5 Best Starfield Mods to Improve Performance

Starfield is a game that uses all of the graphical power it can to make a game that’s up to 2023 visual standards. This makes the game one of the best-looking Bethesda games released, but comes with a massive caveat; performance. Your game might look great, but depending on your hardware specs, you might be tanking frames. That’s where mods come in. Here are the five best mods for Starfield you can download to improve performance.

The Best Mods to Improve Starfield Framerate

Before we begin, we should mention a few things. This list won’t include tutorials for installing each of the mods listed here, as those can be found on the individual mod pages. We also haven’t tested the compatibility of all mods, so if you’re planning to mix and match, keep in mind that things might screw up with your game. Always make backups of your save files before modding for that very reason. With that out of the way, let’s kick things off with the first mod.

Related: How to Download and Use the Starfield DLSS Mod

Starfield Upscaler

Mod Author: PureDark
Link: Starfield Upscaler – Replacing FSR2 with DLSS or XeSS

If you’ve browsed the settings of Starfield, you’ve likely noticed that the only Upscaler available is FSR2. This is fine for AMD graphics cards, but isn’t great for those with Nvidia and Intel graphics cards. That’s where the Starfield Upscaler comes into play. With this mod, you can add in either DLSS or XeSS depending on your GPU manufacturer, and see some massive performance gains at the cost of some slight visual fidelity.

I use this mod every time I launch Starfield since I’m running an RTX 3060 Ti, and it’s providing a much smoother experience with far fewer performance dips. I’m also using the default 0.7000 setting, so it could be tweaked to provide even better framerates.

Starfield Performance Optimizations

Mod Author: Erok
Link: Starfield Performance Optimizations

While turning down your settings can improve your performance, Starfield Performance Optimizations takes things further by optimizing some settings behind the hood. You won’t see colossal performance improvements with this mod, but one example brought a 6% increase to FPS when playing on Ultra settings.

Starfield Performance Boost

Mod Author: A1000N vito47m
Link: Starfield Performance BOOST

One of the biggest hogs of performance comes through shadow detail, which this mod lowers by a decent margin. However, it shouldn’t prove to be a massive dip in visual quality. Modern GPUs may only benefit from a 5% increase in FPS with this mod, while older GPUs could see up to a 15% increase.

Smooth Ship Reticle (120 FPS Smooth UI)

Mod Author: alexbull_uk
Link: Smooth Ship Reticle (120fps Smooth UI)

While this isn’t technically a boost to performance, it does improve the performance of the UI so we’re counting this mod. With the mod installed, your ship’s targeting reticle will move much smoother than its choppy base version. Other settings in this mod allow you to increase the other HUD elements to 120 FPS, making things appear much smoother.

Starfield Performance Texture Pack

Mod Author: Bulwarkhd
Link: Starfield Performance Texture Pack

Starfield’s textures are high resolution which makes them look pretty, but can be quite taxing on your system. This mod also benefits from having 1K and 512 versions of different textures, translating to performance and ultra-performance respectively. If it were me, I’d stick with 1K to keep a fair bit of quality, but feel free to drop it lower if you don’t think it did enough.

If you’re looking for other ways to improve performance, check out our guide on the best PC settings for Starfield.