Earlier this month, the arrival of console mods for Starfield brought a variety of wild and wacky new additions to the game on Xbox, including a few tools to make the Xbox Series S version run with a higher frame rate than intended.
The folks over at Digital Foundry have now taken a look at a handful of these, and the results are pretty positive! As shown in the video above, using the "Uncap FPS for Series S" mod does legitimately uncap the frame rate, resulting in a smoother experience albeit with a lot of screen tearing. Another mod drops the resolution of the game to 720p, providing the ability to run Starfield at up to a whopping 120 frames per-second on the console.
However, this doesn't come without its downsides:
"I actually tested this in full 120Hz mode, meaning that frame-rate could rise as high it wishes (measurable with our tools up to 120fps) and found that we hit a 60fps baseline on challenging GPU-limited areas of the game..."
"This is a rather nice way to play the game - with one exception. The drop to 1280x720 from 1600x900 seems to be far more impactful to image quality than you might imagine. We seem to be finding the limits of FSR 2 upscaling quality, with some ugly artefacting. Even so, you are getting a viable performance mode - it's just that the trades are far more obvious to the eye than the Series X version."
In general, there's plenty of praise in this analysis for these Xbox Series S tools and Bethesda's willingness to allow such modifications, but also an acknowledgment that playing this way can be pretty rough - particularly in the visuals department.
The question is also posed about whether Bethesda would see fit to implement an official Starfield performance mode for Xbox Series S at some point... potentially even at 40FPS rather than 60FPS if need be:
"Looking back at the first test with the existing image quality level paired with an unlocked frame-rate, perhaps there's simply not enough content that gets close to 60fps to make it fully worthwhile… although I'd say that there is a decent enough turnout to make a 120Hz 40fps mode."
Whatever happens next, it's nice to know that these Xbox Series S mods are accessible to everyone for free. Just keep in mind that if you do choose to use them, any number of issues could crop up... that's the nature of mods for you!