Bethesda’s exclusive partnership with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has raised lots of questions about Starfield, like whether it will support Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology.
It’s a reasonable question considering Nvidia are AMD’s biggest rivals.
DLSS uses AI to make games run faster and look better by rendering them at a lower resolution and upscaling them. It also means the GPU doesn’t have to work as hard, which is a godsend for people like me who don’t have a souped-up rig. So, what’s the deal? Will Starfield support DLSS, or will we be forced to use AMD’s less impressive FSR system, which aims to achieve similar results by using spatial upscaling techniques?
Does Starfield support Nvidia DLSS?
The short answer is no, Starfield will not support Nvidia DLSS on its own. This was more or less confirmed by Bethesda CEO Todd Howard himself while discussing the partnership in a YouTube video on June 27.
Starfield had been built on Creation Engine 2 in accordance with AMD, and AMD engineers have been in the code base working on FSR2 upscaling and image processing, Howard confirmed. Given the exclusive nature of the partnership, the logical conclusion is DLSS is not supported—at least, not officially.
Related: Starfield will let you purchase for Xbox and play on PC at no extra cost
DLSS support still might become available thanks to a mod. Starfield supports modding, and a modder with a knack for implementing DLSS in games that don’t support it natively has vowed to bring it to Starfield before its official launch on Sep. 6, according to a report from GameRant.
This modder did it for Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, which also didn’t support DLSS natively, and it worked well. So, there’s still some hope for players like me who could benefit from the increased performance it offers.
If all else fails, another option is to play it on a different platform.
