Last week, space RPG Starfield released a beta patch with DLSS 3, additional optimizations and performance improvements. Innovations decided to evaluate Digital Foundry specialist Alex Battaglia, who analyzed the project shortly after launch.
Image source: Steam (zombie_nation)
Recall that in his previous material on Starfield, Battaglia criticized the Bethesda Game Studios project on several fronts, including the lack of basic options and support for DLSS and XeSS scaling, as well as insufficiently low performance on NVIDIA and ( in particular) Intel videos cards.
According to Battaglia’s measurements, DLSS 3 in the Starfield beta version performs no worse than in the modifications available from release. The specialist also noted an improvement in the performance of FSR 2 in the game (fewer halos lagging behind objects), again complained about the lack of XeSS and reminded that the modders had already corrected this omission.
Notice how much clearer the image is in the distance with DLSS (Image source: Digital Foundry)
The gaming performance in the beta has noticeably improved, also due to the more efficient use of multi-core processors: an increase of 20 percent was achieved on a system with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and an increase of 17 percent with a Ryzen 5 3600. However, problems with frame delivery time jumps can also be observed here.
Bethesda also corrected the work of NVIDIA graphics cards: the RTX 3080 received a 30% increase in performance, but lags 18% behind the RX 6800 XT, which looks more realistic in Battaglia’s eyes. For mid-range GPUs, the improvements are not as dramatic:
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super – 14%;
- AMD Radeon RX 5700 – 6%;
- Intel Arc A770 – 3%.
Finally, Battaglia lamented that thanks to the beta version of the patch, Starfield has become what the game should have been from the start: “[Обновление] clearly shows how unoptimized the game was at launch for NVIDIA GPUs.”.
Starfield was released on September 6th on PC (Steam, Microsoft Store), Xbox Series X and S, and Game Pass, but the beta version of the patch is only available on Steam. Battaglia hopes future updates will bring improvements to HDR performance, eliminate stuttering during motion, and improve performance on Intel graphics cards.
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