Bethesda Games posted an update via X (formerly Twitter), finally announcing support for Nvidia's DLSS 3 for Starfield. This will be initially introduced as an opt-in Beta patch via Steam by next week. The studio also said it will add AMD FSR 3 in the future.
This comes as a relief for Nvidia RTX users, namely RTX-40 series owners, as Bethesda hasn't said anything about its intention to provide Nvidia Upscaler support until now.
Steam users can enable the opt-in update by default via the game's settings in its library. They'll need to right-click on the game in the Steam launcher, slide toward properties, and enable Beta participation under the Betas tab. Xbox Series X|S users must wait for the FSR 3 support.
The story so far...
Starfield was released for the PC via Steam, XBox Game Pass, and XBox Series X|S. The game came with high expectations before the launch, so it's understandable when most PC gamers felt let down by the lack of DLSS support at the time of release. Bethesda's silence was deafening, leaving speculation that it has no plans to include it as AMD is an exclusive PC hardware partner.
There was a workaround for DLSS 2 -- PureDark posted an unofficial patch in NexusMods, which also showed a performance improvement. This mod replaced the in-game FSR 2 support with DLSS 2.0 and XeSS. The free version was released in September, but the modder added a paywall to Nvidia's upscaling technology's advanced frame-generation features via Patreon. It didn't leave a good taste when a DRM was added to deter non-Patreon users from having this unlocked.
This was only seen as a stop-gap solution, as people expected this to be included in the game. Puredark didn't include DLSS 3 support, either free or paid, an offering with the RTX 40-series graphics cards. At the time, AMD's Frank Azor stepped in to say they did not block the gaming studio from including Nvidia DLSS support as a part of its exclusivity contract. It was also unknown why the studio didn't have AMD FSR 3 at the time of launch, too. This absence gave some benefit of the doubt that maybe the game studio was not ready to implement these new upscale features exclusively from Nvidia and AMD Radeon.
If there's one thing that needs to be learned, it is knowing when and how to communicate with its core audience base. Some would see Bethesda's silence as valid since they did make a tweet when it was ready with the Beta launch.
Other Fixes
The game studio also assured it will also include an FOV slider and 32:9 ultra-wide monitor support. Suffice it to say that next week's Beta update should make many Starfield players with Nvidia RTX 40-series with ultrawide monitors a happy space camper, boldly going where Bethesda didn't go until now.
At the time of writing, Intel mentioned they're still working on the Dynamic Resolution Scaling issue with Starfield under its graphic driver's update log.
