Will Starfield ever get an official implementation of NVIDIA DLSS? Possibly, but that’s largely up to Bethesda Game Studios, according to AMD gaming chief Frank Azor, who told an editor with The Verge last week that there’s nothing stopping the developer from adding NVIDIA’s performance-enhancing technology, which is being updated later this year with Ray Reconstruction for improved ray-traced image quality, to its highly anticipated space-faring RPG. The comments come despite AMD being Starfield’s official PC partner, a collaboration that seemingly implied exclusive support for its own FSR upscaling technology.
Azor says he can’t say what the contract includes. Instead, he repeatedly lands on this: “If they want to do DLSS, they have AMD’s full support.” He says there’s nothing blocking Bethesda from adding it to the game.
He admits that — in general — when AMD pays publishers to bundle their games with a new graphics card, AMD does expect them to prioritize AMD features in return. “Money absolutely exchanges hands,” he says. “When we do bundles, we ask them: ‘Are you willing to prioritize FSR?’”
Discussion (7 replies)
Join Discussion →I'm betting it wasn't exclusivity but an agreement not to work with Nvidia engineering on the product since AMD was providing tech/support. Probably as an IP Protection sort of thing.
Even if Bethesda doesn't add DLSS to the game, it probably won't be much trouble for a community mod to do it. I see it with plenty of other games that don't ship with DLSS.
What I want to see is more support for DLAA.
Yeah the fact AMD 'won't' let Bethesda comment on it is proof enough to me there is something more to the story
"nothing" is not the term I would use and it isn't the term Azor used either because there is something
It will be available by the official launch date already.
Where is this coming from?
Well, in my experience with AMD only type recent titles, and I think the only ones currently have are the last few RE games, if you've got anything upwards 4070 Ti-4090 NV card's performance it's kind of a moot point. At least with those games, things are so scalable that DLSS is largely unneeded. Obviously, I can't say for this but I haven't seen anything in the trailers to make me think otherwise, yet.
However, for owners of Intel GPUs, yeah XeSS can definitely help them to reach their potential.
I did read the story and Azor does say that there's money, contracts, support, and timelines involved between AMD and the developers so at first yes things will be like this but after that, there's nothing stopping the developers from expanding their support.
Honestly, though, I'd say that someone will get it out for free before then so just give it some time. I'm about to get RE4 soon and was googling DLSS for it and folks started getting DLSS2 and XeSS out within weeks and I can't remember if I saw anything for 3 but I wouldn't be surprised but this does seem to be a growing trend for the community to be able to beat contract deadlines ahead of time these days.
The Verge article https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/22372077/amd-starfield-dlss-fsr-exclusive-frank-azor -
“We want to be very careful not to put this answer onto our partners,” says Azor.
Bethesda didn’t reply to repeated questions about whether it’ll add DLSS to the game.