Getting ready to play Starfield on an AMD GPU? New drivers offer big performance boost and warning to players with ultrawide monitors

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The new driver package could offer as much as a 16% performance uplift at 4K on RX 7900-series cards.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX photographed with box on a white background.
(Image credit: Future)

If you're waiting patiently for Starfield to drop, spend that time wisely by downloading AMD's latest graphics driver package. The new driver version coming ahead of the game's launch, promises up to a 16% increase in performance for Starfield at 4K on the red team's top cards, the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. That's definitely worth a look.

The new driver package highlights, according to AMD:

  • Up to 16% increase in performance for Starfield @ 4k, using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.8.2 on the Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU, versus the previous software driver version 23.8.1 RS-594
  • Up to 16% increase in performance for Starfield @ 4k, using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.8.2 on the Radeon RX 7900 XT GPU, versus the previous software driver version 23.8.1 RS-595

There's also a word of warning to Starfield players: under very specific circumstances, you may run into "intermittent driver timeout or visual corruption when dynamic resolution is set to 75–78% with certain ultrawide monitors." A very specific issue, indeed.

AMD has partnered with Bethesda for the release of Starfield. That's why there's a limited edition RX 7900 XTX with Starfield plastered all over it, and why we're expecting FSR upscaling support only at launch, without Nvidia's DLSS in the mix. AMD has said Bethesda can add DLSS support to Starfield, but that's not confirmed to happen yet. We're likely to see modders drop DLSS into the game, anyways.

The new driver package, version 23.8.2, is namely to offer support for Starfield, though there's also a bug fix for Baldur's Gate 3 in the mix.

  • Application crash or driver timeout may be observed while playing Baldur's Gate 3 with DirectX 11 API set on certain systems with Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs.

In my testing of Baldur's Gate 3, the game plays nicely on AMD cards with the Vulkan API enabled, which means you might want to consider switching to that API anyways. 

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Jacob Ridley
Jacob Ridley
Managing Editor, Hardware

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you'll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.

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