Starfield's performance on Xbox consoles is said to be far superior to previous Bethesda games

Starfield is now available to those who pre-ordered the Premium Edition, and it's received very well — especially in terms of performance, which is rare for publisher Bethesda, whose products have always started with variable framerates on consoles. According to Digital Foundry, the highly anticipated interstellar sci-fi RPG operates at a consistent 30 frames per second on both the Xbox Series S and Series X, just as the company promised. At first sight, there doesn't appear to be a significant difference in visual quality between the two models, albeit the higher-end Series X appears to have more geometric detail.

Some of the sharper details must be due to the screen resolution(s) Starfield is using on the console. According to Digital Foundry, the version running on Xbox Series X produces a 4K image courtesy to AMD's FSR super-sampling technology, which improves visual clarity while without missing any frames. However, the game is internally rendered at 1440p quality before being upscaled to seem sharp Ultra-HD. Meanwhile, Starfield renders at 900p on the Xbox Series S before being upsampled to 1440p. Regardless, the game plays at 30 frames per second, which enraged fans when it was released, but it had to be done to deal with the CPU strain that a game of this size imposes.

The analysis singles out two important locations where Starfield fell short: the enormous cities of New Atlantis and Akila, both of which experienced'significant' stutters and frame dips despite being limited to 30 frames per second. This looked to be constant on both the Xbox Series X and Series S, despite the fact that the low-cost platform has recently posed technological difficulties for developers. Baldur's Gate 3's Xbox adaptation comes to mind, which never had a release date for the longest time because Larian Studios was trying to implement a split-screen co-op function on the Series S. Some of Starfield's framerate troubles are mitigated by the motion blur feature, which Digital Foundry claims may be turned off at any time. This is perfect for people who have motion sickness.

After experiencing the sluggish Fallout 4 at launch, followed by Fallout 76, I was sucked into adopting the inside joke among Bethesda fans – waiting a couple of months before purchasing to ensure any performance issues and bugs are dealt out. However, it does not appear to be as awful this time. Starfield's PC version lacks Nvidia's DLSS option at launch, which normally allows games to run at higher framerates without compromising too much visual quality. Instead, you'll only discover AMD's AI-powered FSR 2.0 upscaling tech, which isn't surprising given that AMD is the 'only partner' for Starfield on PC.

It is unknown what this exclusivity agreement entails for Nvidia GPU owners. You can still gain some performance improvements by activating FSR2, but it won't be nearly as good when running it on a different manufacturer's card. When looking at character models up close, using FSR upscaling on an Nvidia GPU produces in a blurry mess. While Bethesda has not commented on future DLSS support, AMD gaming president Frank Azor has confirmed that the studio would include DLSS support in Starfield. "If they ask us for DLSS support, we always tell them yes," he told The Verge.

Starfield is already available in early access for those who pre-ordered the Premium Edition; for everyone else, the game will be available on PC, Xbox Series S/X, and Xbox Game Pass on September 6th.