AMD recently announced its partnership with Bethesda and that it will the exclusive PC partner for the latter’s highly anticipated space adventure, Starfield. What this means is that, at launch, the game will launch with support for Team Red’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR2) upscaling technology and, unsurprisingly, NVIDIA fans are none too happy about it.
The reason for the unhappiness? Because it means that there is the possibility that the game will not support other upscaling methods, such as Team Green’s DLSS 3 or Intel’s XeSS. “We have AMD engineers in our code base working on FSR2 image processing and upscaling and it looks incredible,” Todd Howard, Game Director at Bethesda, said about Starfield’s exclusive PC partnership.
The Starfield and AMD exclusivity technically comes at a bad time for the chipmaker, especially after the laundry list of other sponsored game titles were found to be allegedly blocking the upscaling technology of its rivals. What is even more surprising, though, is that supporters of AMD aren’t quite sold on the partnership as well, and you can see it within the r/Amd subreddit. Some Redditors actually cite the problems that PC gamers faced with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and how Bethesda’s new IP may likely encounter similar issues during the game’s zero hour. These aren’t mild comments either; as is usually the case with the internet, the comments are borderline vicious but to be fair, there are some grounded ones as well.
Nvidia sycophants crying about AMD exclusives is hilarious. Nvidia has plagued the industry for years with exclusivity and anti-competitive tactics.
– "the way it's meant to be played" program, Physx, GameWorks, RTX, DLSS2/3, CUDA, Optix, GPP, etc. https://t.co/oH6i3ZoCCO
— AMDGPU (@AMDGPU_) June 27, 2023
As PCGamer points out, though, the vitriol isn’t any better on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform, Twitter. Tweets by long-time NVIDIA supporters range from asking folks to boycott AMD for its “anti-competitive garbage”. It is an ironic comment, given that NVIDIA itself has often engaged in similar tactics for other titles. And of course, there is also the argument that FSR2 is less effective than NVIDIA’s current DLSS 3 upscaling technology, thus limiting the graphical fidelity options to Starfield. While that statement isn’t entirely untrue, FSR2 is still a vast improvements of the previous version of it and the best part of it? It works with both Radeon and GeForce GPUs.
