Starfield: all the news about Bethesda’s massive space RPG

Valve’s next major SteamOS update brings some significant new display settings as well as some new performance improvements to Steam Deck. You can read all about the SteamOS 3.5 update in a blog post on the Steam website.

Two major new features are support for variable refresh rates (VRR) and HDR if you’re using your Steam Deck with an external display that supports them. Valve says that HDR can be enabled if you have a compatible display while VRR can be enabled if you have a compatible USB-C adapter.

Nvidia is rolling out an update that will improve Starfield performance for owners of RTX 30- and 40-series cards. Nvidia says its automatic over-the-air update will enable Resizable BAR and boost Starfield performance for its latest GPUs.

“Today, Nvidia is releasing a Resizable BAR profile for Starfield which increases performance on GeForce RTX 40 Series and GeForce RTX 30 Series desktop and laptop GPUs,” explains Andrew Burnes, technical marketer at Nvidia, in a blog post. “In our testing scenario, GeForce RTX 40-series desktop GPUs see on average a 5 percent increase in performance.”

Starfield is one of the most demanding games on PC that we’ve seen recently, with even the RTX 4090 paired with AMD’s latest Ryzen 7800X3D just about hitting 60fps on average at 4K with all the settings maxed out. As reviewers and testers scramble to figure out why Starfield is so heavy, the experts over at Digital Foundry have discovered some obvious differences between AMD and Intel / Nvidia systems.

“If you’re on Intel and Nvidia you’re getting a bizarrely worse experience here in comparison to AMD GPUs in a way that’s completely out of the norm,” explains Alexander Battaglia in a detailed 32-minute tech analysis of Starfield on PC.

Bethesda’s Starfield universe launches this week, with access to more than 1,000 planets and promises of unlimited exploration. It’s a giant game that even after more than 100 hours of gameplay you’ll still be finding things to do and places to explore. But for all this adventure, you might be wondering: how well does it all run on modern PCs?

I’ve spent the past week or so testing Starfield on a few different GPUs, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Starfield is actually very CPU heavy and will demand the most out of both your CPU and GPU. Whether that’s from the regular loading points in the game to the combat and physics-driven parts of adventuring around its various planets, you’ll absolutely want a modern CPU to play this game and maintain high frame rates.

Starfield isn’t even officially out of early access yet, but one of its mods has already generated controversy within the community. The mod in question adds support for Nvidia’s DLSS 3 upscaling technology, which Bethesda omitted to include in Starfield in favor of AMD’s rival FSR 2. But users have been critical of modder PureDark’s decision to lock DLSS 3’s more advanced frame-generation features behind a subscription to their Patreon. The free version of the mod only supports DLSS 2, which offers upscaling but not frame generation.

Attempting to charge users for mods is a controversial topic, as Bethesda and Valve discovered when they teamed up to let modders charge for their Skyrim mods via Steam in 2015. The move was so controversial that Valve removed the feature just days later, with Valve’s Alden Kroll admitting that the company had “missed the mark pretty badly” with its decision to introduce the feature.

2023 has been packed with some of the biggest games in recent memory, and I’m totally fine with that. For the past little while, it feels like the gaming industry has been more interested in time-sucking live service behemoths, games that never end, rather than satisfying single-player titles. But this year, I’m instead feasting on a delicious platter of great games I can play on my own with a bunch of great courses I haven’t even touched yet.

Those are the just games I’ve actually spent meaningful time with. I still want to play things like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (19-plus-hour campaign), Diablo IV (25-plus-hour campaign), and Final Fantasy XVI (35-plus-hour campaign), but I don’t know how I’ll fit those in between what I still want to do with Starfield, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Zelda. I’ve accepted that I’ll leave some titles unfinished, like Pikmin 4’s extra mode and getting all of the achievements in the Switch version of Vampire Survivors. 

It’s been a very busy year for big game releases, with Starfield being one of the biggest titles that has yet to launch. The Xbox and PC exclusive from Bethesda is promising a massive sci-fi world to voyage around, with over 1,000 explorable planets and countless weapon and mod customizations. It’s also the first new world that Bethesda has created in over two decades, offering a change of pace from its long-running Elder Scrolls franchise.

If what you saw in Bethesda’s 45-minute gameplay preview or our review has you hyped enough to preorder Starfield ahead of its September 6th release date or September 1st early-access launch, we’ve compiled all your options into a one-stop shop. From the $69.99 base game to the $299.99 Constellation edition and all their included add-ons — as well as the colorful branded accessories for superfans — here are all the ways you can preorder Starfield.

Starfield, the new space RPG from Skyrim maker Bethesda Game Studios, is launching today without Nvidia’s upscaling technology. AMD is Starfield’s “exclusive PC partner,” with both Bethesda and AMD engineers working together to optimize the game for multithreaded code on Xbox and PC, Ryzen 7000 processors, and Radeon 7000 series graphics cards.

It’s still unclear what this exclusivity contract means for Bethesda, but AMD made it clear to The Verge last week that there’s nothing stopping Bethesda from adding DLSS to Starfield. “If they want to do DLSS, they have AMD’s full support,” said AMD gaming chief Frank Azor. That could mean there’s a period of exclusivity where only AMD’s FSR 2 technology is supported, or Bethesda could have simply prioritized FSR over DLSS initially.

Even as someone who loves the Fallout games, I must admit that spending dozens of hours in an irradiated wasteland full of ghouls and raiders can be a little, well, depressing. It’s not the kind of world that evokes a sense of adventure. That’s what made the potential of Starfield so exciting: here was Bethesda applying its formula for open-world RPGs to a giant universe with planets to discover and cosmic mysteries to unearth. It’s basically the Elder Scrolls by way of Hello Games; call it No Man’s Skyrim.

In a lot of ways, Starfield lives up to that potential. It is indeed huge, and its main storyline is all about the thrill of adventure and discovery. I found myself pushing through the farthest reaches of space, going to strange, dangerous new places on a quest to seek out the origins of the universe and humanity’s place within it. It’s also a game that sticks fairly closely to the blueprint Bethesda has laid down for its role-playing experiences. Your quest might be much grander in scale, but what you’re doing on a moment-to-moment basis hasn’t changed all that much. This is also the most polished and solid release yet from Bethesda on a technical level.

Microsoft has created custom limited edition Xbox consoles for years, but it’s now offering up a way to customize your existing Xbox Series X console without having to buy a new one. The new Xbox Series X wraps were announced last week, with a Starfield-branded version arriving in October, followed by camo editions in November. I’ve been trying out the Starfield one.

The Xbox Series X wrap folds down neatly into a package that’s the width of the console, and when attached will cover all the sides fully with the exception of the rear. It feels very similar to Microsoft’s Surface Pro keyboards: soft to touch, thin, and lightweight. The wrap fits snugly around an Xbox Series X and is held in place by velcro at the rear.

AMD gaming chief Frank Azor is trying to thread a needle. He seemingly wants to say that AMD did not actually make Starfield, quite possibly the year’s biggest PC game, exclusively support AMD’s FSR upscaling technology at the expense of competitors like Nvidia DLSS.

But he clearly can’t. Azor says he can’t say what the contract includes. Instead, he repeatedly lands on this: “If they want to do DLSS, they have AMD’s full support.” He says there’s nothing blocking Bethesda from adding it to the game.