Starfield's new patch finally gives NVIDIA GPU owners the frame rates they'd expect

The latest update for Starfield - and note it's a beta release - helps to seriously boost the frame rates you'll get on an NVIDIA GPU, thankfully.

The game has, of course, been a source of controversy due it being optimized for AMD graphics cards, and not supporting DLSS out of the gate - fortunately the mentioned patch does add DLSS support (and that includes frame generation or DLSS 3).

What's also eye-opening is that optimization elsewhere has raised the performance level of NVIDIA graphics cards in general with this new patch.

As you can see, the above tweet from CapFrameX observes that on testing a more demanding scene at 1440p resolution (with no upscaling), the RTX 4090 GPU is now 23% faster than the RX 7900 XTX (a beefy custom model of the latter, too). At 1440p with ultra details the RTX 4090 hit 97 fps compared to 79 fps for the AMD card.

Previously, that AMD graphics card actually outpaced the RTX 4090 by 8%, showing just how slanted Starfield was towards Team Red's GPUs in its initial incarnation.

Obviously it's good to see the situation corrected, although those with NVIDIA graphics cards would doubtless argue that this kind of heavy favoring towards AMD should never have happened in the first place.

At any rate, at least NVIDIA graphics cards are performing more like they should, and now DLSS is in the mix, that's obviously a big bonus too. (There was a mod to introduce DLSS 3 support brought out pretty sharpish for Starfield, but the official solution is obviously going to be streets ahead of that - and you won't have to pay for it, as you did with the mod, either).

The patch notes specify that some GPU performance optimizations have been applied, and that these pertain to 'higher-end' cards, presumably on the NVIDIA side (like the RTX 4090).

Interestingly the release notes also mention improved CPU usage (thanks to a better renderer threading model) which again will be felt more with higher-end hardware, we're told.

The patch also ushers in DLSS 3 support as mentioned at the outset, along with stability improvements - which are always welcome - and some gameplay tweaks. Again, on PC there's another important move in the latter category which resolves apparent problems that could cause mouse movement to be choppy.

As ever, remember this is a beta patch, so there could be wonky elements here and there, but hopefully Starfield should see the full release soon enough (supposedly later this month, so in the next couple of weeks barring no hitches).