For the launch of Starfield, Bethesda announced their partnership with AMD as their exclusive partner for Starfield on PC, with AMD’s FSR 2, being the only frame-generating feature for the game, leaving many gamers wondering if DLSS was excluded. Just few days prior to the early access release window for Starfield on August 25th, AMD’s Gaming Chief, Frank Azor came out and explained that DLSS can come to Starfield if Bethesda wants it, giving AMD’s full support to them.
With this latest announcement from AMD, Bethesda never mentioned a release window or acknowledged that DLSS is even being incorporated into the game at launch, leading some to assume that it’ll be patched in later or modders will handle it. Let’s just say that the modders handled this one.
On Nexus Mods, modder PureDark has created a mod called ‘Starfield Upscaler – Replacing FSR2 with DLSS or XeSS.’ The mod does what it says; it replaces FRS2 with either Nvidia’s DLSS2 or XeSS (Intel’s Arc AI image upscaler that’s similar to DLSS and FSR). Unfortunately, according to the mod overview, the current version only supports DLSS2 and not DLSS3.
Along in the notes section of the mod, PureDark explains some of the performance gains for players if they meet certain requirements based on their CPUs.
“Performance gain depends on how much you are GPU limited, if you don’t see any gains it’s very normal, you are most likely CPU limited. Even if you can’t get more FPS in a CPU-limited case, you are however getting the superior AA (Anti-Aliasing) from the DLSS pipeline, or you can just use DLAA (with performance cost),” says PureDark.
As for other big mods for Starfield, there currently is a community patch being worked on to fix the many bugs and glitches that went unnoticed. Currently, there is no word on when it will be released but if you want more information, its here in this announcement on Nexus Mods.