It’s incredible the state Starfield launched in when you stack it up against both prior Bethesda releases and games launches like Cyberpunk 2077. Things just work for the most part. Sure, I’ve seen my fair share of floating rocks (geodes?) and wonkiness with AI, but nothing game busting. And look, there’s over 1000 planets so it’s probably going to take a little time to full iron out the procedural generation.
And that’s what’s so great about the recently released 1.7.33 update – even though it’s a minor one it’s reassuring to see Bethesda patch things up so soon after an already smooth launch. Todd Howard’s response to an overly blunt question (“…you may need to upgrade your PC…”) on the state of the game’s PC performance gave me the impression that Bethesda wasn’t committed to patching in the slightest.
Yesterday’s 1.7.33 update gave me some tangible hope – for one, I no longer notice stuttering every time I whip out my Hand Scanner – but the real encouragement came from their post on September 13. We’ll be getting:
- Brightness and contrast controls
- HDR calibration menu
- FOV slider
- Nvidia DLSS support
- 32:9 ultrawide support
- Eat button for food
In that update they also said, “We’re also working closely with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel on driver support, and each update will include new stability and performance improvements.”.
That’s the meat of it for me – Starfield has been pretty smooth sailing for me but its performance still leaves a lot to be desired. I have an i7-12700KF, 4070, and 32 GB of RAM. The performance just doesn’t align with my specs at points (or even generally speaking). Nvidia DLSS is also objectively better than AMD’s FSR.
No, we haven’t gotten these things yet. They’re yet to come at an unspecified date. But this little hotfix is a great indicator that things are moving in the right direction.
Lover of games, tech, nature, and strange electronic music. Shaped by Sega, PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox – platform agnostic ever since. Currently overwhelmed by choice on my Xbox Series X thanks to Game Pass.