Starfield's first patch has been released, hot-fixing several critical bugs in the game as well as improving the general performance and stability of the game on PC and Xbox Series consoles. But that's not all — the Starfield dev team also released a blog post in conjunction with the new hotfix announcing several new features that will make their way into the game soon, including DLSS support.
Bethesda unveiled six new features that will be implemented into the game at a future date. The list includes a sorely needed FOV slider, HDR calibration, brightness, and contrast controllers, as well as 32:9 super ultrawide monitor support, key binding for food consumption, and the previously mentioned Nvidia DLSS support.
Having all these additional graphics options in Starfield without the use of mods is great to see and will be very useful for many Starfield players. Many of these features, particularly FOV adjustments, brightness, and contrast controls are mainstream features that all first-person shooter games usually come with from the beginning. HDR calibration is really nice to see as well, and will hopefully rectify the game's horrendous HDR capabilities right now.
Official DLSS integration is arguably the most anticipated feature of the bunch, particularly among PC gamers running Nvidia GPUs. Mods for the game offered DLSS support on day one, but like with all mods, they can be inconvenient for gamers to install and can prove to be unstable. Bethesda didn't specify which DLSS features it will be implementing, like frame generation, but current mods such as the PureDark DLSS 3 mod prove that frame generation can easily be implemented into Starfield, along with DLSS upscaling.
The Starfield patch itself isn't anything crazy and is primarily a hotfix addressing three critical bugs affecting Starfield quests. In the quest "All That Money Can Buy," a bug was fixed where player activity could result in the quest being blocked. Starfield quest "Into the Unknown" also rectified an issue that could prevent the quest from appearing after the game is completed. The final bug fix addresses gamers attempting to complete "Shadows in Neon" where player activity could (again) result in a quest blocker.
Additionally, the Starfield dev team is also working closely with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel on driver support, to provide further performance enhancements and stability improvements to the game. We hope this extra driver work will finally equalize the performance disparity present in Nvidia and Intel's latest GPUs, compared to AMD's latest and previous generation GPUs which run the game at noticeably better frame rates.
Nvidia ReBAR OTA Update, and Performance Benchmarks
Nvidia has released a new update for supported GeForce RTX hardware that enables Resizable Bar in Starfield. However, unlike your typical driver update, ReBar enablement comes in the form of an "Over The Air" (OTA) update that will automatically be applied on both Nvidia's latest Game Ready driver 537.34, and previous driver release 537.17.
We tested the new Starfield patch as well as the new OTA update on an RTX 4060 Ti to see what performance gains there might be. We found that the gains are minuscule at best with our RTX 4060 Ti gaining a whopping 5% additional performance with both updates intact. We suspect all the performance gains are coming from the ReBar update since Nvidia specified a 5% performance improvement as well based on their testing data.
It's worth mentioning that we also saw worse 1% lows at 1080P medium-quality settings, with the new updates. So it's not a complete win. But hey, at least GeForce cards can render actual stars in Starfield.
