A new surprising, but exciting, development, has come up when it comes to Starfield, at least for people who don’t have PC builds based around AMD.
This all started when Bethesda revealed that they had made AMD an official partner for Starfield. Bethesda is not commenting on whether this arrangement means that other companies are not allowed to work on compatibility with Starfield. In particular, everyone’s concern are upscalers, such as Nvidia’s DLSS, or Intel’s XESS. It certainly sounds like only AMD’s FSR will get official support for Starfield. This
In fact, a new rumor emerged that Starfield will be the launch game for the state-of-the-art FSR3, the newest and most advanced installment of AMD’s upscaler technology. FSR3 will only be compatible with AMD’s newest Navi32 GPUs, and those GPUs are rumored to launch alongside Starfield. While this will make Starfield the most high-end game at its launch date, that will also definitely come to the detriment to every PC player (and for that matter, Xbox Series X|S user), who can’t upgrade to those GPUs.
Now, the issue about other companies was cleared up, as Bethesda confirmed other companies would not be working with them directly on Starfield, but they would be free to work on compatibility with their own upscalers.
However, a modder named PureDark emerged soon after, and promised to work on a mod for DLSS3 and DLSS2 support for Starfield. Now, this does not help gamers with Intel Arc GPUs. However, given that Intel is a newcomer to the market, and most gamers do have either an older Nvidia or AMD GPU, Puredark will help cover more or less half of those PC gamers, on Nvidia GPUs.
So, the news is that PureDark was himself given a review copy of Starfield. Our source may be too enthusiastic, as we don’t know if that’s enough time for PureDark to finish that DLSS3 and DLSS2 support mod for the game. But, it certainly indicates a good faith move on Bethesda’s part.
This move goes beyond, Bethesda will allow PureDark to work on the game if he wants to. They are discreetly supporting his endeavor by giving him as early a chance to work on it as he can. It’s especially noteworthy as Starfield literally just hit gold a few days ago, so Bethesda couldn’t really do it any much earlier.
While it also implies that Bethesda may never work on that compatibility themselves, it’s certainly a positive sign that the company isn’t just going to put their community under the bus if they can help it.
Starfield will be releasing on September 6, 2023, on Xbox Series X|S, and on Windows via Steam. It will also be Day One on Game Pass.
