DLSS in Starfield? AMD says nothing’s stopping Bethesda from adding it

No, AMD are not forcing their partners to ditch Nvidia’s DLSS tech

In a conversation with Frank Azor, The Verge’s Sean Hollister managed to AMD’s Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions to discuss the topic of FidelityFX Super Resolution exclusivity, as it was speculated that AMD were forcing its partners to exclude Nvidia’s DLSS technology from games. 

If you do not know what FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and DLSS are, they are resolution upscaling solutions that allow lower resolution game renders to be upscaled to higher resolutions to deliver near-native (and sometimes better than native) levels of image quality. These techniques operate using temporal data from games, though both FSR and DLSS have evolved to also include Frame Generation technologies with FSR 3 and DLSS 3 respectively, in addition to their “Super Resolution” upscaling capabilities. 

When discussing the topic of FSR exclusivity within AMD partnered games, Azor simply stated that “If they [AMD’s partners] want to do DLSS, they have AMD’s full support.” Azor has made it clear that AMD are not blocking DLSS from sponsored titles. This means that Starfield could support DLSS if Bethesda wanted to implement it.

Starfield is an AMD partnered PC release, which means that AMD has paid a publisher to bundle their games with their graphics cards. These deals give AMD’s graphics cards an extra value add-on, and give game developers and publishers additional funding. With these partnerships, hardware manufacturers often work with game developers to add optimisations or features to their games, often in the form of assistance in making their game’s multi-threaded (if the hardware partner is a CPU manufacturer), or help adding new features to games like ray tracing, and upscaling technologies like DLSS or FSR.

Frank Azor has stated that “When we do bundles, we ask them: ‘Are you willing to prioritize FSR?’”, which means that FSR support is a must for an AMD partnered game. This makes a lot of sense for AMD, as FSR is one of their premiere gaming technologies, and a lot of game developers choose to exclusively support FSR in their games, as AMD’s upscaling solution is GPU-agnostic and will work on AMD, Nvidia, and Intel graphics cards.

When partnered developers ask if they can ad support for Nvidia’s DLSS technology, Azor stated that “we [AMD] always tell them yes.” Azor also commented that “Bethesda’s decision to use FSR is console leverage.” With Starfield being one of Xbox’s largest game launches of 2023, it makes a lot of sense for Bethesda to invest in their implementation of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution technology, as the benefits of FSR can impact gamers on both PC and Xbox Series X/S. That said, a lot of PC gamers are disappointed in Starfield’s apparent lack of DLSS support, as Nvidia’s DLSS Super Resolution technology typically delivers better upscaling results than AMD’s competing FSR tech.

You can join the discussion on AMD confirming that DLSS can be integrated into AMD partnered PC games on the OC3D Forums.