Starfield | OPTIMIZATION GUIDE | Every Setting Tested | Best Settings

After 5 years since the announcement , Bethesda Studios newest RPG Starfield is finally here and this time under the umbrella of Microsoft as an Xbox and PC exclusive the game is developed using the newest in house Creation Engine 2 and most of the time the game can showcases remarkable visuals however performance wise it's not perfect and it's one of the most demanding games this year that's why in this video we'll benchmark and compare each graphical setting in order to to determine the optimal combination that should give us the best balance between good visuals and performance so without any further ado , let's get going Before we dive in into the comparisons I want to first discuss the game's presentation and the visuals on display Starfield most of the time looks excellent particularly in terms of its intricate details and the high quality of different materials in addition to its high-quality Global Illumination, particularly evident in indoor environments. however because of the vast scope of the game not every area maintains the same level of visual excellence , for instance water looks mediocre as the game exclusively relies on cubemaps for reflections with no Screen Space Reflections or RT Reflections also Similar to many other Bethesda games , Character and NPCs don't look great. when it comes to the graphics menu , the game doesn't offer anything special there are no preview images that showcase the visual impact of each setting and the description doesn't provide any helpful information also the amount of tweakable settings is limited in number, lacking basic settings like Texture Quality , Texture filtering and FOV. And for upscaling instead of presets and quality options , the game offers a resolution scaling slider and I really like this approach as it gives more customization and control to the user. and unfortunately there is no official support for DLSS or DLAA , FSR 2 is the only upscaler here however , there is a mod that swaps FSR2 with DLSS. and while FSR 2 can give much clearer image compare to native TAA and can preserve fine details much better , it has some noticeable issues like shimmering , even at 100% resolution scaling FSR 2 looks unstable compare to TAA and when adding the DLSS Mod to the comparison we can clearly see that DLSS greatly improve the image stability and has less shimmering even when compare to native TAA DLSS can also fix ghosting that appear on some animated signs like here. so if you have an RTX GPU I highly recommend using the DLSS Mod , as it can allow you to drop the resolution scaling even further compare to FSR 2 which should give higher performance while maintaining better image quality. Now let's kick off with Shadow Quality this one adjust the resolution and quality of Shadows like here and also affect Shadows draw distance and the performance impact of this setting can vary depending on the location for example here in New Atlantis going from Low to Med and High costs around 3% and to Ultra 9% but in other areas like this forest with a lot of shadow casting objects the performance impact is much bigger here going from Low to Med and High costs 11% and to ultra a massive 27% so here for Shadows I recommend Med or High. Next we have Indirect Lighting , at first glance I though that this setting will affect the quality of Global Illumination but going back and forth between Low and Ultra doesn't show any visual difference and strangely enough I've noticed that this setting in some areas can affect the rendering resolution of some distant objects like here and performance wise going from Low to Med and beyond can cost 4% so for better Image Stability I recommend Medium Indirect Lighting. Reflections is next and this setting controls the Quality of Cuebmaps used for Reflections and performance wise going from low to Med costs around 1% and to High 5% so Here I recommend Medium Reflections. Particle Quality similar to indirect lighting has no significant visual impact and I've tested this setting in several places but I couldn't notice any visual difference and on the performance side in most areas it has negligible performance impact however in some areas like here with this weird looking mist effect at the bottom of New Atlantis waterfall using High or Medium can cost up to 16% compare to Low and the same thing here in Neon City wa can see that going from Low to Medium and High costs around 15% with no any noticeable visual improvements , so here I recommend Low Particle Quality Next we have Volumetric Lighting which should control the quality of volumetric effects but similar to Particle Quality it's really hard to notice any visual difference between this setting options and on the performance side it's one of the most demanding settings in the game for example here with this foggy weather going from Low to Medium costs 9% and to High and Ultra a massive 23% so here for my optimized settings I recommend Low Volumetric Lighting Moving on to Crowd Density , this setting adjust the number of NPCs and it's more noticeable in big cities like Neon here and performance wise when GPU Bound going from Low to even High costs around 3% however when CPU Bound going from Low to Medium costs 4% and to High 13% so here I Low or Medium Crowd Density specially if you have a weaker CPU. For Ambient Occlusion Starfield relies on GTAO and here we can see that higher options improve the intensity of Ambient Occlusion and it's worth noting that in certain areas like here using anything but Ultra can result in noticeable noise around corners and on the performance side GTAO is so cheap to use as going from Low to even Ultra costs around 2% so Here I recommend Ultra GTAO Next we have Grass Quality and this one mainly controls the draw distance of foliage like here and performance wise going from Low to Med costs 2% to High and Ultra 6% so for my optimized settings I recommend Medium Grass. Moving on to Contact Shadows , this settings from what I've seen only has noticeable visual impact on weapons where with Medium , High and Ultra we can see that this weapon cast some self shadows unlike low and visually Medium , High and Ultra look similar and this setting has negligible performance impact so for this one I recommend Medium. Startfield Supports Variable Rate Shading or VRS , but the implementation is not great in most instances I couldn't notice any visual or performance difference when toggling this Setting On and OFF the only place where VRS should makes a difference on the performance side is near Transparent surfaces like here where I saw around around 6% performance gain Therefore I recommend keeping VRS ON it doesn't affect the visuals and it might give you some extra performance in some areas. and finally we have Depth Of Field , which appears to have minimal impact on the performance whether during conversations like here or during gameplay so if you like this effect , don't worry about the performance and keep it ON. and based on everything we saw so far these are my recommended settings let's now compare Optimized Settings and Ultra Preset using DLSS Mod at 67% resolution scaling on both sides which correspond to DLSS Quality Mode Let's start with New Atlantis we can see here that Optimized Settings can offer around 40% more fps compare to Ultra Preset next we have this area near New Atlantis which has a lot of foliage and trees and here we can see around 37% more fps with Optimized settings compare to Ultra Preset and finally we have Neon city and here where we can see the biggest difference with 49% boost to performance when going from Ultra Preset to Optimized Settings. Overall Starfield is a mixed bag , the game often exhibits impressive visuals but in my opinion the visuals on display don't justify the performance and the game could have greatly benefited from more optimization prior to its release and we can only hope that after the official launch Bethesda will keep working on improving the game's performance and add official support for DLSS and XeSS. and that's it for this one , I hope this video helped you and provided you with some useful information Thank you so much for watching and for your time if you enjoyed the video leave a like and if not leave a dislike , don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell for any future videos and hopefully I'll see you all in the next one :)

Channel: BenchmarKing

Views: 36,465

Keywords: Starfield optimization, Starfield best settings, Starfield boost fps, Starfield fix stuttering, Starfield optimized settings, Starfield low end pc, Starfield fps drop, Starfield fps boost, Starfield pc performance, Starfield rtx, Starfield PC port, Starfield pc optimization, Starfield optimised settings, Starfield Ray Tracing, starfield gtx 1650, starfield pc review, starfield part 1, starfield 60 fps, starfield dlss, starfield fsr, starfield xess, starfield nvidia

Id: uON6kH3XTwI

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/kdD93hFlj]

Solid comparisons, I like his videos.