AMD Claims Starfield Devs Have the Power to Add DLSS Support

In a recent discussion with The Verge, AMD's Chief Architect of Gaming, Frank Azor, affirmed that the company is not preventing Starfield from utilizing Nvidia's DLSS technology. Contrary to many people's opinions. Azor assured Starfield fans that AMD does not control what upscaling solutions Starfield utilizes, and if Bethesda wants to add DLSS in the future, AMD will give its full support.

However, Bethesda has not announced plans to add DLSS support to Starfield, so there's no guarantee that DLSS will make it to the space RPG. Azor gave a possible explanation for Bethesda's prioritization of FSR2 over DLSS, stating the fact that FSR2 can run on all PC hardware and the Xbox Series X and S. He also admitted that AMD requests FSR (FSR2?) to be prioritized in a game if the company is paying a publisher to bundle their game with its own graphics cards. However, Azor clarified that AMD's requests are not demands for FSR2 to be implemented in sponsored games.

(We should note that FSR and FSR2 are different beasts, and games that support FSR only would require more work to support DLSS — as well as FSR2. But FSR2, DLSS, and XeSS all use similar hooks, so if a game supports one it should be relatively easy to add support for the others.)

It's good to hear that AMD is not preventing its gaming partners from incorporating Nvidia's competing DLSS upscaling technology into their games. Assumptions about AMD blocking DLSS started when enthusiasts and media outlets began actively tracing the number of AMD-sponsored games that support both FSR2 and DLSS and discovered that very few of the games actually support DLSS. This was backed up by the suspicious removal of DLSS and ray tracing in Boundary after the game's development studio, Skystone Games, became an AMD partner — the DLSS support already existed, so why remove it?

Unfortunately, The Verge failed to get an official statement from Bethesda to see if Starfield might receive DLSS integration in the future. It wouldn't be surprising if Bethesda is prioritizing FSR2 due to the reasons Azor suggested, since AMD's FSR2 technology does indeed work on different hardware configurations and doesn't require dedicated hardware to function like Nvidia's competing tech. At the same time, Bethesda could wait to implement DLSS and even XeSS later, once the game is launched and development resources are freed up.

But if you're really desperate for DLSS, DLSS modder PureDark has promised he'll have a Starfield DLSS mod ready when the game launches. He's done the same for several recent AMD promoted games that only had FSR2 support, which tells you a lot about how easy it is to add DLSS support to a game that already has FSR2 support. At least there will be ways to get DLSS working in Starfield unofficially.