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

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 reduces the graphical processing workload on the hardware as some areas on-screen are rendered at a lower rate than others. In Starfield, VRS is enabled by default. The setting allows you to bypass hitching or stuttering in certain scenes by minimizing the rendering workload, thus not overloading your hardware while maintaining decent visual quality.

The game can sometimes be very demanding, which is why it offers a lot of flexibility for fine-tuning the graphics settings to suit your particular configuration. VRS in Starfield has shown a decent performance uplift, but the main reason to keep this setting enabled is to prevent significant stuttering unless you’re running a very high-performance system. Interestingly, in some situations, disabling VRS can lead to worse visual fidelity than keeping it on. The major drawback is that the game sometimes lacks sharpness when rendering the entire scene natively at the same shading rate.

Advantages of VRS

At its core, Variable Rate Shading aims to reduce stuttering and provide an overall smoother gameplay experience.

1) Performance

In Starfield, VRS doesn’t directly increase frame rate numbers and differs from technologies like DLSS. It showcases a performance uplift but only meets the bare minimum in frame rate numbers. However, it does help improve your gaming experience 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 on the screen. More important elements like the HUD, maps, and subtitles within the game remain unchanged, but objects like the background (sky, grass, roads) aren’t rendered at the full scale. On a broader scale, this relieves the GPU of some of the computational workload it otherwise would have to process. Fewer processing tasks are done on areas that don’t require maximum visual fidelity, which in turn improves the game’s overall smoothness and maintains a consistent frame rate, even boosting performance numbers on systems where the GPU is the bottleneck.

3) Reduced Graphical Fidelity Loss

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

Should You Turn it On or Off?

Variable Rate Shading is enabled by default in Starfield. Generally, you should keep VRS enabled in Starfield unless you’re very particular about on-screen visual fidelity or are confident that your system won’t have issues running the game at native resolution. However, do not expect any major performance boosts solely from using VRS.

↪ Does it Help Starfield Run Smoother?

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

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

↪ VRS Support on AMD GPUs

Variable Rate Shading is supported on NVIDIA GPUs, particularly those with the Turing, Ampere, and Ada Lovelace architectures. These include 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. Starfield’s implementation of Variable Rate Shading is adequate to prevent jittery or stuttery gameplay and to squeeze out a bit of extra FPS from your hardware. However, the feature isn’t designed to significantly boost performance numbers and is primarily in place for a smoother overall gaming experience.