AMD and Starfield are making common cause – with possible consequences for the feature list of the upcoming Bethesda epic.
In a few months, Starfield will finally be on the (digital) shelves – accordingly, Bethesda Entertainment is heavily promoting the space epic. After the publisher had voiced criticism about a Playstation port and declared that Starfield would have become a worse game that way, the next exclusive is now coming into the game. As AMD announced, they were able to win Starfield as an exclusive PC partner game and proudly present the promised optimisations in the YouTube video:
AMD optimisations for PC and Xbox Series X/S
Accordingly, AMD and Bethesda have worked closely together to optimise Starfield for both PC and Xbox. Specifically mentioned are the current CPU and GPU generations around Ryzen 7000 and Radeon 7000.
The optimisations include the use of multithreading code, which should significantly benefit performance on both platforms.
Game Director Todd Howard, on the other hand, emphasises again that Starfield means the most ambitious game
Bethesda has ever developed. Together with AMD developers, the studio worked on the code based on Creation Engine 2 to optimise such things as KI upscaling using FSR 2
Will DLSS and XeSS be left out of Starfield?
The community reactions on the net, however, are clearly less enthusiastic about the AMD partnership. After all, only recently have suspicions been raised that the Radeon manufacturer is deliberately blocking games for Nvidia technologies such as DLSS.
Accordingly, there is speculation that the cooperation with AMD could lead to the fact that neither Nvidia DLSS nor Frame Generation will be supported at release. The same would probably apply to Intel’s XeSS in that case.
A concrete answer from Bethesda on this topic is still pending – as soon as we have a confirmation or a denial, we will update the article accordingly.
And on Twitter the usual Nvidia vs. AMD
community war
In the usual social media channels, the announcement is followed, almost as expected, by the verbal tug-of-war between supporters of the red and green graphics card camps.
Some even call for a boycott of AMD as this partnership is further proof of the anti-competitive measures
the manufacturer is carrying out.
We need to start a boycott of AMD for this anti-competitive garbage. They are intentionally blocking DLSS support in games they sponsor, something that Nvidia does not do at all. Terrible on their part. Shame on you, AMD. pic.twitter.com/Mo4vvFXy6B
– Joker (@JokerReview) June 27, 2023
Even in (AMD’s own subreddit) the announcement is viewed critically when the most popular comments are used as a sentiment indicator.
The recent launch of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which was also advertised with an AMD partnership and struggled with technical problems is cited as an example.
Bethesda’s recent launch history also has commenting users worried about how optimised and smooth Starfield will really run on PC and Xbox – and this despite the latter wanting to avoid exactly such judder with a 30 FPS limit.
What do you expect from the partnership between AMD and Starfield? For the PC gamers among you, is lack of DLSS and frame generation a reason to switch to the console version? Let us know in the comments!
