Bethesda’s Todd Howard says the team built Starfield in partnership with AMD and promises exceptional performance on PC for AMD users and Xbox. Howard made the announcement in a short video with AMD’s general manager of the company’s computing and graphics group John Huynh, who said AMD worked “hand-in-hand” with Bethesda to optimize the space game for Xbox and PC using Ryzen 7000 series processors and graphics cards.
Howard said that Bethesda built new technology for their development engine Creation Engine 2 in partnership with AMD engineers to help, and Huynh said the result is better performance and higher visual quality on console and PC.
The reaction on Reddit was less than glowing. PC users were surprised and annoyed at the best features being tied to an AMD graphics card, since Starfield’s minimum requirements for AMD are significantly higher than they are for Nvidia graphics cards. The minimum system requirements on Steam call for an Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti or an RX 5700, but the RX 5700 is equivalent to an Nvidia GTX 2070 Super – which is a pretty substantial gap in price and quality.
AMD’s record with upscaling and quality enhancement is also a bit divisive. The general consensus among PC gamers is AMD’s FSR upscaling is inferior to Nvidia’s DLSS in both performance and extra features, such as ray tracing.
However, as some Reddit users pointed out, it’s not too much of a problem. Bethesda already promised Starfield as a “heaven” for modders, so a DLSS mod will probably pop up soon after the game launches on Sep. 6, 2023.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
