Starfield — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 4% fps cost

In Starfield, we recommend Texture Quality at High (4% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In Starfield: Creation Engine 2 streams textures through a dedicated pool tied directly to available VRAM. At Ultra, 4K surface textures are loaded for architecture, terrain, and ship interiors — pushing VRAM use past 8 GB at 1440p. FPS impact is near-zero when within budget, but dropping to High frees VRAM headroom that prevents streaming stutter during fast cell transitions between ship interiors and planetary surfaces. Medium is appropriate for GPUs with 6 GB or less.

Typical impact 8-25% · 12% fps cost

In Starfield, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (12% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In Starfield: Starfield uses cascaded shadow maps for the directional sun light on planetary surfaces and area lights inside structures. Ultra increases the cascade resolution to 4096 and extends the far cascade range, which is particularly expensive on open planets with no occlusion geometry. In dense city cells, the GPU must shadow-render hundreds of NPC and prop meshes per cascade. Dropping to High reduces cascade resolution and shadow cast count noticeably but preserves sharp near-field contact quality.

Typical impact 5-15% · 8% fps cost

In Starfield, we recommend Volumetric Lighting at Medium (8% fps cost).

Renders light scattering through participating media (dust, fog, atmosphere) to produce god rays and light shafts. The engine ray-marches through a 3D froxel grid (frustum-aligned voxels), sampling the shadow map at each step to determine which voxels are lit. Higher settings increase froxel resolution and march step count. Each froxel accumulates in-scattered light using the Henyey-Greenstein phase function. The final result is composited as a screen-space overlay during post-processing.

In Starfield: Controls god ray quality in space and atmosphere. Ultra uses per-pixel ray marching — visible in ship cockpit sun shafts.

Typical impact 10-25% · 12% fps cost

In Starfield, we recommend Indirect Lighting at High (12% fps cost).

Simulates light that has bounced off surfaces before reaching the viewer (global illumination). Implementations include screen-space irradiance probes that sample the G-buffer radiance field, light propagation volumes that propagate radiance through a 3D grid, and baked lightmap interpolation with dynamic updates. Higher settings increase probe density, grid resolution, or update frequency. Each approach requires compute shader passes to gather, propagate, and apply indirect radiance — this is fundamentally more expensive than direct lighting.

In Starfield: Creation Engine 2 uses screen-space GI for bounced light. Ultra adds higher-resolution probes — visually striking in New Atlantis interior areas.

Typical impact 3-20% · 6% fps cost

In Starfield, we recommend Reflection Quality at Medium (6% fps cost).

Controls the method and fidelity of surface reflections. Low settings use pre-baked cubemap probes — a single texture lookup per pixel. Medium enables screen-space reflections (SSR) that ray-march through the depth buffer to find reflected geometry. High uses higher-resolution SSR with more march steps. Ultra may enable planar reflections (re-rendering the scene from a mirrored viewpoint) or RT reflections (hardware-accelerated rays). The cost escalation from cubemaps to SSR to RT is dramatic — cubemaps are nearly free, SSR costs 3-8%, and RT reflections cost 15-25%.

In Starfield: Starfield uses screen-space reflections for glossy surfaces including ship hull panels, wet rock, and architectural floors. At High, SSR ray marches at full resolution with a generous step budget, clearly visible on the metallic surfaces of the Lodge and UC Vanguard facilities. Off falls back entirely to static cubemap probes — flat and unconvincing on curved hull surfaces. Low provides SSR at reduced resolution and step count, which is a reasonable middle ground for GPU-limited setups. RT reflections are absent in this title.

Typical impact 3-12% · 6% fps cost

In Starfield, we recommend Particle Quality at High (6% fps cost).

Controls particle system density, simulation complexity, and render quality. Higher settings increase maximum particle count per emitter, enable GPU-driven particle simulation in compute shaders (position, velocity, lifetime, collision), and use soft particle blending (sampling the depth buffer to fade particles near surface intersections). The overdraw cost from thousands of alpha-blended billboard quads is the primary performance concern — each particle that overlaps another requires a separate blending operation.

In Starfield: Controls emitter density and simulation detail for thruster exhaust, weapon impacts, atmospheric dust, and explosion debris throughout Starfield's space and planetary environments. Ultra enables GPU-simulated particle physics with depth-buffer soft blending. The cost is highly variable — routine exploration is cheap, but active combat near settlement areas with multiple simultaneous weapon effects and thruster plumes can produce meaningful overdraw. High retains most of the visual density while trimming peak particle count per emitter.

Typical impact 8-20% · 10% fps cost

In Starfield, we recommend Crowd Density at Medium (10% fps cost).

Controls the maximum number of NPC entities spawned in populated areas. Each NPC requires CPU-side AI evaluation (navigation mesh queries, behavior tree ticks, perception checks), skeletal animation blending (bone matrix computation), collision detection, and GPU-side skeletal mesh rendering with skinning transforms. The primary bottleneck is CPU-side — animation blending and AI ticking for 100+ simultaneous NPCs can saturate multiple CPU cores.

In Starfield: New Atlantis and Neon are CPU-heavy with high crowd density. Reducing to Medium saves 15-20% FPS in cities while keeping them populated enough.

Typical impact 5-20% · 8% fps cost

In Starfield, we recommend Grass Quality at High (8% fps cost).

Controls grass blade density, draw distance, and rendering method. Grass is typically rendered via GPU instancing — a single blade mesh is instanced thousands of times with per-instance transforms stored in structured buffers. Higher settings increase instances per square meter and extend the draw distance. Each grass blade is an alpha-tested quad or multi-polygon mesh, producing significant overdraw in dense fields. Wind animation is computed in the vertex shader using procedural noise functions. Some engines use mesh shaders or indirect draw for grass, reducing CPU-side instancing overhead.

In Starfield: On planetary surfaces with vegetation — particularly the more Earth-like biomes — Creation Engine 2 instances grass blades via GPU instancing with per-vertex wind shaders. Ultra pushes blade density and draw distance to their maximum, producing significant alpha-tested overdraw across wide open terrain. The cost is most felt during surface exploration on verdant planets when the camera pans low. Dropping to High reduces instance density and clips the far draw distance, cutting overdraw substantially with minimal visual change at normal play camera angles.

Typical impact 2-6% · 4% fps cost

In Starfield, we recommend Contact Shadows at On (4% fps cost).

Enables screen-space ray-marched contact shadows that add fine-detail shadowing where objects meet surfaces. The technique works by marching rays from each pixel in the depth buffer toward the light source, detecting occlusion at a much finer granularity than shadow maps allow. Typically uses 8-16 ray march steps per pixel in a compute or pixel shader pass. The cost is proportional to screen resolution since every lit pixel is evaluated.

In Starfield: A screen-space ray-march pass that adds small-scale self-shadowing where objects meet surfaces — visible under equipment, crates, and NPC feet throughout Starfield's interiors. Creation Engine 2 runs this as a post-geometry compute pass that evaluates 8–16 depth taps per lit pixel toward the primary light direction. The cost is proportional to screen resolution and lit pixel count. Disabling it removes subtle grounding cues in interiors but is a clean, low-visual-cost FPS save at 1440p and above.

Typical impact 2-15% · 2% fps cost

In Starfield, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at TAA (2% fps cost).

Smooths jagged edges (aliasing) on geometric boundaries. FXAA is a single-pass edge-detection blur — cheap but softens the image. TAA accumulates multiple frames using motion vectors, sampling sub-pixel jitter offsets to reconstruct smoother edges — moderate cost with potential ghosting. SMAA uses pattern-matching edge detection with a more intelligent blend. MSAA runs the rasterizer at 2x/4x the sample count, evaluating coverage for each triangle edge — expensive because it multiplies ROP work and render target memory, but produces sharp geometry edges without blur.

In Starfield: Off provides no temporal smoothing — geometry edges alias noticeably on Creation Engine 2's deferred renderer. TAA uses per-frame jitter with motion vector reprojection, providing stable edges at the cost of some image softness and minor ghosting on fast-moving ship elements. The in-game FSR option here is FSR 1.0 spatial upscaling used as an AA method at native resolution — it sharpens the TAA output using a spatial filter. For most users, TAA is the correct choice unless DLSS or FSR 2 upscaling is being used, which handles temporal AA internally.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Starfield, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.

In Starfield: DLSS 2/3 is natively integrated in Starfield via NVIDIA's SDK, rendering at a reduced internal resolution and reconstructing via Tensor Core inference. Quality mode at 1440p renders at approximately 960p — a substantial pixel reduction that recovers 30–50% GPU frame time with well-preserved detail on ship interiors and planetary terrain. Balanced and Performance modes are recommended for 4K displays. DLSS does not address the CPU bottleneck in city cells, so gains in New Atlantis will be smaller than on open planets or in ship interiors.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Starfield, the recommended preset leaves AMD FSR off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

FidelityFX Super Resolution — AMD's upscaling technology available on all GPUs. FSR 2.0+ uses temporal accumulation similar to TAA — it combines multiple jittered lower-resolution frames using motion vectors and a depth buffer to reconstruct a higher-resolution output via a multi-pass compute shader pipeline. The pipeline includes depth clip detection, motion vector dilation, luminance instability detection, and a reconstruction pass with Lanczos-based resampling. Unlike DLSS, FSR runs on standard compute units rather than dedicated AI hardware, working vendor-agnostically.

In Starfield: FSR 2 in Starfield uses temporal accumulation with motion vectors from Creation Engine 2 to reconstruct high-resolution output from a reduced internal render. Available on all GPU vendors, it is the primary upscaling option for AMD and Intel users. Quality mode renders at roughly 67% of native linear resolution — at 1440p this is approximately 960p internal. Image stability is generally good on static surfaces but can show mild shimmering on fine geometric detail like scaffolding or distant city architecture. Ultra Performance is usable for CPU-limited city scenarios where GPU headroom is not the constraint.

Typical impact 1-5% · 1% fps cost

In Starfield, we recommend Motion Blur at On (1% fps cost).

Applies directional blur to moving objects based on per-pixel motion vectors. The engine writes a motion vector buffer during the G-buffer pass — each pixel stores a 2D velocity derived from the difference between current and previous frame positions. The post-process shader samples the color buffer along each pixel's motion vector, averaging multiple taps to produce directional streaking. The cost is a single fullscreen pass with 8-16 dependent texture fetches per pixel. Many competitive players disable this for image clarity.

In Starfield: A single-pass post-process that samples the motion vector buffer to apply per-pixel directional blur during character sprinting and camera rotation. Starfield's implementation uses 8–16 taps along each pixel's velocity vector — the pass is inexpensive (under 2 ms at 1440p) but many players disable it for cleaner image clarity, particularly during the frequent low-speed interior navigation where even small camera motions can produce unwanted softening. No meaningful FPS difference either way — purely a preference toggle.