Starfield announces AMD as exclusive partner on PC

Starfield announces AMD as exclusive partner on PC, which reduces the chances of DLSS support for the game.

Marco Wutz | Jun 27, 2023

Starfield announces AMD as exclusive partner on PC /

AMD and Bethesda have announced an exclusive partnership regarding Starfield, the upcoming space RPG created by the Skyrim developer. This means that Starfield is being built with AMD’s technology in mind, which is going to be great for anyone with an AMD GPU in their PC.

It’s not great for everyone else, though: AMD’s FSR technology is regarded as inferior to Nvidia’s DLSS among gamers.

Both technologies are supposed to do similar things: upscale lower resolution images to reduce the workload of devices and make games look better overall. However, DLSS is hardware-based while FSR is software-based, and Nvidia’s approach just seems to work more effectively.

DLSS has seen a very fast rate of adoption among high-end video games and while Nvidia often partners up with developers, tech from AMD and Intel is consistently available from launch day for games coming out of these “exclusive” collaborations – that’s not so much the case with AMD: Only a small minority of games developed with them as an exclusive partner got support for DLSS at any point after their release. Resident Evil 4 Remake, Dead Island 2, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor are still not supported, for example.

This is what’s worrying PC gaming fans about the Starfield announcement.

While FSR is the technology that’s available on more GPUs (since DLSS requires specific hardware), it’s simply not as good, and ideally both types should be supported by games. There is always the hope that modders can implement DLSS as they have done in some cases, but in one of PC's biggest releases this year it should really have official support from the start.

Published Jun 27, 2023

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg