Starfield DLSS 2 & XeSS Mod Is Now Available For Free, Replaces FSR 2 Integration

Starfield has just entered its early access phase and the first mod to add DLSS 2 & XeSS support is already out for gamers.

Starfield Mod Adds NVIDIA DLSS 2 & Intel XeSS Into The Game As A Replacement For AMD's FSR 2

Bethesda's latest AAA RPG is now available to gamers who bought the Premium Edition. The game already received overwhelmingly positive reviews with our gaming team calling it an Elder Scrolls experience set in space minus the bugs that are usually associated with Bethesda's titles. Despite the PC performance being good, the game is still a next-gen title that demands the best hardware to run optimally. One such aspect is that it requires to be installed on an SSD and has some beefy requirements.

Owners of AMD's Radeon GPUs already get access to FSR 2 upscaling technology within the game that can provide increased performance with great visuals. Thanks to the AMD partnership, the PC optimization, especially for Radeon GPUs and Ryzen CPUs is great. Having FSR 2 also means that all other camps, NVIDIA & Intel, can also access the frame-rate boosting technology.

However, FSR 2 is known to be a bit lacking when compared to NVIDIA's DLSS 2 and Intel's XeSS upscaling technologies which is a slight bummer that the game didn't implement those knowing how easy it is to integrate such technologies these days. Modder, PureDark, already confirmed his DLSS 3 plugin to be released during the early access period today but that mod will be behind a pay-wall and also feature DRM protection which might lead to some performance impact as we've seen in the past.

But PureDark is offering a free alternative to AMD FSR 2 to PC gamers in the form of the NVIDIA DLSS & Intel XeSS plugin for Starfield. You can head over to the NexusMod link here to grab the plugin and add it to your game which can provide better image quality and better performance on the respective hardware. Following is the process to install the mod:

1. Extract this mod to the game's root folder.
2. Install Upscaler Base Plugin, place the PDPerfplugin.dll into mods/UpscalerBasePlugin folder.
3. You need to download nvngx_dlss.dll or libxess.dll, and place them into mods/UpscalerBasePlugin folder. Check UpscalerBasePlugin's description.
4. Press END in the game to open the menu for the upscaler, and you can select DLSS or XeSS.
5. You need to turn on FSR2 in the game's settings, cuz this mod replaces FSR2 with DLSS/XeSS.
6. There's no quality levels anymore, you simply change the render scaling ratio in the game's settings.

Notes

• DLSS/DLAA is only supported by RTX cards, Intel GPU can use XeSS.
• I included a ReShade CAS effect because DLSS has no intergrated sharpener anymore.
• And if you want to install another ReShade preset, just go ahead, but remember to rename the dxgi.dll from ReShade to d3d12.dll after installation and use extract the dxgi.dll from this mod again!
• Performance gain depends on how much you are GPU limited, if you don't see any gains it's very normal, you are most likely CPU limited.
• Even if you can't get more FPS in a CPU limited case, you are however getting the superior AA from the DLSS pipeline, or you can just use DLAA (with performance cost).

I am currently playing the game with a pretty solid frame rate at 4K resolution (native) on an RTX 4090 & Core i9-13900K setup. While I can't speak for the majority of gamers, what I can see is that if you are having performance issues, then trying out the other two alternative upscaling techniques can definitely assist with the performance in the game. There's likely going to be a patch rollout soon that will address various issues.

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