Starfield performance on Xbox consoles reportedly much better than previous Bethesda games

Starfield is now available for those who pre-ordered the Premium Edition, and it’s been fairly well received – even more so in terms of performance, which is unusual for developer Bethesda, whose titles have historically debuted with inconsistent frame rates on consoles. According to Digital Foundry’s breakdown, the highly anticipated space sci-fi RPG runs at a healthy 30 frames per second on the Xbox Series S and Series X, exactly as the studio announced. At first glance, there doesn’t appear to be a worrying disparity in visual fidelity between the two versions, although the higher-end Series X appears to have more geometric detail.

Some of these sharper details must be related to the screen resolution(s) Starfield runs on on the console. Digital Foundry notes that the version running on Xbox Series Internally though, the game displays at 1440p resolution, before being upscaled to appear in crisp Ultra-HD. Meanwhile, on the Xbox Series S, Starfield renders at 900p, before being upsampled to produce a 1440p image. Regardless, the game runs at 30 frames per second, which certainly angered fans when it was announced, even if it had to be done to cope with the CPU load that a game of this scale inflicts.

The report mentions two key areas where Starfield faltered: the major cities of New Atlantis and Akila, both of which suffered from “significant” stuttering and frame drops despite being capped at 30fps. This seems consistent across the Xbox Series I’m thinking of the Xbox port of Baldur’s Gate 3, which for the longest time never had a release window because Larian Studios had trouble integrating split-screen co-op functionality onto the Series S. Some of these issues lost Framerates in Starfield are reduced by the motion blur effect, which, according to Digital Foundry, can be disabled at will. This is ideal for those who suffer from motion sickness.

After personally playing the slow Fallout 4 at launch and then trying Fallout 76, I too was forced to accept the inside joke of Bethesda fans – wait a few months before purchasing, so that any performance issues and the bugs are resolved. . However, it doesn’t seem so bad this time around. As for the PC version, Starfield lacks Nvidia’s DLSS option at launch, which generally allows games to run at higher frame rates, without sacrificing too much visual quality. Instead, you’ll only find AMD’s AI-powered FSR 2.0 upscaling technology, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering the chipset company is Starfield’s “exclusive partner.” on PC.

It’s unclear exactly what this exclusivity deal means for Nvidia GPU owners. Of course, you can still get some performance benefits from enabling FSR2, although it won’t be as ideal when running it on a card from another manufacturer. Additionally, running FSR scaling on an Nvidia card results in a blurry mess when looking closely at character models. Although Bethesda has not commented on DLSS support in the future, Frank Azor, head of gaming at AMD, assured that nothing is stopping the studio from including DLSS support in Starfield. “If they ask us for DLSS support, we always say yes,” he told The Verge.

Starfield is already available in Early Access for those who pre-ordered the Premium Edition; for everyone else, the game will be released worldwide on September 6 for PC, Xbox Series S/X, and Xbox Game Pass.