It’s no secret that Starfield requires a powerful gaming PC. Even if you have the latest generation hardware and the best graphics settings, the game will still crush your framerate. PC optimizations are on the way at last though for Nvidia users, because the latest game drivers improve Starfield performance by a small margin on systems that support Resizable BAR.
Nvidia spokesperson Andrew Burnes published a blog today regarding details for the latest driver and the update on Starfield’s PC performance. Burnes noted that the latest driver 537.34 and the previous 537.17 (thanks to an over-the-air update that doesn’t require a manual download) both now enable Resizable BAR. The update improves performance by about 5% on average based on Nvidia’s testing with RTX 40 Series GPUs. Fortunately, RTX 30 Series owners can also benefit from a performance uplift, provided the other hardware in their PC supports it.
Related: Learn more about how Resizable BAR works and how to enable Resizable BAR.
Starfield PC performance – Who’s optimizing what now?
While Bethesda Studio Head Todd Howard likes to think Starfield is optimized for PC, it’s already clear there’s room for performance improvement on Nvidia and Intel hardware. AMD users already enjoy some performance advantages thanks to early driver optimizations and similar features like Smart Access Memory, which is AMD’s custom version of Resizable BAR.
Image via Bethesda Softworks
This is nothing unexpected given that Starfield is an AMD-sponsored game, primarily developed for AMD-based console hardware. This is a serious problem for PC users, though, since Nvidia dominates most of the graphics market while Intel retains a sizable hold on the CPU space. These Nvidia drivers are the first step at least.
As someone that played Starfield in the pre-release state, it was disappointing that multiple game and driver updates didn’t noticeably improve the framerates up to launch. Even this Nvidia driver offering 5% uplift comes one week late. It’s clear that more optimizations will be needed to increase average fps in the game, whether that be done by Bethesda, Nvidia, or the modding community.
Nevertheless, Starfield runs smooth on PC and is pleasing wider audiences with everything that it offers content-wise. The 5% average performance uplift is still something, so grab the latest Nvidia driver update for Resizable BAR support to improve Starfield’s performance on PC. Also be sure to check out our Starfield review and don’t let the optimization issues deter you from an otherwise grand science fiction RPG.
Published: Sep 13, 2023 12:22 am