The wait is more or less over for many who’ve pre-ordered Bethesda’s latest game as it began unlocking for PC owners around the world yesterday. PC owners wanting more features have some options already as Starfield gets DLSS 2, XeSS, and FOV mods ahead of its official release date next week. There has been some controversy with Starfield’s AMD-specific features but the modding community has been quick in getting to work on adding features that are already known to not be included at launch, but the developers could choose to do later on down the road. Among these are other types of super-sampling options, but oddly enough an FOV option as well.
From DSOG:
“PureDark has just released a free mod for Starfield that replaces FSR 2.0 with Intel XeSS and NVIDIA DLSS 2. This is a must-have mod for everyone, and it’s good to see a free version of it available to everyone.
You can download this Starfield DLSS 2/XeSS Mod from here.”
There are some steps in setting up and enabling this mod but they are fairly straightforward. It’s pretty much download and replace DLL files, a standard practice when changing supersampling options these days, and then pressing the right keys in-game to enable it. These mods replace FSR 2.0 and there are no quality presets to pick from but it is free and gives owners of Intel/NVIDIA GPUs other options to work with. However, adjusting the render scaling ratio in-game is said to be the means to reaching the various quality levels of DLSS 2.
How to add FOV:
This is more of an old-school trick as it’s really about creating a configuration file that mods the game. Such tricks as these go back decades and can be quite useful. Per, again DSOG, users need to create a text “ini” file, add in the appropriate settings, and then drop the file in the correct folder.
“All you have to do is create a text file in your “Documents/MyGames/Starfield” folder and name it “StarfieldCustom.ini”. Inside that text file, you can then add the following commands
“[Camera]
fFPWorldFOV=100.0000
fTPWorldFOV=100.0000″
The above settings will give a FOV of 100. If you want a FOV of 95, you can replace these numbers with “95.000”
It is a bit odd that the developers did not include an FOV slider but perhaps one will arrive in an update very soon.
Discussion (19 replies)
Join Discussion →Hahahahahaha that was quick! Gotta love the community!
DLSS2... Yea I don't know if I'd want that one. :)
It's a start. I'd almost put money that we'll see DLSS 3 in 10-14 days, for free. I know there's one behind a paywall but sooner or later a free one should pop up.
I plan to hit it with my 4090 rig tonight and I'll let everyone know how it goes in the morning. It'll be interesting to see if/how many hotfixes come out this weekend.
Yea, as it's not a MMO style game I don't feel a need to grab it NOW to race to the end.
I'll probably sub a month to XBGP and try it out, but Bethesda games rarely hook me for too long for some reason.
I was like that with Fallout 4. Tried multiple times to get into it and just never went far but it did have some appeal for a time (maybe 20-30 hours). Enjoyed Skyrim for a decent bit (100-200 hours-ish)which is mostly what I'm thinking this will be but hoping for more. Mostly, I just want a fun space game.
I enjoyed ME Andromeda for what it was, grinded away most missions/goals (60+ hours), and although I've craved going back to it I'm hoping this will have elements of that, Fallout, and a bit more. I sort of liked No Mans Sky but got bored quickly but I was also a part those that got it at launch, or right after. I know there's been a bunch of things added to it but I still doubt it could draw me in. I got Outer Worlds with some hardware purchase and I never put more than 10 hours into that one.
I also barely put any time into outer worlds. For whatever reason it never did hook me.
Same here. I tried BG3 and it wasn't for me, so may give this a go.
So first impressions after just starting the game. Needs work for PC optimization. Image controls (brightness/color/etc.) are none nonexistent and the game does not support HDR or Fullscreen (just windowed or borderless). I really feel like someone included the wrong GUI for this because it's hard to believe that even Bethesda would launch a modern game lacking so many display customization options that have been common for much of the last decade. Meanwhile though, and totally ironic, NVIDIA GeForce Experience can do just about everything you may need to fix a lot of this. I never used it until today but I am surprised at how effective it can be.
If you want to adjust the image settings you have to use GeForce Freestyle to add the filters to a style and then you can tweak the following settings. I found a post on Reddit where someone suggested these settings, and I have to admit that they make the game look great on an OLED.
Playing this on the 4090 rig and already seeing some wild GPU FPS fluctuations. Things can go from 80-110 down to 55 just by going from walking around to engaging a character in a conversation. On the plus side, the mouse control is nice and balanced. I like the overall visuals as well. The 5800X3D doesn't seem to be working very hard either. I'm using my OC settings on the GPU and it's holding 2895 MHz but pulling ~415W to do it and occasionally drops to around 350W.
Gonna switch over to the rig in the cave and install that DLSS2 mod on it and try these image settings in there with the Z9D. Out to look pretty good and hopefully, that mod will let that rig with its air-cooled 3090 Ti stretch its legs nicely.
The brightness / constrast issues seem to be only plaguing the intro level, it looks fine after that for me. But yeah my first reaction was also to look for the option to adjust brightness in game, only to not find it.
Otherwise I'm enjoying it. I already put 6.5 hours in it on launch day. It undeniably mimics Mass Effect, but that's OK, I don't want originality for the sake of it. The on ground part has a ting of Cyberpunk feel to it, but the missions and level design seems to be entirely inspired by OG Mass Effect.
The space combat follows the X-Wing / Tie Fighter recipe, adjust power distribution between weapons engines and other systems. But there is also a stealth aspect to it. If you power down everything except for engines you become harder to detect and can sneak around enemies to reach objectives without alerting them.
The first person shooter part is very similar to Fallout 4, but slightly worse. I found it almost impossible to properly hit enemies from a distance. When shooting from the hip the spread is too much to do anything but waste ammo. But if you aim down the sights, then the weapon occupies 3/4 of the screen and you can't even see where you are shooting at. It's really difficult to hit enemies when you can't see them from your own gun.
If you can land headshots enemies seem to die from 3-4 hits, which is already a bit bullet spongy to me, one headshot should be an instakill. But if you don't hit them in the head, then they truly become bullet sponges, especially the ones with regenerative shields. If you can't finish them off instantly before they regen it almost feels like you have to start from zero again. And this is exacerbated by the fact that reloading is painfully slow in the game. It takes like 10 seconds with most weapons.
Another thing I'm not a fan of is if you put a skill point into a certain ability you have to complete a challenge before you get the benefits of it. For example if you put a point into guns you have to kill 20 enemies with guns to actually gain that skill, or even allow you to put more points into guns. This is really bad design, because it forces you to kill all enemies with guns even ones that are much easier defeated with different weapons. Not to mention that if you have a companion then their kills don't count, so it almost becomes a fight against them, to not allow them to snatch kills from you.
The inventory and menu system seemed very weird at first, but it actually works well. After I got used to it I started liking the simplicity of it.
However the single biggest negative of the game is the useless map, it doesn't show anything just vague icons for generic areas not even specific locations. It is total garbage and can't be used for anything. You have to find your own way, which helps immersion as instead of just running past scenery, you actually need to learn the layout of the settlements and where is what in relation to each other, because the map won't help at all. It actually does more to confuse you than to offer anything of value. IDK how did they think this was OK? We might as well not have a local map.
I did some tinkering in the cave last night before going to bed and used a different DLSS 2 mod that seems to be working well. I found it mentioned at the top of the DSOG forum posts. Nothing really wrong with the previous one but this one is a bit easier to drop in and use. The trick with it is to remember the correct render scales (percentages) that DLSS uses for it quality levels. I used 66%, at 4K, and that 3090 Ti was holding mostly 50-60 FPS at mostly Ultra settings (turned off the usual crap- film grain, depth of field, motion blurr). I was pretty worn out and only just got past the first flight combat training.
This basically just allows a simple bridge/swap out from FSR to DLSS (there's an XeSS version also). FSR will still show in the menu but it'll be whatever you've chosen to drop in its directory. There's some confusion on which DLSS dll to use. At first I tried ver 2.5 and it was working well but I was curious and tried ver 3.5 (won't give frame gen but at least you've potentially got the latest library) and it seemed to do well with my 3090 Ti. I'm going to do more testing today with it and the 4090 and I'll let you all know how it goes.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/196?tab=description[/URL]
Good to know. It was pretty bad on my first try with both the C2 and Z9D. Those custom NV GFE settings work but are still not perfect but I do feel they make the game look a lot better. However, at times some details are still lost. I really hope Bethesda adds some gamma/brightness/hdr controls because the game has a lot to offer visually and it seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot by not doing so. It's truly baffling to me because it's obvious that they've put some work into the game but then to just leave out such basic modern features is weird, to say the least.
I think it is more likely an intended look of the game to make it more atmospheric. I think I'm going to leave it as is, I don't want to alter the game by making every area look crisp and vivid.
It seems so odd that DLSS/XeSS arent included along with AMD's - or for that matter the games that just have DLSS - it's my understanding that implementing these are 'low hanging fruit' with kits/software provided by Intel, AMD, and NVidia - though I could see NV charging a lot more and trying to force developers to go with just NV tech.
I am not saying I think the other two corporations are innocent and free of sin by any means, all the companies have been caught red handed, more than once, team green just seems to get caught more - I dont know if they do bad things more, or just arnt good at coving it up.
I know resources are limited... I guess I just dont know enough about the tech, implementing it and for that matter creating and publishing a game in the modern market.
It's not like back in the day I could hit control-break on my apple and look at the Basic or boot into the Pascal operating system to dig into files/code.
It's purely politics. Since this is an AMD sponsored game it would be "bad sport" to include the competitor's up-scaling tech, even if AMD does not openly prevent it.
I mean if a modder was able to add it for day one, it surely wasn't a resource issue at Bethesda.