AMD will be the official Partner for Bethesda's upcoming title Starfield. Players are now concerned about missing important features. Read all about it here.
As announced on Twitter and YouTube, AMD will be the new partner for Bethesda's Starfield PC port. There is already some backlash for this decision, since the community fears that important features, provided by AMD's competitor NVIDIA, might not be usable now. Here is everything you need to know.
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Starfield Partners With AMD
The upcoming Bethesda game Starfield just partnered with AMD, as announced today. This decision was published on Twitter and YouTube with a short video featuring Jack Huynh, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Computing and Graphics at AMD and Starfield director Todd Howard.
Huynh opens the announcement video with a declaration of love for the upcoming sci-fi RPG:
Ever since Bethesda first announced Starfield, I have anticipated playing one of the biggest and most ambitious role-playing games that has been 25 years in the making. Making this game even more special is the close collaboration between Bethesda and AMD to unlock the full potential of Starfield.
As stated by Huynh, Bethesda and AMD worked hand in hand to optimize Starfield for both PC and Xbox with Ryzen 7000 series processors and Radeon 7000 series graphics
These optimizations both accelerate performance and enhance the quality of your gameplay, using highly multithreaded code that both Xbox and PC players will get to take advantage of.
Starfield Director Todd Howard had the following to say:
We are so excited for our new partnership with AMD on Starfield. It really is the most ambitious game we've ever made. We built all the new technology with Creation Engine 2 and working with AMD on that to make it look great and run great has been really, really special.
Unfortunately, some people in the Community aren't that happy about this announcement
Together, @AMD advances gaming with @Bethesda in #Starfield - optimizing gameplay for Xbox, as well as PCs powered by @AMDRyzen and @AMDRadeon 7000 Series. #GameOnAMD https://t.co/j86GgSOFpH pic.twitter.com/WjkBkVgbNm
— AMD Gaming (@AMDGaming) June 27, 2023
Community Backlash: Will Starfield Miss Important PC Features?
This announcement was followed by some backlash from the community, and some even called for a boycott. Especially the question, if features like DLSS and XeSS would be blocked by AMD, concerns the users. DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling-Technology and uses AI to help produce higher FPS by upscaling a games' resolution.
Especially on the AMD Subreddit, people were suspicious about the future. For example, user "fnjj" writes: "Rip, get ready for a (possibly) really, really bad fsr implementation like in jedi survivor and no DLSS support at all".
The user "johnieboy82" is even more negative about it:
At this point i expect any game that has the AMD Rewards sticker to be completely broken at launch and many month after that. The Callisto Protocol, Forspoken, The last of us 1 and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor made a very lasting impression in this regard. As a 7800X3D/4090 User i will probably be fine with Performance and VRAM without DLSS, but anyone with an older Nvdida Card should start to worry. I also predict the DLSS mod that will release 1-2 Days after the games launch will be the fastest and most downloaded mod from Nexusmods ever.
Todd Howard also talked about the FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution), that "fnjj" wrote about: "We have AMD engineers in our code base working on FSR2 image processing and upscaling. And it looks incredible. You're going to get the benefits of that obviously on your PC but also on Xbox."
Conclusion
Only the future will show, if Howard's and Huynh's partnership will provide nice graphics and stable fps optimization for Starfield on all platforms. Parts of the community had some very bad experiences with AMD in the past, as you could read in the Subreddit. The only way to convince them would be a perfect release for the title and some smooth hours of gaming.
Also, it will be interesting to see if this partnership between Bethesda and AMD will continue for other games as well. The Elder Scrolls 6 could need some nice graphics to live up to the immense hype, that will be coming for sure.