AMD recently announced its partnership with Bethesda on the upcoming game Starfield. Gamers are not happy with the announcement.

Seemingly out of nowhere, AMD uploaded a video on their official YouTube channel. On it, Jack Huynh, Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Computing and Graphics Group at AMD, announced that they were partnering with Bethesda Studios to “unlock the full potential of Starfield.” To be specific, they mentioned that they “worked hand-in-hand” to optimize Starfield on both Xbox and PC. When they brought up the PC, they specifically mentioned Ryzen 7000 series processors and Radeon 7000 series graphics cards.

Supposedly, according to Huynh, this will “both accelerate performance and enhance the quality of … gameplay using highly multi-threaded code that both Xbox and PC players will get to take advantage of.” Todd Howard, Chief Software Engineer at Bethesda Softworks and Starfield creator, explained things further. One thing he said, however, caught the attention of gamers in particular. At around the 1:19 mark of the video, Howard mentioned that they had “AMD engineers in our [their] code base working on FSR2 image processing and upscaling.”

It's this tidbit that caught the attention of a lot of people. FSR2, or the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, is what AMD uses to boost the framerates in supported games, as well as upscale resolutions. It's frequently compared to the NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), which does basically the same thing. Various people have tested the two and most, if not all of them, agree that the DLSS2 crushes the FSR2. This is why when the announcement came out, a lot of gamers were not happy with it.

A lot of people are mentioning that thanks to this, the game will likely not have DLSS support. This is because AMD-partnered games mostly do to not have other upscaling technology in them. Players are, therefore, forced to use FSR when playing.  One user even mentioned that they would have to “crank [their] 4090 to 200% render resolution since AMD's FSR is awful below 4K.”

Tom Warren, a Senior Editor for The Verge, said the same thing. In his tweet, he brought up the fact that “DLSS is massively superior to FSR2”, which is why he doesn't understand why Microsoft/Bethesda would “sign a deal that will lock DLSS out of Starfield.” He even went so far as to say that the deal is “anti consumer and won't help AMD sell GPUs.”

We'll see when the game comes out on September 6, 2023, what the performance will be like. It'll be a pleasant and welcome surprise if everyone's worries don't come true.

That's all the information we have about the people's reactions to AMD's partnership with Starfield. Check out our gaming news articles for the latest in gaming news.