AMD says Bethesda can choose to put in NVIDIA DLSS support in Starfield

Earlier this year, AMD announced a partnership with Bethesda Game Studios. AMD would become the official "exclusive PC partner" for Bethesda's upcoming spaced-based RPG Starfield. That partnership includes optimizing the game to run well on high end Ryzen and Radeon chips. Also, a digital bundled copy of the game will be included when purchasing certain AMD Ryzen CPUs or AMD Radeon GPUs for a limited time.

Later, a leak from the game's preload files seems to show that the PC version would not support NvVIDIA's Deep Learning SuperSampling (DLSS) or Intel's Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) graphics technology, at least at launch. Both are designed to boost frame rates and make games look smoother at higher resolutions. AMD has a similar technology for its GPUs called FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR).

While there may not be any DLSS support for Starfield at launch, that apparently doesn't mean that DLSS or XeSS couldn't be added to the game at some point. In an interview with The Verge as part of Gamescom 2023, AMD's gaming marketing head Frank Azor admitted that the company does ask developers to put the company's products and technology first with certain gaming deals:

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?’”

Having said that, Azor repeatedly added during the interview that if Bethesda really did want to add NVIDIA's DLSS tech to Starfield, there's apparently nothing in their contract with AMD that prevents them from doing so. He stated, "If and when Bethesda wants to put DLSS into the game, they have our full support,”

AMD announced their new version of their own FSR graphics tech at Gamescom this week. FSR 3 Frame Generation, which will reportedly give PC and console games a huge frame rate boost with support for graphics cards from any vendor, will be added to two PC games via patches in September, with more on the way. Starfield will support the older FSR 2 tech when it launches on August 31.

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