What is VRS in Starfield? Should You Turn It On in 2024?

Starfield is a graphically taxing game that can sometimes push your hardware to its limit, especially if it sits at the lower end of the game’s system requirements. The game is, by no stretch, perfectly optimized, and more than a few players have reported high temperatures and jittery frametimes due to the game maxing out on the GPU.

While Starfield has numerous options to tone your gameplay according to your system’s hardware, one of them is Variable Rate Shading (VRS), which—in theory—pulls some of that load off of your GPU, resulting in a relatively smoother experience. This guide will try to inform the readers what it means, what it does, and what it is helpful for. It’ll also guide you through turning on VRS and whether you should do it.

What is VRS & How Does it Work?

Variable Rate Shading, or VRS, is a technique that improves a game’s rendering performance by—as the name suggests—adjusting the rate of shading on different parts of the screen. This relieves some of the graphical processing workload off of the hardware as some areas on-screen are rendered at a lower rate than others.

To understand how this works, you’ll need to know that each pixel within a frame is rendered individually. VRS breaks down the screen into a particular section of blocks and assigns a level of importance to each of these blocks, based on the content on-screen.

For instance, the game’s main focal character or central element will be shaded at a relatively higher level than its background, which, in the grander context, doesn’t hold the same level of graphical fidelity to processing power ratio for most scenes.

When VRS is enabled, the importance level of each block dictates its shading rate. This is determined based on the position where your eyes would be focused. The pixels rendered around that important block are interpolated, meaning their colors and rendering quality are essentially ‘estimated’ based on surrounding shaders.

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What is VRS in Starfield?

In Starfield, VRS comes enabled by default. The setting allows you to bypass hitching or stuttering in certain scenes by minimizing the rendering workload and not taxing your hardware while maintaining a decent visual quality.

The game can sometimes be really demanding, which is why it offers a lot of flexibility in fine-tuning the graphics settings to suit your particular configuration. VRS in Starfield certainly has shown a decent performance uplift, but the main reason to keep this setting enabled is that the game sometimes tanks your performance so much that unless you’re running the beefiest system, you’re not prone to stuttering.

Interestingly, in some situations, disabling VRS can lead to worse visual fidelity than keeping it on. The major fallback was that the game sometimes lacks sharpness when natively rendering the whole scene at the same set shading rate.

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Advantages of VRS

At the core of its implementation, Variable Rate Shading aims to reduce stuttering and provide an overall smoother gameplay experience. It has seen a sudden surge in adoption over the past few years, with games like Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, Elden Ring, and more embracing the technology.

1) Performance

With Starfield, VRS doesn’t directly ramp up those frame rate numbers, and is different to something like DLSS. It does showcase a performance uplift, but only scratches the bare minimum with framerate numbers. It does however help in improving your experience while playing the game by reducing stuttering, and making the game feel more alive and smooth.

2) Hardware Load

VRS adjusts the shading rate dynamically according to the content you see on the screen. More important elements like the HUD, maps, and subtitles within the game are left as is, but objects like the background (sky, grass, roads) aren’t rendered on the full scale.

On a broader scale, this relieves the GPU of some of the computational workload it otherwise had to process, and fewer processing is done on areas that don’t require the maximum visual fidelity. In turn, this improves the game’s overall smoothness and maintains a consistent framerate, even boosting performance numbers on systems with the GPU as the bottleneck hardware component.

3) Reduced Graphical Fidelity Loss

In theory, VRS seems to maintain the rendering resolution on the major elements within a scene, with a blurry and jittery background, but in reality, it sort of estimates the low-priority pixels based on the colors, lighting, and elements of the pixels surrounding it. The concept is somewhat reminiscent of the upscaling technologies of DLSS and FSR and, similarly, gives a result where the graphical fidelity loss is minimal.

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Should You Turn it On or Off?

Variable Rate Shading is enabled by default on Starfield, and it is generally recommended that you turn it on unless and until you’re running into some sort of stability issues with certain parts of the game.

At the time of this writing, Bethesda has issued more than five major updates, each with hundreds of bug fixes and optimization improvements. If you come across any bugs or unstable scenarios in-game, keep in mind that these might be addressed in the next update and may not be directly related to Variable Rate Shading.

Generally, it is recommended that you keep VRS enabled in Starfield unless and until you’re really nitpicky about the on-screen visual fidelity or are confident that your system won’t have issues running the game at native resolution. But, do not expect any major performance boosts solely using VRS.

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↪ Does it Help Starfield Run Smoother?

VRS is meant to improve the game’s performance by easing the load on the hardware, just a tad bit. In theory, Variable Rate Shading does improve the average framerate on Starfield—but get this—only by 1%. The feature doesn’t lead to any noticeable uplift in the performance numbers, but it does smooth out the gameplay since it helps maintain a consistent framerate, reducing stuttering and hitching.

It is important to understand that Starfield or similar games today are usually run on higher resolutions—1080p, 1440p, or even 4K. This means that each pixel on the screen will become smaller and, hence, a lot less significant as you ramp up the resolution. Due to this, the unimportant areas of the screen would be rendered with relatively less density, reducing the workload on the GPU and, hence, maintaining consistent framerates.

↪ VRS Support on AMD GPUs

Variable Rate Shading is only supported on NVIDIA GPUs, particularly those with the Turing, Ampere, and Ada Lovelace architecture. These are the RTX 16, 20, 30, and 40 series GPUs. AMD has a similar feature called AMD FidelityFX Variable Shading, supported by RDNA2 (RX 6000 Series) and above.

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Alternative Ways to Improve Performance in Starfield

The performance you’re extracting out of your system depends upon the hardware available. On mid-range systems, the game should see improvements in performance numbers with an optimized set of Display options. You can easily find these online, with tried-and-tested configurations.

For more low-end PCs, we recommend going the mod-route. PureDark’s DLSS mod has been reported to bring huge performance uplifts for players with NVIDIA’s GPU hardware. For folks with AMD, they’ll have to make-do with the default implementation of FSR in-game.

READ MORE: How NVIDIA Plans on Doing Driver-Based Frame Generation ➜

Conclusion

Starfield’s implementation of Variable Rate Shading is decent enough to prevent jittery or stuttery gameplay and squeeze out a bit of FPS from your hardware. However, the feature isn’t meant to boost the performance numbers by any stretch and are merely in place for a better overall experience.