A NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super paired with a AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D lands around 55 fps in Starfield at 1440p with Ultra textures, High shadows and DLSS Quality. Ray tracing is left off on this pairing. These values come from the same model the interactive optimizer uses, applied to this exact hardware pair rather than a generic preset.
Based on benchmark data and community reports for this hardware combination — treat as an estimate, not a guarantee. How we calculate this.
Starfield's engine spends its budget in places that are easy to miss. Space and small outposts are light; New Atlantis, with its crowd simulation and layered interiors, is heavy and CPU-bound. Any preset that has only been tested on a barren moon is essentially untested.
The other quirk is upscaling. The game's internal resolution scaling has a large impact on both performance and image quality, and setting it correctly is usually worth more than several individual quality sliders combined.
Covers the current Creation Engine 2 PC build with upscaling available. Major cities are the CPU reference; space is not representative.