Starfield has been in early access for a few days, and the numbers have started climbing. The game already has over 200K concurrent players on Steam itself, and this is the $100 early access we’re talking about here. The regular $70 version is yet to launch. Nevertheless, gamers are taking full advantage of the Premium Edition, with over 300 mods already on Nexus. Surprisingly, the most popular mod for Starfield replaces the in-game AMD FSR 2 with NVIDIA DLSS 2 or Intel XeSS.
The “Starfield Upscaler- Replacing FSR 2 with DLSS or XeSS” is the #1 most popular mod on Nexus, with over 166,600 downloads and half a million views at the time of reporting. This mod from PureDark replaces AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.2 upscaler with NVIDIA DLSS 2 using Streamline. Since both upsamplers require the same inputs, it merely requires updating the algorithm/training model data.
The installation is quite straightforward. You must copy the mod into the game’s base folder and the PDPerfPlugin.dll file into the mods/UpscalerBasePlugin folder. Following this, the NVIDIA DLSS .dll file (nvngx_dlss.dll) needs to be downloaded and copied into the same folder.
To enable DLSS 2 or XeSS using the same method, FSR 2 must be enabled in-game as the mod replaces the same implementation. Instead of the DLSS quality settings, you can control upscaling quality by changing the render resolution percentage.
DLSS 3.5 can be enabled in the same way. You just need to download the DLSS 3.5 DLL file and place it in the UpscalerBasePlugin folder. As per initial impressions, DLSS 3.5 looks much better than FSR 2.2 despite offering over 2x the performance.
