Starfield has now received DLSS support, but not from Bethesda.
You can probably already guess where I am going with this. As verified by Okami13 on Twitter, PureDark has published the mod to add DLSS support to Starfield over at NexusMods.
When PureDark originally announced his plans to add support, it was welcomed by the community. PureDark was already known for adding upscaler support for various GPUs and the upscaler technologies that they are compatible with. He decided to work on this upscaler after Bethesda announced that AMD was the official PC partner for Starfield. The way that announcement was framed made it unclear if Bethesda was going to work on support for Nvidia and Intel technologies alongside AMD’s.
We still don’t know if Bethesda has plans to support Nvidia and Intel for Starfield, but there’s an upside to this story. PureDark was himself given a review copy of Starfield, something we reported on all the way back in August 21, 2023. It’s likely that PureDark received his copy even earlier than August 21, but whatever the case may be, Bethesda’s choice gave PureDark ample time to work on his mod.
And so here we are. If you look at the NexusMods page for the upscaler mod, PureDark has shared a few surprises. This mod is described as a “Plugin to replace FSR2 with DLSS/XeSS in Starfield. This version only support DLSS2 and not DLSS3.”
This mod was apparently developed so that it can work with a separate mod called Upscaler Base Plugin, but that shouldn’t be necessary. If you want to use this on your computer, you need to turn on FSR2. That will make it possible to replace FSR2 in the game with DLSS 2 or XeSS.
PureDark’s choices for upscaler support are practical and very community friendly. Most PC gamers who don’t have an AMD GPU would have an Nvidia GPU, and even more likely, one from the past few years that works with DLSS 2. DLSS 3 is in the market now, but is only available on the newest Ada Lovelace based GPUs. This essentially means that this mod serves as legacy support, and will cover most gamers.
However, the XeSS support was a welcome addition. While Intel had a rough launch for their Intel Arc GPU line, they have proven committed and diligent in improving performance, and especially, compatibility for their GPUs with as many games as they can. There are not that many people who have Arc GPUs either. However, unlike DLSS 3 compatible GPUs, Arc are midrange in price and are a promising new option for consumers. This doesn’t cover that much more gamers, per se, but it gives Starfield fans more options than they would have had otherwise.
Now, PureDark did say he was also working on DLSS 3, but we must assume that his work is not done for that upscaler. He may add that support on this mod later, or make a separate one.
While PureDark’s work is commendable, it really should be the companies that are responsible for adding this support in, and they should make sure that this compatibility sticks around after Starfield gets patched a few years over. We do still expect some combination of Bethesda, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel to provide their own official patches to add this support in the future, so that even people who don’t know how to mod can just update their game and get that support easily.
Starfield will be releasing on September 6, 2023, on Xbox Series X|S and Windows via Steam. It will also be Day One on Game Pass.
