This mod aims to improve performance, stability & consistency for the Steam Deck & other low powered handhelds/PCs. Offering up to 38% better performance compared to vanilla Low settings depending on the scene.
BETA WARNING: The games new & this is a large mod in scope which means it may cause instability or bugs, especially tweaks labeled as “experimental”. If you don’t want to potentially troubleshoot or uninstall avoid those tweaks until they’re stable. Even stable tweaks have a potential to cause issues as it’s still early days. If you do use this mod please report every issue & try to tell me exactly which file caused it (if you can) so we can get this mod out of early access
What Does This Mod Do?
1. Compresses textures & files with a technique good for slower SD cards & HDD enabling better texture streaming, load times, & 1% lows
2. Reduces texture size as to not exceed the Steam Deck’s VRAM & to reduce bad frametimes caused by getting near it, improving 1% lows
3. Increases fluidity of interactions & animations to 40fps, enabling a smoother experience
4. Lowers settings not exposed in the menu & lowers existing settings in the menu further, improving both GPU & CPU perf. Increasing AVG FPS across the board (At the cost of image quality)
This mods biggest advantage is drastically reducing stutters and the QoL improvements it makes rather than increasing overall FPS (although it does do that too) this game is too CPU bound for SD to play at a locked 40fps unless you’re avoiding cities. There will be future patches to help more with this though coming soon
Disclaimer: You must switch to a different preset then back to Low in game for the changes to take effect after applying the ini tweaks
Installation
1. Put the files inside “Starfield Directory” in Starfield’s main game directory
2. Put the files inside “Documents” in your documents folder, the same folder where StarfieldPrefs.ini is
3. Delete your shader cache for Starfield in all locations (or the texture mod may cause your game to not render properly. If you do not know how to do this/won’t then just install every tweak except the SDTexturesFull.ba2. If you’ve already done it and this happens then remove that file to uninstall it to fix the issue)
StarfieldCustom.ini Location
%USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Games\Starfield
C:/users/%USERNAME%/Documents/MyGames/Starfield
C:/users/%USERNAME%/OneDrive/Documents/MyGames/Starfield
/home/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1716740/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Starfield
Starfield Directory Location
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Starfield
/home/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Starfield
Shader Cache Locations
%LOCALAPPDATA%\NVIDIA\DXCache
%LOCALAPPDATA%\AMD\DxCache
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Starfield\
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\shadercache
/home/deck/.steam/steam/steamapps/shadercache
Additional Info
I recommend you setup CryoUtilities & set your VRAM to 4gb, it’s a program that tweaks SteamOS and can give you performance gains for free and make frametimes smoother in games. A tutorial can be found below and a download here
How to get Vortex on SteamOS
Image Comparison: Stock vs Modded
FAQ
Q: Which ones do I install? Do I have to choose just 1?
A: No, they each do different things but none of them conflict with each other, you’re suppose to download all of them for the full mod/features but if you don’t have the patience or space or theirs a bug with one of them you can choose to not download it
Credits:
Hybred
Download mod
| File | File size |
|---|---|
SDEssentials ini Tweaks (Stable)-1-9-11
|
22 KB |
SD Essentials (40fps UI - Loading - Experimental)-1-9-6
|
105 MB |
|
SD Essentials (VRAM - SDCard HDDs - Experimental)-1-9-6
|
4 GB |
