Nvidia driver update should improve Starfield performance for many
A new Game Ready driver and automatic update are out today, and Nvidia says RTX 30-series and 40-series users will see Starfield gains.
Released today, Nvidia driver 537.34 adds optimizations for Lies of P and Mortal Kombat 1, but more urgently includes some Starfield-related performance notes. The biggest is the addition of a resizable BAR profile that Nvidia says will improve Starfield performance on RTX 30-series and 40-series GPUs.
Before this update dropped, we explained how to enable Resizable BAR manually for Starfield. You can find more details in that article, but the short of it is that BAR stands for "Base Address Register," and the feature has to do with improving the game's access your graphics card's memory. According to Nvidia, this update improves Starfield performance by an average of 5% on RTX 40-series desktop GPUs.
The Resizable BAR profile will be "automatically applied for gamers running the latest Game Ready Driver (537.34) or the previous release (537.17)," Nvidia said. The new 537.34 driver also adds Starfield to the "optimal settings" GeForce Experience feature, which tweaks the game's graphics settings based on your hardware config.
(Side note: The image above of my Starfield character trying to box an alien has nothing to do with this driver update, it's just the most recent screenshot I had of the game. I punched it to death.)
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Tyler grew up in Silicon Valley during the '80s and '90s, playing games like Zork and Arkanoid on early PCs. He was later captivated by Myst, SimCity, Civilization, Command & Conquer, all the shooters they call "boomer shooters" now, and PS1 classic Bushido Blade (that's right: he had Bleem!). Tyler joined PC Gamer in 2011, and today he's focused on the site's news coverage. His hobbies include amateur boxing and adding to his 1,200-plus hours in Rocket League.
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