Starfield is an action role-playing game that promises to deliver deep space exploration via procedurally-generated environments. It boasts incredible graphics that are truly marvelous to look at. However, while you can enjoy the pretty visuals and hours' worth of content, they come at a steep cost.
The game actually requires you to have some respectable hardware specs to run it smoothly. If you play this on a modest PC, there is a huge chance that you will encounter stuttering and performance issues. Fortunately, these issues can be resolved by making certain adjustments.
If you're experiencing stuttering issues while playing Starfield, read further. For today, you will learn how to fix those problems by following some quick and easy tweaks.
Turn 'Dynamic Resolution' Off
Dynamic Resolution is a feature that reduces in-game resolution to a considerable degree in order to ensure that your frame rates do not dip below 30 FPS. While this feature was made to improve performance, that is usually not the case when playing Starfield. If anything, this may result in annoying stuttering issues as the game is still not refined in this regard.
To prevent stuttering issues from happening, or at least, reduce them to a minimum, you can disable the Dynamic Resolution feature for now. To do that, head to the settings menu and under "Display," scroll down and you should find it.
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Disable Fullscreen Optimizations
As the name implies, "Fullscreen optimizations" is a feature found on PCs running Windows 10 and 11 that is supposed to improve performance while playing games in fullscreen mode. Although there are cases where this feature works as intended, it may result in poor performance on some systems. And true enough, the latter can be said when it's enabled on Starfield.
So, to turn the said feature off, you must actually log out of the game first. Then, look for "Starfield.exe" in the game's installation folder. Right-click on it and under the "Compatibility" tab, untick "Disable fullscreen optimizations" then click Apply. For good measure, reboot your PC before you log back into the game.
Force Recompile Shader Cache
The Shader Cache is a folder that stores all of the compiled shader codes after the initial launch. This improves game performance and loading times when you run the game the next time around. However, there are instances where something could get corrupted, which may result in stuttering and other issues.
If you suspect the Shader Cache to be the culprit, you can force a recompile of the shaders by deleting certain files. The specific folder directories are different depending on the graphics card you are using. Before you delete the files, however, you must have "Hidden Folders" disabled to see the folders that you need.
For NVIDIA GPUs, head to User\%LOCALAPPDATA%\NVIDIA\DXCache. If you're using AMD graphics cards, go to User\%LOCALAPPDATA%\AMD\DXCache. Once inside, delete all of the files that you can see.
The last step is to go to User\%LOCALAPPDATA%\Starfield\ and delete the "Pipeline.cache" file found in the folder.
Now, if you somehow cannot delete the files for some reason, boot into Safe Mode.
When you run Starfield after deleting the files in the Shader Cache, it will initiate a recompile of the shaders, so just be patient until the process is finished.
So, have you tried all of the quick fixes above? If so, has it resolved your stuttering issues?
Starfield is available on Xbox Series X/S and PC.
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