Best Starfield Settings on the Steam Deck for Good FPS and Gameplay

In this guide, I’ll show you the best Steam Deck Settings to play Bethesda’s new game, Starfield on Steam Deck. We’ll go through all the in-game settings you should set up, along with Steam Deck optimization tweaks you can perform.

With some tweaking, you can get a constant 30 frames per second (FPS) playing Starfield on Steam Deck. Future tweaks and updates to the game will improve this even more.

If you’ve played around and you have other recommended Starfield Steam deck settings to share, comment below and let us know!

What is Starfield?

Starfield is an ambitious action RPG. Explore the Milky Way like never before, landing on over 1,000 diverse planets, moons, and even aboard space stations. Navigate New Atlantis, a fictional city that contains a host of NPCs who can join your crew or even become romantic partners.

Character Development

In Starfield, you can craft your character’s appearance and traits to unlock specialized skills in five distinct areas:

• Physical

• Social

• Combat

• Science

• Technology

Opt for a first or third-person perspective to suit your gameplay style, wielding various customizable firearms and explosives. Your choices, like the ‘Introvert’ trait, directly affect gameplay, providing more endurance when alone but less when with a crew.

Exploration

Navigate intense spaceship combat with a real-time ‘power allocation’ system, letting you prioritize weapons or your ship’s “Grav Drive.” Construct resource-extracting outposts and dive into research to unlock unique crafting options.

Experience dynamic combat as varying gravity on different planets adds a unique twist to battles. Customize your ship to the nines, altering everything from its weapons to its paint color.

Promising unparalleled freedom and endless celestial possibilities, Starfield aims to answer humanity’s ultimate question:

What’s beyond the stars?

Why is Starfield so popular?

Bethesda, the developer of Starfield, has a very high reputation in the gaming world. They have developed and released other titles such as the Fallout Series, Skyrim, and DOOM.

Starfield is Bethesda’s first new game universe in 25 years.

This is why Starfield is so popular when you put all of this together. Bethesda tends to support and release upgrades for their games for many years, so expect that Starfield will have a long life.

How to Buy

Starfield can be purchased from the Steam store. Stores like Humble Bundle and Green Man Gaming also sell official Starfield keys for Steam and often have better pricing and sales.

Use the buttons below to compare prices and buy the game today.

What are Starfield’s Minimum PC Requirements?

Officially, the recommended and minimum requirements for Starfield are:

PC specs	Minimum	Reccomended
OS	Windows 10 – version 21H1 or higher	Windows 10/11 with latest update
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel Core i7-6800K	AMD Ryzen 5 3600X or Intel i5-10600K
Graphics card	AMD Radeon RX 5700 or Nvidia GeForce 1070 Ti	AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT or Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080
RAM	16GB	16GB
Storage	126GB SSD	126GB SSD

Does Starfield Run Smoothly on the Steam Deck?

With two slight tweaks to your Steam Deck, Starfield can run smoothly and consistently without any crashes.

Switch SteamOS to Beta

In your Steam Deck settings, under the System menu, change your System Update Channel to Beta. The beta version of SteamOS features some GPU fixes which do a better job giving you a high framerate. I recommend this setting for Starfield.

Use Proton Experimental

In the settings screen for Starfield, you need to change the runtime to Proton Experimental. This allows more aggressive and experimental runtime libraries, which often allow newer games to work better on the Steam Deck.

With these two tweaks, Starfield will run without any crashing. That means that with the right settings, the game will run at a high framerate.

Let’s dive into the Starfield Settings in the game that you should set on your Steam Deck first.

Best Starfield Settings on the Steam Deck

The best settings for Starfield on the Steam Deck are:

• Borderless Full Screen = ON

• Window Size = 1200 x 720

• Dynamic Resolution = ON

• Render Resolution Scale = 50%

• Graphics Preset = Custom

• Shadow Quality = LOW

• Indirect Lighting = LOW

• Reflections = LOW

• Particle Quality = LOW

• Volumetric Lighting = LOW

• Crowd Density = LOW

• Motion Blur = OFF

• GTAO Quality = LOW

• Grass Quality = LOW

• Contact Shadows = LOW

• VSync = OFF

• Upscaling = FSR2

• Sharpening = 50%

• Enable VRS = ON

• Film Grain Intensity = 0%

• Enable Depth of Field = OFF

Above, I’ve bolded the most important settings you should set. FSR2 upscaling and VRS are the best settings you must have. These settings allow your Deck to use artificial intelligence to render less frames at a time and keep your game running smoothly.

Borderless fullscreen and setting a fixed window size ensure your Deck doesn’t have to use up any extra performance.

With the Starfield Settings on the Steam Deck above, the game runs smoothly in most situations. In most situations, you will get over 40 FPS indoors and 20-30 FPS outdoors.

Can You Run Starfield on Medium Settings?

On launch day, I think you need to keep your settings on low to keep your framerate above 30 FPS consistently. You could get away with medium grass or particle quality in most cases for a small improvement.

Remember that your Steam Deck screen size is only 7-inches. Do you need to see high grass quality on such a small screen?

How to Optimize Starfield on Steam Deck Further

If you want to play Starfield on the Steam Deck and maximize your frame rates, there is some further performance optimization you can do.

Increase VRAM to 4GB

You can increase your Deck’s VRAM from the default 1GB to 4 GB, which lets the game cache more items on your Steam Deck while you play. To do this, you need to:

1. Completely shut down the Steam Deck by holding down the power button and selecting Shutdown.

2. Press and hold power and volume up buttons together until you hear a beep, then release the buttons and allow a few seconds for the Deck to boot to the BIOS screen.

3. Click on the “Setup Utility” button and change the UMA frame buffer size to 4GB from the default 1GB.

4. Press the select button, select yes to save, and exit.

5. Your Steam Deck will reboot!

Immediately, you will notice an improvement in playing the Starfield Steam Deck game. You can further optimize the Deck’s performance and in-game settings for even better performance.

Steam Deck Performance Overlay Settings

The next step to improve and optimize Starfield on Steam Deck is to update the Steam Deck performance overlay settings.

While the game is running:

1. Press the three dots button on the right side of the gamepad to access the performance overlay menu.

2. Enable per-game profiles from the performance overlay menu

3. Set the frame rate limit to 40.

4. Turn on half-rate shading

5. Change the scaling filter to Linear.

6. Press the three dots button to exit out of the settings.

Conclusion

With some simple tweaks, you can achieve a constant 30 frames per second while playing Starfield on the Steam Deck. While not perfect, this should be high enough to play the game well.

As the Starfield development team releases optimization fixes and improvements, we think you will be able to achieve 40 FPS or high soon.

As things change and develop, we will update this guide with new Starfield settings on the Steam Deck.

Frequently Asked Questions About Starfield on the Steam Deck (FAQs)