AMD has announced it will be the exclusive partner for Bethesda’s upcoming Space Adventure title, Starfield, released in September 2023 for PC and Xbox consoles.
AMD’s senior vice president and general manager, Jack Huynh, explains why he’s humbled and what this means for you, the gamer. Bethesda’s game director, Todd Howard, joins in on the fun, stating that he’s excited about the partnership and how Starfield is the developer’s most ambitious game ever, how they are working hand in hand with AMD, and how AMD’s FSR 2 (FidelityFX Super Resolution), an upscaling technology will be featured in the game.
Watch the video below.
This sounds like great news, but we’ve seen this song and dance before, and whenever we hear that AMD is an exclusive partner of a title, it also means that Nvidia’s upscaling technology, DLSS, and likely Intel’s XeSS (Xe Super Sampling), won’t be involved. The past few AMD-exclusive titles did not feature DLSS, while the recent titles that worked with Nvidia also did manage to include FSR.
The good news is that FSR has improved with FSR 2, and unlike Nvidia’s DLSS, it works on both AMD and Nvidia graphic cards. This is good news for those who don’t have the latest and greatest GPUs, as FSR doesn’t require dedicated hardware and has improved, but I still have concerns about it, mainly it’s Then again, maybe because I mostly use Nvidia GPUs.
There’s always a chance that Bethesda will eventually implement DLSS into Starflied, or at least we hope so. And if not, due to the DLSS SDK being available to the public, we’ll see modders dropping this into the game, similar to several other games that didn’t ship with DLSS but, thanks to modders, now has access to it.
A good example is DLSS being added to the Anniversary and Special Editions of Skyrim, thanks to the PC modder, PureDark. Called the Skyrim Upscaler, not only was DLSS added to both games, but it was able to add a significant amount of framerate to the game.
If it happened to Skyrim, that’s a chance this will happen to Starfield as well. Regardless, at least we know that AMD and Bethesda are working together to make Starfield a better experience, visual and optimization-wise.