Getting Star Rail to 4K 60fps Is Possible, But You Need to Understand What You Are Asking
I have been doing this since Honkai Impact 3 got its PC port in 2018, and the same basic constraints apply. You want clean, stable 4K 60fps solo gameplay footage, or you want to play solo at that resolution yourself. Both require the same core setup. The first step is your GPU. If you are on anything older than an RTX 3070 or RX 6800 XT, you will be fighting for every frame at 4K. I ran into this exact problem last year when I was trying to push 60fps on a 2080 Ti at native 4K with all quality sliders maxed. The game would hold 60fps for maybe twenty minutes, then start dipping into the low fifties during team fights or enemy skill phases. What actually fixed it for me was not turning everything down to low. Instead I left textures at ultra, kept shading quality at high, but dropped the shadow resolution to 2K and disabled the SSAO pass. That single change gave me back about eight to twelve frames per second in the worst scenes without any visible degradation in the output file. There are two distinct paths here, and most people confuse them. The first is playing solo and recording at 4K 60fps. The second is watching someone else's 4K 60fps solo run. They share almost nothing except the final video format. If you are the one playing, your bottleneck is rendering, not encoding. If you are watching, your bottleneck is file size and streaming capacity. I will assume you want to produce the footage yourself because that is the harder problem. Recording at 4K 60fps requires two things happening simultaneously. The game must render at or above 60fps, and your capture software must encode that stream without introducing stutter. The most common mistake I see is people who have a great GPU but use OBS with a CPU-based encoder, or worse, they use the built-in game recorder and then wonder why the footage looks jagged. Here is what I use and what works reliably for me.
I record with NVIDIA ShadowPlay or AMD ReLive, depending on which card I am running. Both use hardware encoders, so the recording does not steal frames from the game. I set the target bitrate to 60 Mbps for 4K 60fps. If you go lower than that, you will notice macroblocking in dark areas like the Herta corridors, and no one wants that in their export. ShadowPlay's default 35 Mbps is fine for casual clips, but it compresses too aggressively when you need clean frames for editing. For the playback side, the actual run itself, you do not need any special software beyond the game launcher and a stable internet connection. Star Rail is online-only, so you cannot play it offline or in a emulator for this particular goal. The solo part is just the standard match made by picking your characters and not joining a co-op session, which is the default behavior anyway.
Hardware Requirements and Real World Performance Numbers
I am going to give you honest numbers based on my own machine and what I have seen other people report across multiple threads and beta tests. These are not marketing figures. They are what happens when you actually turn the game on. Minimum for 4K 60fps: An RTX 4070 Ti Super or an RX 7900 XTX, 32 GB RAM, and a CPU that will not throttle under sustained load. The CPU matters more than most people think because Star Rail's Unity build has some single-threaded bottlenecks in the UI rendering path, especially during the intermission screens between battles. If your CPU peaks at 100 percent during those loading screens, you will get frame drops even if the GPU is barely at 50 percent. Expected range on a 4070 Ti Super: Native 4K with high settings holds 60fps in exploration and open field combat. In heavy skill spam scenes, like a Lord Ravager fight with multiple enemies casting simultaneously, you can expect 52 to 58 fps. I recorded a full cycle through the Simulated Universe at this setting and the average came to 56.3 fps. That is good enough for most purposes.
Get the Full Details
If you drop to 1440p: You gain roughly 15 to 25 fps across the board on the same hardware. If your goal is pure performance rather than resolution, 1440p 60fps is often a better experience than 4K 30fps with upscaling. I tested this myself by running the same route at both resolutions and the 1440p version felt significantly smoother in combat even though the visual difference at normal viewing distance is minimal.
Common Problems and What Actually Fixes Them
I have been doing this long enough to see the same failures repeat. Here are the ones that actually matter. VSync turning on automatically. Some drivers have a feature called adaptive sync or equivalent that will force VSync under certain conditions. When this engages at 4K, it caps your framerate to your monitor's refresh rate, and if your monitor is 144Hz, you might think everything is fine until you try to export and realize the frames are locked and your recording looks choppy. I solved this by disabling VSync in the game options and then creating a custom profile in the NVIDIA Control Panel that forces VSync off for Star Rail specifically. Same approach works on AMD Radeon Software. Memory leaks in long sessions. Star Rail, like most live service games, does not always manage texture streaming perfectly over hours of play. After about two to three hours of continuous solo runs, I started seeing gradual frame time spikes. The workaround is simple but annoying. Close the game and restart it once per day, or even every thirty minutes if you are pushing for consistently clean footage. It takes sixty seconds and saves you from hours of re-rendering or re-recording later.
Audio desync in exported files. This happens when your recorder and your game are writing to different drives and the drive scheduler is not balanced. I had this issue when my game was on an NVMe and my recordings were going to a SATA SSD. The fix was moving both to the same drive. Audio stayed in sync after that with zero additional settings changes. Up-scaling artifacts. If you are not running native 4K and instead using DLSS or FSR, you will get shimmering on fine geometry like rail tracks or building edges. I recommend DLSS Quality mode if you are on an Nvidia card. It is slightly slower than Performance mode but the image is clean enough that you do not need to spend time denoising in post. On AMD cards, I prefer RSR with the game running at 1440p scaled up, because the driver-level scaling tends to produce fewer chroma artifacts than in-game upscaling in this particular engine.
Export Settings That Actually Work
Once you have your raw footage, the export process is where most people lose quality. I use the following settings in DaVinci Resolve, which is free and handles H.264/H.265 exports without any licensing cost. These numbers come from what I have tested repeatedly, not from a manual. Resolution: 3840x2160. Codec: H.265 if you want smaller files, H.264 if you need maximum compatibility. Bitrate: 60 to 80 Mbps for final export. Quantizer: If using CQP mode, set it to 18 to 20. This gives you near-lossless quality without the massive file sizes that come with ProRes or DNxHD, which are unnecessary unless you are doing professional color grading. If you are uploading to YouTube, I recommend using YouTube's Recommended Upload Settings. They recompress H.264 files aggressively if your bitrate is too high, so a target of 45 to 50 Mbps usually lands you with a final upload that looks better than your source because YouTube's encoding pipeline handles it more efficiently.
What This Cannot Do
I want to be clear about the limitations so you do not waste time chasing something that is physically impossible with the current build. Star Rail does not support native 4K 60fps on integrated graphics. Period. You will need a dedicated GPU. Second, if you are on a laptop with a mobile GPU, even an RTX 4080 laptop chip will struggle to hold 4K 60fps consistently because thermal throttling kicks in after about ten minutes. The desktop 4080 can handle it. The laptop cannot, at least not for extended sessions. Third, the game does not currently support 120Hz on all platforms. The Windows version supports it, but some older hardware will not read the display mode correctly, which can cause screen tearing even if your GPU is producing the frames. Finally, if your goal is simply to watch other people's solo runs at 4K 60fps, there is no official download link because this is not a downloadable product. It is gameplay footage, and the closest thing to a central repository is the official HoYoverse YouTube channel or community streams on Bilibili. I have found that many high-quality solo run uploads are available there, and they are usually encoded at resolutions and bitrates appropriate for the platform, so you do not need to do anything special to watch them other than have a decent internet connection and a monitor that can display 4K.
The community side of this is active but fragmented. There is no single verified source for 4K 60fps solo run packs because they are user-generated clips, not official releases. If you find someone selling "full game at 4K 60fps," it is either a scam or a repack of free community content with malware added. I learned that the hard way in 2023 and would rather not go through it again.
