Digital Foundry Tests Starfield's New Update; Notes 'Impressive Performance Increase'
According to Digital Foundry, Starfield benefits a lot from DLSS 3 support, but even without this technology, the beta patch clearly improves the game's optimization.
As of last week, PC gamers can finally officially enable DLSS 3 in Bethesda's latest game. The editors of Digital Foundry also got down to testing, and checked whether the full version of update 1.8.84 for Starfield is worth the wait.
Let's recall that a week ago Bethesda released the new patch, albeit only as part of the beta on Steam. In addition to general optimization fixes, mission fixes, etc., the patch introduced two more changes promised by the developers in September. One was the addition of support for DLSS 3, Nvidia's performance-enhancing technology for scaling images to higher resolutions using AI.
This wasn't the only feature missing at launch, and Digital Foundry points out that - unfortunately - Starfield continues to disappoint in this regard, including not offering an option to preview the game from the graphics settings menu. HDR implementation also fares poorly, especially compared to fan-made mods.
Fortunately DLSS does its job very well even in the beta version, not inferior to the unofficial modifications. Thus, it performs much better than the competing Fidelity FX Super Resolution 2 for the release of Starfield. This technology, by the way, was also improved in the patch, although DF editors noted that AMD's solution is still the less optimal option (the game does not support its newer, third version).
Journalists also noted the "impressive performance increase" in Starfield even without enabling DLSS, among others on Nvidia cards. Admittedly, the ideal is still a long way off, but GeForce cards no longer stand out from Radeons as much as they did before the beta update in question. Unfortunately, Intel's chips need major optimization fixes before they catch up with AMD and Nvidia cards.
So it is fair to conclude that the patch will significantly improve Starfield, although - as Digital Foundry concludes - Bethesda still has a lot to do, if only in terms of occasional frame generation time spikes and descriptions of numerous graphics settings. For now we do not know when the patch will be "officially" released.
