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Starfield’s Potato Mode mod looks like a sci-fi Morrowind you could run on a 20-year-old PCPerhaps this might help you play it on Steam Deck, at least
Perhaps this might help you play it on Steam Deck, at least
Image credit:BulwarkHD/Bethesda
Image credit:BulwarkHD/Bethesda
Starfieldis asurprisingly demanding PC game, requiring a fairly hefty GPU and CPU to run it smoothly at anything approaching max specs even at 1080p. And, alas,it’s just a bit much for the Steam Deck to handleunless you’re happy to sacrifice visual fidelity, framerate or - in most cases - both if you plan on spending your time doing anything except browsing menus (though there’ll be plenty of that).
All that said, help may be at hand in the form of aPotato Mode modthat deliberately aims to makeStarfield, well, seriously ugly. Modder BulwarkHD’s creation swaps every texture in the game for its 128-bit equivalent, leaving the 2023 game resembling something that released closer to the turn of the millennium.
BulwarkHD knows exactly what they’re going for, proposing “Does your PC have 1gb of Vram? Is it so old your grandpa used it to play Morrowind?” as two possible reasons for wanting to send high-resolution texturesthe way of dogsin Starfield’s future.
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While Potato Mode is still likely a bit much for a literal potato to run, there might be a surprising flipside and genuine advantage to thisStarfield modclearly created as a bit of fun. With Starfield’s performance not up to par on Steam Deck, I’d love to know whether this mod actually allows it to run at a decent framerate - albeit while resembling a PSP game. Still, on a far smaller screen, the crappy visuals might not look so bad. Right?
