Striking back against speculation that it paid Bethesda to exclude support for the rival upscaling solution, AMD’s Frank Azor says the developer is free to add Nvidia DLSS to Starfield if it wants. Ever since it was announced that Starfield wouldn’t include support for DLSS, some Nvidia owners have theorized that AMD had paid the developer to exclusively support its FSR upscaling solution.
AMD says there is nothing preventing Bethesda from adding DLSS to Starfield
Speaking to The Verge, AMD’s Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions, Frank Azor, said that if Bethesda wants to implement Nvidia DLSS in Starfield, “they have AMD’s full support.” Though he stopped short of divulging specific details about the contract between AMD and Bethesda, Azor says there is nothing standing in the way of the Starfield developer implementing Nvidia’s upscaling solution in the future. At present Starfield, which is available for preload now ahead of its September release, only includes support for AMD’s FSR upscaling technology.
Azor told The Verge that, while AMD expects developers to prioritize its features when it pays to have a title bundled with new cards, it doesn’t prevent them from including DLSS support. Currently, gamers who buy AMD’s 7800 XT or 7700 XT graphics cards will get a copy of Starfield with their purchase. Azor also suggested that Bethesda may have chosen to prioritize FSR support since the AMD chips powering the Xbox Series X and S can also make use of the upscaling tech. Although PC players with high-end cards like the Nvidia RTX 4090 won’t be able to use DLSS in Starfield, they can still take advantage of AMD’s FSR upscaling which, unlike Nvidia’s tech, is hardware agnostic.
Despite the lack of official support for the upscaling tech in the game at launch, though, some dedicated Nvidia users are already working on ways to add DLSS to Starfield. A modder called PureDark, who has previously added DLSS support to numerous titles, promised to add DLSS3 to Starfield during its early access period. This may not be the official solution Nvidia owners were hoping for, but it should at least give them the opportunity to use DLSS if they prefer.
