Modder Promises DLSS 3 Integration Early in 'Starfield'

Starfield
(Image credit: Steam - Starfield)

Upscaling modder PureDark announced he will mod DLSS 3 into Bethesda’s new space role-playing game, Starfield,  when the game enters its early access phase. The modder is going through the trouble based on the fact that Starfield is an AMD-sponsored title, and assuming that Bethesda (Starfield’s developers) will not add DLSS to the game. According to PureDark, he will add frame generation first, then slowly start implementing DLSS 2 upscaling after the game leaves early access.

PureDark is a pretty well-known modder at this point and is particularly known for his work in Jedi: Survivor, where he was able to nearly double the game’s frame rate by modding DLSS 3 frame generation into the game when it first came out with all of its performance problems. He’s built up quite a large following recently and now actively “sells” his mods through Patreon, where gamers can sign up to grab his latest mods. 

His ports have been surprisingly good, and have a quality that closely resembles official implementations. That said his mods are not always perfect, and you’ll often see some minor artifacts with his implementation.

PureDark (Modder) on the Starfield situation from r/nvidia

The nice thing about PureDark’s commitment is that Starfield players will have DLSS support whether or not Bethesda decides to officially support it or not as long as the modder lives up to his promise. Modding is one of PC games’ biggest advantages, especially in this case, and gives gamers more ways to experience the game compared to other platforms.

That said, having frame generation before launch might not be that beneficial, depending on how demanding the game’s graphics are. Based on the game’s system requirements, it looks like it will be another daunting AAA title that will push all of your hardware to the limits — even your SSD. For some additional perspective, the game will also be locked to 30 frames per second on consoles according to game director Todd Howard, to insure visual quality won’t be compromised. If the game is as demanding as sources lead us to suggest, having frame generation could be very beneficial, but DLSS frame rate improvements will be locked to RTX 40 series owners until DLSS 2 integration gets added.

Of course, PureDark’s promise could be nullified if Starfield’s developers decided to add DLSS into the game early/at launch, which is what many would like in the first place. Even if DLSS doesn’t get implemented officially, it's not like the game won’t have other upscaling options to choose from. AMD has confirmed that Starfield will have FSR 2 support through its new PC-exclusive partnership with Bethesda. So Starfield players will still have an upscaling solution that will work with both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards that won’t require mods, they just won't have the choice of what they want to use.

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

  • Well all know, it’s no secret that AMD and NVIDIA are doing their best to promote their upscaling techniques. Behind closed doors, these two teams sign deals with numerous developers so that they can implement their techs in their games. However, it appears that NVIDIA is more pro-consumer than AMD when it comes to these PC upscalers.

    As NVIDIA told WCCFTech, it does not prevent developers from using different upscalers in its sponsored games.

    “NVIDIA does not and will not block, restrict, discourage, or hinder developers from implementing competitor technologies in any way. We provide the support and tools for all game developers to easily integrate DLSS if they choose and even created NVIDIA Streamline to make it easier for game developers to add competitive technologies to their games.”
    On the other hand, AMD dodged that question. And, since most AMD-sponsored games only have FSR and not DLSS, we can assume that something fishy is going on behind closed doors.

    “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.”
    So, instead of improving its tech, AMD appears to be restricting developers from using NVIDIA’s tech. And since we are on the topic of FSR… where the heck is FSR 3.0? AMD’s answer to NVIDIA’s DLSS 3?

    As WCCFtech noted, most of the NVIDIA-sponsored titles had DLSS and FSR support at or soon after launch. On the other hand, out of the 13 AMD-sponsored AAA games, only 3 of them received support for DLSS.

    To be clear, NVIDIA has also done some shady stuff in the past. However, in this particular case, the green team is more pro-consumer than its rival.


    PS: There is ZERO "fanboyism" in all my replies. I don't take any camp's side, be it AMD, NV, Intel, DELL, HP, or Apple. I just try to tell the basic facts and truth behind this gaming industry scene.

    Reply
  • Honestly speaking, this seems like a bummer though.

    Because based on the recent gameplay demos/videos shown, and also the 'Creation Engine 2' which this game is using, which is an enhanced version of the engine used in Bethesda’s previous games, Starfield seems likely to be a CPU-heavy game, so DLSS 3 would have been ideal for it.

    For CPU-heavy/bound titles DLSS helps a lot ! AMD claims that the game will also be able to utilize multi-core CPUs.

    But, the game does not appear to have any specific PC-only Ray Tracing effects. This is a missed opportunity as Starfield could really benefit from RTGI, RTAO and RT Shadows.
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    How ironic... DLSS is closed and proprietary and does not work on Intel or AMD with no real good reason. Hell, even Frame Generation doesn't work on anything from before RTX4K and people doesn't bat an eye eating all the BS nVidia said about it not being possible to backport.

    Yes, it's bad these Developers don't include it, but this is BetaMax vs VHS again, LaserDisk vs DVD, HD-DVD vs BluRay.

    Let the Company with the biggest pockets win, I guess. We all lose.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • evdjj3j
    I thought NV said DLSS requires "training".
    Reply
  • RedBear87
    -Fran- said:
    How ironic... DLSS is closed and proprietary and does not work on Intel or AMD with no real good reason. Hell, even Frame Generation doesn't work on anything from before RTX4K and people doesn't bat an eye eating all the BS nVidia said about it not being possible to backport.
    Agreed on the irony, but it is ironic because AMD is so invested in open technology that, apparently, it will actively close its games to the solutions developed by others. I'm not really sure where you're getting the infos about DLSS and frame generation being possible to run on shaders without the usage of separate accelerators and without getting lower than native performance. I'm sure Tom's Hardware or any other outlet would love to look at the detailed documents about this conspiracy.:D
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    RedBear87 said:
    Agreed on the irony, but it is ironic because AMD is so invested in open technology that, apparently, it will actively close its games to the solutions developed by others. I'm not really sure where you're getting the infos about DLSS and frame generation being possible to run on shaders without the usage of separate accelerators and without getting lower than native performance. I'm sure Tom's Hardware or any other outlet would love to look at the detailed documents about this conspiracy.:D
    How to phrase it... Let's see... You have ways to decode instructions and either emulate or translate instruction streams and make them work across different architectures. That's why you can have FP units process different kinds of floating point operations and decompose them. The fact DLSS "can't be ported" is a factual lie. I don't need documents to prove it. It's akin to someone saying you can't port a Super NES game to PC, because the SNES uses a completely different architecture than PC, but we all know how that went in the 90s.

    Do I know exactly how to run DLSS on AMD or Intel hardware? No, I do not. Do I know if it is possible? Yes, I do.

    If nVidia opens the DLSS as a spec anyone can follow and implement, you can bet AMD or Intel could run it if they wanted to. It's the same as PhysX back in the day when nVidia locked AMD GPUs from running just because and forced it to be "emulated" in the CPU instead.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • NeoMorpheus
    I honestly dont get the issue here.

    1- somehow, smart people here are conveniently ignoring that DLSS only works on SOME nvidia gpus, yet FSR works on AMD, Intel and Nvidia gpus, including GPUs that Dear Leader Jensen decided to leave out of their magical DLSS.

    2- why aren you outraged that DLSS is actually turning PC gaming into a closed platform?

    3- where were these modders when it was the other way around?

    4- Lastly, theres this:

    CZmTqEJPSeEView: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZmTqEJPSeE

    At this point, I wish that AMD simply sold their GPU division and left us at the mercy of nvidia.

    Hope you have enough money to buy your new 5050 RTX gpu that will have a msrp of US$2k...
    Reply
  • rluker5
    -Fran- said:
    How ironic... DLSS is closed and proprietary and does not work on Intel or AMD with no real good reason. Hell, even Frame Generation doesn't work on anything from before RTX4K and people doesn't bat an eye eating all the BS nVidia said about it not being possible to backport.

    Yes, it's bad these Developers don't include it, but this is BetaMax vs VHS again, LaserDisk vs DVD, HD-DVD vs BluRay.

    Let the Company with the biggest pockets win, I guess. We all lose.

    Regards.
    DLSS is largely run on tensor cores that do many more, but simpler operations than a conventional GPU is capable of. A GPU without them might be able to do the same job but it would be so much slower it would be useless.
    Intel tried to bring XeSS to their iGPUs that lack XMX cores (Intel's tensor version) but had to drastically tone it down so much that it looks like junk. It's a whole different version that can work on other hardware, but is inferior.
    Maybe Intel Arc and Nvidia RTX could both use each other's matrix computed upscaling, because they both have significant matrix math processors, if they shared, but the other graphics cards without enough matrix units can't use the upscaling methods in a timely fashion because they simply lack the hardware.

    The reason DLSS, XeSS and FSR2 can all work on the same games is because they all take a previous frame and motion data to upscale the current one. https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.2/en-US/temporal-upscalers-in-unreal-engine/ They are all temporal upscalers that can be all used in a game if any can. But they use different hardware so you can't just use an upscaler on mismatched hardware.
    Reply
  • Dr3ams
    The amount of Bethesda DLC and fan mods for this game will be epic.

    ...and I could care less about who is upscaling what, as long as my GPU can run the game.
    Reply
  • Sleepy_Hollowed
    NeoMorpheus said:
    I honestly dont get the issue here.

    1- somehow, smart people here are conveniently ignoring that DLSS only works on SOME nvidia gpus, yet FSR works on AMD, Intel and Nvidia gpus, including GPUs that Dear Leader Jensen decided to leave out of their magical DLSS.

    2- why aren you outraged that DLSS is actually turning PC gaming into a closed platform?

    3- where were these modders when it was the other way around?

    4- Lastly, theres this:

    CZmTqEJPSeEView: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZmTqEJPSeE

    At this point, I wish that AMD simply sold their GPU division and left us at the mercy of nvidia.

    Hope you have enough money to buy your new 5050 RTX gpu that will have a msrp of US$2k...
    You beat me to the punch.

    I was legitimately wondering why even write this article when FSR is officially supported on all GPUs, and this should've been the opening line.

    Absolutely wild DLSS is absolutely not needed unless people it want to feel special that their cores are using a specific type of mathematics.
    Reply