On Tuesday, Twitter user Wario64 reveals that AMD is now the exclusive PC partner for Bethesda’s Starfield while linking a video from AMD’s official YouTube channel which covers the announcement.
In the video announcement, Jack Huynh, the SVP (Senior Vice President) and GM (General Manager) of Computing and Graphics, which are responsible for creating the processors and video cards of AMD, and Bethesda’s Todd Howard reveal the partnership between the two companies to “…unlock the full potential of Starfield,” by using AMD’s technology, most notably FSR. Huynh explains,
We have worked hand-in-hand with Bethesda Game Studios to optimoze Starfiled for both Xbox and PC with Ryzen 7000 series processors and Radeon 7000 series graphics (cards). These optiomizations both accelerate performance and enhance the quality of your gameplay using highly multi-threaded code that both Xbox and PC players will get to take advantage of.
On AMD’s website, they have also announced this partnership, further explaining the gaming technologies being used and links AMD FSR2 (AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution) as well as other resources like their cloud-based service “AMD Link” and “AMD FreeSync™. On AMD’s website for FSR2, “FSR 2, our next-level temporal upscaling technology, is designed to deliver similar or better than native image quality and boosts framerates in supported games across wide range of products and platforms.” FSR offers an upscaling algorithm in which the algorithm adjusts the in-game resolution, based on the setting the user has it set to. The Xbox Series X/S utilizes FSR, so console users will be able to use AMD’s image upscaler since the consoles use AMD Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures. Many compare AMD’s FSR technology to Nvidia’s DLSS Imaging upscaling, which essentially is the counterpart of AMD FSR. On Nvidia’s website, they explain that DLSS, “Boosts performance for all GeForce RTX GPUs by using AI to output higher resolution frames from a lower resolution input.”
User reception for this announcement has been mixed so far. Many users point out that FSR2 is only going to be available, hinting Nvidia’s DLSS might be excluded. Tom Warren on Twitter calls the deal anti-consumer, pointing out DLSS being superior to FSR2, saying “These deals are simply anti-consumer and won’t help AMD sell GPUs.” Other users in Wario64’s tweet, like user Jackgamer74 point out that including DLSS into the game would help with framerate due to DLSS’ frame generation.
Starfield is expected to be released on September 6th.