Graphics performance has been one of the issues that plagued Starfield since its launch. Specifically, users who have installed Nvidia’s 40-series RTX video cards have encountered dismal frame rates that go beneath the promised 60 frames per second minimum from the game.
This has even led to a small controversy after modder PureDark put his DLSS3 mod behind a Patreon paywall, which would have made frame generation possible for the 40-series RTX cards. Hackers later forcibly made the mod free for all to use.
Nvidia had to step in to upload a new Game Ready driver for all of its video cards. Almost immediately after, Bethesda released near the end of last month Update 1.8.86, which introduced DLSS 3, including frame generation and anti-aliasing.
With that set-aside, what about FSR3 support for Starfield? Bethesda and AMD had previously announced that they had an exclusive technical partnership. Still, the game only had native FSR2 support at launch despite FSR3 being announced just days before Starfield’s launch.
Bethesda said there will be FSR3 support for Starfield in a future update but did not specify when. In any case, an update from AMD itself may bring that technology to the game much earlier than expected.
As PC Gamer reported, the first FSR3 mod is already available just a few days after AMD made the FSR3 source code open-source. This is not just an ordinary mod, however, because it can run FSR3 in any game optimized for Nvidia’s DLSS3 technology.
This update is groundbreaking because it can bring frame generation and the improved graphical performance it carries even to Nvidia video cards that are older than the RTX 40 series.
This means that Starfield players can now enjoy the full advantages of FSR3 frame generation earlier than Bethesda’s promised update, which has no definite release date as of the time of writing.