AMD seems to have put themselves in hot water with PC gamers over the issue with AMD sponsored games. Unfortunately for them, the spotlight got put on them now because of Starfield.
But let’s talk about the issue first. WCCFTech observed that games that received sponsorship from AMD were not getting official DLSS or XESS support. They had made the accusation that AMD was deliberately blocking the games from getting such support. AMD responded to WCCFTech alleging that their upscaling technology, FSR, is open source and should be supported across other builds.
This was AMD’s statement:
“AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is an open-source technology that supports a variety of GPU architectures, including consoles and competitive solutions, and we believe an open approach that is broadly supported on multiple hardware platforms is the best approach that benefits developers and gamers.
AMD is committed to doing what is best for game developers and gamers, and we give developers the flexibility to implement FSR into whichever games they choose.”
However, a few days after this, AMD and Bethesda officially announced that AMD would be the exclusive partner for Starfield.
GamersNexus then sent this question over to AMD:
“Does the contract between AMD and Bethesda have any language which intentionally blocks or could be construed as blocking or limiting Bethesda’s ability to integrate alternative upsclaing technologies within Starfield?”
AMD’s curt, but very telling reply, is below:
“We have no comment at this time.”
Now, obviously, working only on supporting AMD CPUs and GPUs does make it easier for game developers. If their games are also coming to console, both Xbox and PlayStation supply their chips from AMD.
However, this creates issues that relate to competition. It’s not fair to AMD’s competitors that they don’t get official support for their technologies, such as upscalers. Even worse, it’s completely unfair to the consumers, who are coerced into buying AMD.
GamersNexus presenter Steve Burke theorizes that AMD may now conspire to save face by quietly allowing Nvidia and Intel to add their input to optimize Starfield. They can then reveal it later so that fans would feel bad for questioning them.
But as a general business practice, we can’t rely on PR nightmares to get companies to behave. This announcement does suggest that AMD can’t really do much optimization for Starfield at all, if they’re suppressing their competitors’ access to it. Really, the right thing to do is to just give other companies the chance to get their optimizations in for Starfield as well.
You can watch the GamersNexus video discussing this issue below.
