I think it’s fair to say that Starfield launched in a poor state on PC in September, with no official DLSS or XeSS upscaling support, no HDR controls, an underwhelming graphics menu and weirdly poor performance – especially on Nvidia and Intel graphics cards. The latest Starfield beta on Steam looks to address a number of these issues, so we tested out the new version to see how the game has changed.
One of the biggest changes for Nvidia graphics cards owners is the official inclusion of DLSS 2 and DLSS 3, for image reconstruction and frame generation respectively. Weirdly, while DLSS uses Nvidia’s preferred nomenclature (quality, balanced, performance), FSR upscaling still uses a percentage-based resolution slider which feels a little unintituive for casual users.
DLSS here performs as well as it did in the community mods available soon after the game was released, but as always it’s more convenient (and likely more stable) to have these options built-in. FSR 2 quality has also improved, with less ghosting in some scenarios like ejected shell casings from your weapon, though it is still more artefact-prone than DLSS overall. It would be nice to see XeSS also added, as this is another cross-platform solution like FSR that sometimes offers fewer artefacts in motion – and mods already exist to add it to the game.
