AMD has just planted its flag firmly on the hottest videogame entity there is: Starfield. Team red is apparently Starfield’s exclusive PC partner, in an astonishing move that must have Nvidia green with envy. While we don’t have all the details on what this will mean for fans of the space game, it can only be bad news for those of us hoping to boost Starfield’s frame rate with DLSS 3 tech.
In a jaw-dropping YouTube video, AMD’s Jack Huynh says the American hardware firm worked with Bethesda to “optimize Starfield for both Xbox and PC with Ryzen 7000 series processors and Radeon 7000 series graphics.” Ryzen and Radeon owners must be jumping for joy right now. While the technical nitty-gritty hasn’t been entirely nailed down, these optimizations will use highly multi-threaded code to boost performance, and Xbox users will benefit alongside their PC brethren.
In the video, Bethesda boss Todd Howard confirms Starfield will use FSR 2 upscaling to boost image quality. FSR 2 (or FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 to give it its full title) is AMD’s less well-known answer to DLSS 3. This temporal upscaling technology improves game graphics by rendering on-screen images at a higher resolution and then downscaling them to fit a lower resolution.
Unlike DLSS 3, FSR 2 isn’t hardware-restricted, so all GPUs can use it. You won’t need the best graphics card to benefit from AMD’s cutting-edge tech, although some see it as inferior to DLSS 3. We think this is a good thing for PC gaming, though, as it means performance boosts aren’t locked behind the latest (and most expensive) hardware.
The Starfield release date isn’t far away, so hopefully we won’t have to wait long to find out more about the AMD Starfield partnership. Make sure you check out the Starfield system requirements to be confident your rig will be blasting off at lightspeed when the sci-fi game finally drops.