Best Starfield settings for Steam Deck

The Steam Deck is an insanely popular handheld gaming console, but it features some of the weakest hardware in the market. Powered by a 15W AMD APU, the Valve device has to regularly rely on sacrifices to graphics quality for playable framerates in some of the most demanding titles. The same applies to Starfield, the new space explorer RPG from Bethesda.

Besides being one of the most expansive and ambitious titles from the Maryland-based devs, Starfield's optimization isn't the best.

Players with powerful PC graphics hardware aren't being able to run the title at the highest settings. Thus, those with a Steam Deck will have to spend quite some time in the menus perfecting the graphics options combinations.

To help ease your work, we will list the best Starfield settings for the Valve handheld console in this article.

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Best Starfield graphics settings for Steam Deck

Starfield runs at 30 FPS on the Deck with the lowest settings applied. Even temporal upscaling with FSR doesn't improve the experience by a huge margin. We recommend the following settings in the game SteamOS for the best experience.

SteamOS settings

We recommend setting the Steam Deck to the highest power draw for an optimal experience in the space explorer. Do note that the battery life takes a hit while doing this.

• Framerate limit: 30
• Refresh rate: 30
• Allow tearing: Off
• Half rate shading: Off
• Thermal power (TDP) limit: On
• Watts: 15
• Manual GPU clock control: On
• GPU clock frequency: 1200
• Scaling filter: Linear

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Display

A mix of low and medium settings is best for the Steam Deck. The game doesn't look the best with these options applied. You can expect some artificating due to the low render scale and FSR.

However, with these settings, Starfield is playable on the Steam Deck:

• Borderless full screen: On
• Window size: 1200 x 800 (16:10)
• Select monitor: Primary monitor
• Dynamic resolution: On
• Render resolution scale: 40%
• Graphics preset: Custom
• Shadow quality: Low
• Indirect lighting: Low
• Reflections: Low
• Particle quality: Low
• Volumetric lighting: Low
• Crowd density: Low
• Motion blur: Low
• GTAO quality: Medium
• Grass quality: Low
• Contact shadows: Low
• Vsync: Off
• Upscaling: FSR 2
• Sharpening: 75%
• Enable VRS: Off
• Film grain intensity: Full
• Enable depth of field: On

Interface

• Crosshair: On
• Show floating markers: On
• Show damage numbers: On
• Show item information in HUD: On
• HUD opacity: 75%

Controls

• Invert Y: Off
• Invert flight Y: Off
• Invert menu camera X: Off
• Invert menu camera Y: Off
• Fight stick swap: Off
• Roll dominant: Off
• Look sensitivity V: As per your preference
• Look sensitivity H: As per your preference
• Aim sensitivity V: As per your preference
• Aim sensitivity H: As per your preference
• Controller look sensitivity: 30%
• Controller cursor sensitivity: 25%
• Mouse look sensitivity: 40%
• Ship reticle sensitivity: 75%
• Controller vibration: On
• Controller hotswap: On
• Outpost item rotation speed: As per your preference
• Outpost Flycam translation speed: 40%
• Outpost FlyCam rotation speed: 30%
• Outpost FlyCam distance speed: 25%
• Outpost FlyCam starting pitch: 80%
• Outpost FlyCam starting distance: 55.0m

The Steam Deck doesn't feature very powerful hardware. This puts it at a disadvantage in demanding titles like Starfield. Therefore, we recommend you stick to a gaming PC while playing this new RPG.