Starfield – How to Fix Weird Lighting and Shadow Glitches

Weird Lighting and Shadow Glitches Issues

This is how I resolved my weird lighting and shadow glitches, which didn’t look quite like your issue, but worth a try.

• Verified integrity of the install in Steam. (If you’re unsure how to do this, right click the game in your library, click properties, go to installed files, and find the validate option.)
• Ran scannow and DISM (open a command prompt – go to Start and type cmd if you aren’t familiar with how to do so – then type “sfc /scannow” without the quotes and hit enter. When it completes assuming no errors were found, type “DISM /online /cleanup-image /checkhealth” without the quotes and hit enter. When that process completes, then type “DISM /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth” without the quotes and hit enter.) No errors were found in my case, but I was trying to be exhaustive.
• Downloaded the latest driver and did a clean install (for nVidia, just in case anyone here doesn’t already know how to do this, download the driver manually from the site as you normally would, not using the GeForce experience app. Then install and select custom, clean install.)
• Left Anisotropic Filtering set to application controlled in control panel. Enabling it to any degree (4x, 8x, 16x, etc.) other than application controlled reintroduced the glitching for me. I could change anything else without issue, but AF was causing the glitching to reappear.
• Downloaded the latest chipset driver for my motherboard. (In my case this was the chipset driver for X470. AMD and Intel’s support and driver sections have a drop down menus to navigate to the correct chipset for your system. If you don’t know what your chipset is, hit Start or the Windows key and type system information, and open the system information app, and you’ll be able to identify your motherboard model and then determine your chipset. My motherboard hadn’t had a BIOS update in ages – since 2018 to be exact – and I just updated my chipset not long ago, but lo and behold AMD did offer a recent chipset update from August, so I figured that was worth a try. I then restarted when the process completed.)
• Set the game to run as administrator (if you don’t know how to do this, in Steam go to the game in your library, right click, select properties, go to installed files, then click browse. In the folder that opens you’ll find the Starfield.exe app. Right click that, properties, compatibility options, tick the Run As Administrator box, click Apply, click Ok. Exit the folder.)
• Relaunched the game and allowed it to recompile shaders before starting an entirely new game.

This solved my issue, and also improved performance considerably. But YMMV and as I said it doesn’t look quite like what you’re having. Still good practices regardless, though.