Nvidia boosts Starfield performance with GPU driver update

Nvidia is rolling out an update that will improve Starfield performance for owners of RTX 30- and 40-series cards. Nvidia says its automatic over-the-air update will enable Resizable BAR and boost Starfield performance for its latest GPUs.

“Today, Nvidia is releasing a Resizable BAR profile for Starfield which increases performance on GeForce RTX 40 Series and GeForce RTX 30 Series desktop and laptop GPUs,” explains Andrew Burnes, technical marketer at Nvidia, in a blog post. “In our testing scenario, GeForce RTX 40-series desktop GPUs see on average a 5 percent increase in performance.”

The over-the-air update will be applied to the existing 537.17 drivers and the new 537.34 drivers Nvidia released today. The latest drivers also include new one-click optimal settings for Starfield, making it a little easier to pick settings based on your system. Nvidia has also fixed its GPU profile for the Microsoft Store version of Starfield.

Nvidia’s updates come just days after the experts at Digital Foundry found that Starfield is a “bizarrely worse experience” on Nvidia and Intel compared to AMD GPUs. Digital Foundry found issues with Intel CPUs and a 46 percent performance gap between AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 XT and Nvidia’s RTX 3080 in Starfield. That’s an unusually large gap, and we’ll have to see if this new Resizable BAR profile update helps to close it.