Playing Starfield on a AMD 7900 series GPU? Make sure you grab the latest driver update for a dramatic performance boost!
Whether you have early access to Starfield now, or are waiting for the official September 6th release date, and if you’re playing on an AMD Radeon graphics card, you should probably download the new driver AMD just released. The game released yesterday for early access buyers and has already gotten mixed reviews from critics. To coincide with the games launch AMD released AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.8.2 which is reported to come with a 16% performance increase in Starfield specifically when using either the RX 7900XTX or the RX7900XT graphics cards at 4k resolution.
If you aren’t running those beefy cards but instead lower-end or older-generation Radeon cards, the driver still supports those and you will likely see stability and incremental performance improvements, but this release is specifically focused on increasing 7900 series performance numbers.
As you may have already heard Bethesda (the makers of Starfield) and AMD have a partnership for the release of the game, meaning AMD cards are the only ones to support frame-generation solutions in the game right now. Thus, we have AMD’s FSR and no access to Nvidia’s DLSS solution, this could change in the near future as both AMD and Bethesda have stated that there is nothing stopping them (or modders) from adding DLSS to the game. For now, however, AMD cards should give you the most bang for your buck in performance when playing Starfield.
But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, with the release of Adrenalin Edition 23.8.2 AMD has warned that some Starfield players might experience “intermittent driver timeout or visual corruption when dynamic resolution is set to 75-78%, with certain ultrawide monitors”. So, if you’re running a similar setup, it might be a good idea to increase or decrease your Dynamic Resolution settings. Either way, AMD says they are working with Bethesda to resolve the issue and will push a fix in a future Adrenalin Edition patch.
It’s not all Starfield though, in this patch AMD also fixed an issue where a player would experience driver timeouts in Baldur’s Gate 3 while using the DirectX 11 API on RX 7000 series cards. It’s worth noting that from my investigation this seems to have been a relatively specific and rare issue (much like the Starfield driver timeout) as there is only a couple of handful of reddit posts, twitter mentions and steam forum posts about it, not nearly as much as you’d expect in such a popular game.
For a full list of patch changes (though I pretty much covered all of it here) see the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.8.2 release notes (which is also the source for this article).
