Starfield offers a smoother space odyssey thanks to DLSS 3 and Frame Generation mods

Back during IFA 2023, AMD's gaming chief Frank Azor said that the company is perfectly okay if Bethesda decides to offer support for competing upscaling solutions other than FSR 2 in Starfield. While Bethesda only supports FSR 2 in Starfield at the moment, enterprising modders have found ways to enable DLSS 3 and DLSS Frame Generation in the game, and the latest such mod offers a way to do it for free.

The first such DLSS 3 mod was released by PureDark, but it is available only to subscribers on Patreon. Bethesda has officially not confirmed support for FSR 3 that offers Fluid Motion Frames (FMF) — AMD speak for Frame Generation — but PureDark has also promised FMF support once AMD releases the FSR 3 SDK.

PureDark's DLSS mod uses an upscaler plugin, which makes it easy to toggle Frame Generation on and off or adjust sharpness and Reflex settings on the fly. Just press the END key (you may be required to authenticate the mod the first time you use it) to open a menu and change the required settings.

Now, another modder by name LukeFZ, who created the FSR2toDLSS bridge, has released a free (you can still choose to support the modder on Patreon) DLSS upscaler for Starfield on Nexus Mods. LukeFZ's approach does not rely on ReShade nor offers an in-game menu.

Instead, you can adjust DLSS presets and toggle Frame Generation on/off via a config.json file in the game directory that is created after you install the mod and start the game for the first time. The upscale quality is determined by the game's render resolution slider.

Both mods will require manually sourcing DLLs for both DLSS and Frame Generation — the latest DLSS 3.5 DLLs are already available online. FSR 2 also needs to be enabled in the game settings. Do note that using Frame Generation requires an RTX 40 series GPU.

While the original FSR 2 implementation does a decent job, switching over to DLSS seems to offer a perceivable quality and fps boost over FSR 2. It is also possible to use Intel's XeSS upscaler with LukeFZ's mod if desired.

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