Image from Starfield showing an astronaut looking up at a giant Nvidia RTX graphics card.
Image via Destructoid.

Latest Nvidia driver improves Starfield performance on RTX 30 and 40 series

After concerns that the game is not as well optimized for Nvidia GPUs.

A few months before release, it was revealed that Bethesda would be partnering with AMD for Starfield, likely leaving Nvidia and Intel users worried. Now, Team Green has pushed out a new driver update that is said to boost the game by an average of 5%.

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That’s according to a recent blog post from Nvidia itself. The long and the short of it is the company is rolling out an over-the-air (OTA) update for the RTX 30 and RTX 40 series. The post describes it as a “Resizable BAR profile for Starfield which increases performance” for its modern graphics cards.

Anyone playing the game on PC with one of the above GPU generations should hopefully see some improvements to overall performance.

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Given that Starfield has been better optimized for AMD hardware, the likes of Nvidia and Intel will likely have a harder time meeting expectations.

This does appear to be the case as noted in the above video from Digital Foundry. In the analysis, Starfield running on an Nvidia RTX 2070 SUPER struggles to reach 60fps. By comparison, Cyberpunk 2077 is able to achieve above 70fps with the same hardware and with ray tracing on.

Even the Nvidia RTX 4060 is unable match the performance output of AMD’s own RX 7600. The former seems to have problems even reaching 40fps, while the latter more than outdoes its competitor in terms of framerate.

Hopefully this latest OTA update from Team Green should see some improvements. Future benchmark tests will at least be able to give the lowdown. If you’re struggling to get the driver update OTA, Nvidia’s own Sean Pelletier has some advice on how to force the update.


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Image of Andrew Heaton
Andrew Heaton
Andrew has been a gamer since the 17th century Restoration period. He now writes for a number of online publications, contributing news and other articles. He does not own a powdered wig.