produces in other games also important to note is Shadow draw distance is affected by this setting Ultra has excellent draw distance for high quality Shadows only peeling back to lower quality Shadows after a fair way the draw distance with high is reduced but not by a deal breaking amount it's when we get to medium that I felt I could notice Shadow popping during regular gameplay while with low it's quite distracting as Shadow quality changes very close to the camera and at a medium distances there's quite a huge drop off when we look at performance in the city area dropping from Ultra to high provides a nine percent performance Improvement on average which I feel is good given the visual difference medium though isn't worth it for just a two percent gain over high and low is definitely not worth using given the huge sacrifice to visuals this does change in the forested area though dropping from Ultra to high sees a 26 performance Improvement which is absolutely massive for one setting and is why I'd strongly recommend Gamers use high shadows in this game medium over High provides an additional 12 gain a good choice for those that need extra performance low is also eight percent faster again here but I feel that that's hard to justify indirect lighting is supposed to change the quality of global illumination but as far as I can tell this setting does very little in the opening two hours of the game as well as several planets further along in the story that I won't show to spoil it I saw essentially no visual difference even between Ultra and low now there may be some areas much later in the game where this setting does make a difference but I haven't found it yet I also saw no performance difference from this setting which backs up what I saw visually Steve also confirmed this on his system benchmarking the game so who knows if it's broken or just something that only has a minor impact in some areas of the game but it's not a setting to be concerned about Reflections is a pretty straightforward setting this one controls the resolution and definition of in-game Reflections which you'll see across many surfaces such as water glass and some metals High looks the clearest low looks the worst and quite bad in my opinion with medium closer to high though noticeably reduced particularly in City areas and indoors there are lots of surfaces that are impacted by this setting so high is better in the new Atlantis area I saw a three percent Improvement dropping this setting from high to medium and four percent using low over high for this reason I would avoid the low setting and generally I would only turn this setting to medium if you needed additional performance so it's one of the last settings I would turn down in the forested areas and on other planets the performance impact is much smaller just a one percent difference here on average particle quality is another setting where I couldn't really figure out what this setting impacts visually I saw little to no difference shooting weapons looking at explosions observing fires or assessing smoke effects there likely is some impact here somewhere I just couldn't find it in time for this video in my testing I only saw a small two percent Improvement to one percent low performance changing the setting from high to medium so I probably do that but again I'm not really sure what this setting does in terms of affecting the visuals in the game so seeing a small performance Improvement between a couple of settings makes sense volumetric lighting affects the resolution and accuracy of the volumetric effects in the game so things like Ray shining through a window light blooming into a bit of fog or Mist the difference between each setting is very subtle in fact I saw a little difference at all between high and Ultra when set to medium there is a drop in quality but for most Gamers you probably won't even notice and you could say even that you know medium is just artistically different to ultra low seems to blur out the volumetric effect a bit and reduce definition though it doesn't remove them entirely so again could be worth using one of the only ways I was able to discern a difference here was to look at the definition of volumetric effects in motion where medium is a drop compared to Ultra I really had to look for this though in many scenes it has next to no obvious difference making it a great candidate for optimization in new Atlantis I saw a three percent performance Improvement dropping the setting from Ultra to medium and there was a five percent gain from low over Ultra in the forest area I saw a two percent gain for medium and three percent gain for low I'd recommend using medium here with low if you need extra performance seriously don't be afraid of using low here it doesn't disable this effect and the game still looks good crowd density controls the number of NPCs sport the best way I can describe this is showing our Benchmark passes using the high setting I counted roughly 70 NPCs through the pass medium had about 60 NPCs and low about 45. changing this setting doesn't immediately drop NPC account in your viewport but it does appear to control the rate of NPCs that spawn in as you move around the world High makes the world feel the most dense this setting has little impact when GPU Limited in the city area where there were a lot of NPCs I saw just a two percent Improvement dropping from high to low this is something to further explore when CPU Limited in a future video but for gpus I'd probably just leave this on high motion blur is a classic feature that most Gamers will be familiar with unfortunately Starfield combines camera and object motion blur into the one setting so as you turn down motion blur from high to low the quality and blurriness of both camera and object blur reduces it would have been nice to see the low setting for example turn off camera motion blur while preserving per object blur which is a configuration some Gamers like the quality of motion blur in this game is generally okay though personally I like to disable this feature there's not a huge difference between the three motion blur on settings and only a two percent gain on average from disabling the feature entirely I recommend setting it to off but this is a personal preference thing gtao quality controls ambient occlusion quality and this typically manifests as a difference in the resolution and apparent strength of shadowing between close objects like a pipe and the wall or the corners of a bookshelf there isn't a huge difference between Ultra and high Ultra is slightly darker but it can be hard to tell medium drops the quality a bit though it's really on low where you'll notice the flattest world and lack of depth this setting is very similar to ambient occlusion settings in other games so you might be familiar with the impact it has in Starfield I saw a two percent Improvement moving from Ultra to high which isn't massive but I also saw a similar Improvement for the medium setting which means that high is worth using over medium the low setting drops quality a fair bit for a very minimal uplift in performance so it's not worth using in the forest areas the impact from the setting is less than in the city but still a small gain using High instead of ultra grass quality is an extremely straightforward option the higher the grass setting the longer draw distance you will see for foliage and the more foliage you will get in general the areas where you can see far into the distance Ultra to high to medium all has a predictable Cadence of grass reduction low then really peels things back to the point where even close grass is affected in areas with a shorter view distance it's really only the low setting that has a large impact although medium can also be noticeable in City areas with little foliage it makes sense that this setting has no performance impact in our forest test area there is also very little impact with our mid-range GPU while GPU limited only the low settings or a two percent performance Improvement at a huge cost of visuals I'd recommend for most Gamers setting this to ultra provided UI GPU limited and will explore CPU limits in the future contact Shadows is a very subtle effect in Starfield to the point where I found it almost impossible to tell the difference between ultra high and medium in most scenes the time of day difference with shadows moving slightly from capture to capture is more noticeable than any impact from this setting the one exception to this is the low setting which does reduce or eliminate some contact Shadows such as here it's no surprise to see that contact Shadows has a minimal performance impact in City areas I saw a small improvement from medium versus Ultra and similar in the forest areas a reasonable four percent gain is achievable using low which I'd recommend for gamers after the biggest performance increase as the low setting is still relatively subtle overall for everyone else I'd use medium variable rate shading is a setting that does what it says in the name it adjusts the radio shading depending on the content on screen reducing the shading rate for less important areas I didn't see any noticeable difference between setting on or off and the default is on for all presets there may be some areas where it has an impact I just didn't see them on a general look throughout the game it also has a minimal performance impact turning off vrs only dropped my frame rate by one percent so it doesn't appear as though this is a particularly deep vrs implementation so I'd recommend keeping it on film grain and depth of field are the remaining settings in both their personal preference things filmgrain has no performance impact so you can safely tune this to your liking depth of field has no performance impact for General gameplay but turning it off will deliver a three percent Improvement to Performance for character interactions when you talk to a character it zooms to their face and blows out the background disabling depth of field disables that blur effect and slightly improves performance this isn't a crucial setting for General performance throughout the game lastly I wanted to talk about upscaling in this game the settings on offer here are lackluster just upscaling off reverting to Native TAA fsr2 and Kaz upscaling which is just spatial upscaling with a sharpening filter there are no modes here Starfield instead uses a resolution slider and even allows you to run fsr2 at a 100 resolution scale as far as anti-aliasing goes so running either upscaling off cars at a 100 render scale or fsr2 at 100 render scale you're best off either using upscaling off or Cavs with sharpening set to your liking upscaling off is softer but less prone to motion artifacts than fsr2 even at 100 render scale and Kaz is slightly sharper for General upscaling and using a lower render resolution the output quality is determined significantly by your native resolution kaz's garbage at upscaling so I wouldn't recommend it seriously the 50 Rena scale image using Kaz is not safe to show on this screen you'll instantly be sick and regret ever seeing it it's that awful fsr2 in the game is okay but It suffers from some of the known flaws with fsr2 that we've covered in previous content this station actually handles tree foliage quite well something we've seen it struggle with in other titles grass is also it's okay there is some sizzling and typically fsr2 reduced ghosting compared to running native TAA with upscaling off its other elements that still suffer from flickering and stability issues especially any textures or geometry with straight clean lines there's a lot of that throughout the game the Interiors of ships and buildings in particular fsr2 also reduces fine detail when used on Lower settings like a 50 render scale which can make the presentation look a bit blurry or muddy whether or not fsr2 upscaling makes sense to use depends highly on your native screen resolution a 4K I thought it generally looked good down to around a 67 render scale which corresponds to the fsr2 Quality mode in other games 75 is used for the ultra preset in Starfield and to me that's a fine setting to use the high preset uses 62 though which I think does introduce some artifacts at 4K a 1440p fsr2 struggles and this is something that we've seen before in other games the native TAA implementation isn't amazing at 1440p either but even using fsr2 at 75 percent at 1440p sees a noticeable drop in image stability anything below 70 doesn't look all that great and at 50 I'd say the image quality is pretty bad 80 or 85 is probably the limit for reasonable image quality using fsr2 at this resolution but that doesn't exactly provide a huge performance uplift a 1080p I find it difficult to recommend upscaling at all the native TAA does struggle here but fsr2 struggles more to maintain a stable clean image this isn't a very good outcome as the lower presets like medium and low set fsr2 to a 50 render scale which at 1080p looks atrocious I think that's a big mistake as Gamers with weaker Hardware are more likely to be playing at 1080p on Lower quality presets unfortunately though it also might be the only viable way to get decent performance on a lower tier card as for upscaling performance these are my results at 1440p on an RTX 3070 using fsr2 at 100 render scale saw a six percent performance drop versus native at worst image quality in my opinion so rule that out Caz sharpening saw a one percent hit so that remains viable then we saw a 15 performance gain for 75 scaling 23 at a 67 render scale and 30 at a 60 render scale okay cast performed better offering a 20 Improvement at a 75 render scale for a much worse image whether or not this is worth using will depend highly on your final resolution and tolerance for artifacts combining all of these recommendations together we have the Hub quality and hub performance presets noting that we aren't recommending upscaling options here if you want to improve performance while maintaining a very good presentation would recommend relative to ultra settings turning down Shadow quality to high particle quality and volumetric lighting to medium motion blur to off gtao quality onto high and contact Shadows on medium if you want a further performance Improvement using a hub performance preset drop shadow quality and Reflections to medium set volumetric lighting to low gtao quality to medium and contact Shadows to low these presets in our new Atlantis test area offer a 19 and 35 performance improvement over the ultra preset respectively this makes Hub quality a little more performant than high settings while maintaining settings like grass quality while the Hub performance preset is similar to medium with better image quality the advantages are more significant in the forest area Hub quality offers a 39 Improvement compared to ultra while Hub performance offers a 64 gain versus Ultra most of this comes down to the reduction in Shadow quality and volumetric lighting with a few other stack benefits this makes Hub quality more like medium in performance in these areas with high performance more like low while looking significantly better in my opinion but typically you will only see these sorts of performance gains in these forested areas the rest of the game is much more like what you see in that City area testing and you can see the quality improvements here using the Hub quality settings in my opinion delivers image quality between the high and Ultra presets though of course it will depend on the area of the game you are in game is after the ultimate visuals will still want to push settings like Shadows volumetric lighting and gtao to the max but this is a good compromise high performance is a Juiced up medium settings with a few benefits especially to Grass draw distance if your system is GPU limited while dropping a few settings to low like volumetric lighting and contact Shadows with only a small hit to visuals the this configuration doesn't look as good as the Hub quality preset but it is still a great way to play for those with mid-range gpus that aren't satisfied with the presets on offer and want more performance overall it is possible to improve starfield's performance on PC with only a small hit to visual quality leading to a more balanced experience than what Bethesda offers in the game through presets on my RTX 3070 system ultra settings without upscaling at 1440p wasn't a great experience as I was only getting around 30 to maybe 40 FPS in the most intensive areas with some tweaking it's easily possible to get a 20 Improvement to frame rate before needing to mess around with resolution scaling while maintaining pretty good visual quality I'm sure there will be a wide variety of opinion on how Starfield runs and whether the visuals justify the performance quite an intensive game to run and I'm not sold on how it looks in some areas texture quality in particular could have been improved to deliver a sizable Improvement to the presentation at a minimal performance cost on gpus with enough vram but it's hard to deny that some of the handcrafted cities and ships do look fantastic anyway and with some tweaks you can achieve acceptable levels of performance there's plenty of room for improvement here Bethesda need to add in standard PC features for AAA game like HDR and fov slider and Gamma settings modders have already created an fov mod for the game which is good to see but it should be a native option I also think the visual scaling relies too heavily on resolution scaling rather than quality scaling though I'm not sure how much further things can be cut back without affecting the Ambiance of the game unfortunately this means that game is on mainstream Hardware will likely have to play on fairly low settings at 1080p with mediocre upscaling upscaling there is a mod for Star field that swaps fsr2 for dlss or xcss already which I'd recommend trying for those that have Nvidia gpus especially when gaming at 1440p or 1080p FSI 2 in Starfield is not great as we've seen from amd's upscale and Tech in other games so dlss will likely deliver Superior image quality I didn't have much time to mess around with mods in this game though instead focusing on the game's built-in options but I'm just making you all aware that a mod does exist and really Bethesda should have included dlss in the game anyway especially if they were gonna be relying so heavily on upscaling for some of their visual presets if they want to use upscaling so significantly they probably should have included the best upscaling option for people with Nvidia gpus anyway that's it for this optimization guide hopefully this will be useful for people that are just starting to play Starfield now obviously at this point we're sort of very early into star field in terms of patches and things like that both AMD and Nvidia jewelry have game ready drivers that's not so much of an issue but I would expect some patches to hopefully improve performance and add in features in the future things like the indirect lighting setting for example maybe that is bugged at the moment and we'll see that fixed in a future patch or something but this is how the game is performing now for people that are jumping in right away we will be back soon with a look at performance over performance in Starfield across a range of gpus so check that out if that's not already on the channel by the time you're watching this and yeah if you want to support our testing and videos like this if you want to say hey keep making the optimization guides then please do consider supporting us directly through our patreon float plan links are in the description below you'll get access to some cool benefits like BTS content Discord chat and all that sort of stuff so thanks for watching I'll catch you in the next one [Music] thank you [Music] foreign

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 540,988

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: 40iwgUjBmoA

Length: 27min 17sec (1637 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 02 2023