If you’re the kind of person who takes joy in pointing at the people who don’t have a thing that you have,then maybe it’s time to reevaluate your life. I do have some faith in humanity still, however, so I like to think that not many people areactuallylike that, and that concepts like ‘platform exclusivity’ aren’t particularly welcomed by anyone other than the business-heads for whom the term is synonymous with profit.
With platform holders threatening torug-pull games that we may have been looking forward to playingon our console of choice by suddenly buying the publisher of said game, it’s a bit of an unstable time for gamers, and now it looks like the infection of exclusivity is threatening to spread to something as granular and banal asgraphics options.
Last week,AMD ‘proudly announced’a deal with Bethesda, revealing AMD as the “Exclusive PC Partner” forStarfield. The video really says a whole lot of nothing, talking about how AMD will help get ‘the best’ out of Starfield (read on and you’ll see how unlikely that is), and Todd Howard pretending he’s excited about a deal that will—if it is what it sounds like—seriously hinder the game’s PC performance.
Naturally, the exclusivity announcement has got people worrying that the deal blocks Bethesda from implementing DLSS in Starfield, with AMD’s terse “no comment at this time” (via GamersNexus) on the matter not exactly reassuring anyone. If this were to happen, it would effectively sabotage performance for Nvidia GPU owners (who make up over 75% of PC gamers, according toSteam’s hardware survey).
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But first, let’s be clear on what we’re talking about here.
FSR 2 is AMD’s graphical upscaling solution, and is the company’s equivalent to Nvidia’s DLSS. Both features do much the same thing: namely a form of super-sampling that renders images at a lower resolution than the one you set, then uses AI to upscale the image and generate frames to increase frame rates at almost no extra power cost or sacrifice to image quality. Most modern graphically demanding triple-A games feature DLSS support, with nearly 300 supported games at the last count, while around 130 games support FSR. Crucially, any game can support both, thereby catering to both AMD and Nvidia GPU owners.
It’s a very impressive tech, though there’s overwhelming evidence to suggest that Nvidia’s rendition performs quite a bit better, especially with DLSS 3 on its latest generation of graphics cards. YouTube channelHardware Unboxed, for instance, compared the last-gen DLSS 2 against AMD’s latest-gen FSR 2 across 26 games, with DLSS trouncing FSR across the board in terms of visual fidelity. With DLSS 3, that gap is even wider, often doubling the frame-rate of FSR while offering much better image quality (see video below).
The performance difference ranges from small to massive, but it’s always in DLSS’ favour. Yes, there are murmurs that FSR 3 will finally be the one that finally catches up with DLSS, but with no release window in sight, that’s just all talk right now, and not a reality.
What is a reality is that if Starfield’s ‘exclusive AMD partnership’ means what we suspect it does, and blocks DLSS as a feature from Starfield, then it’ll effectively sabotage the game’s performance for the vast majority of PC players, who mostly own Nvidia cards.
That’d be seriously dodgy, and set a dangerous precedent that could further fragment the PC gaming space. We’re already having to tolerate this idea that somehow PC gamers who own a game on one PC platform might not be able to crossplay with players on another PC platform (a glaring issue that was only recently fixed inWarhammer 40,000: Darktide), but now we’re looking at the possibility that performance-improving features like DLSS may be arbitrarily disabled in games because of some kind of sketchy ‘exclusivity’ deals.
And I say this as someone who has a bit of a soft spot for AMD. Their GPU prices are way more competitive than Nvidia’s (you definitely get more bang for your buck, unless you really care about ray-tracing,which you probably shouldn’t), and they’ve been progressive when it comes to making their techs available for Nvidia users. FSR, inferior though it might be, does at least work with Nvidia GPUs, while many PC monitors that use AMD’s FreeSync are compatible with Nvidia’s equivalent G-Sync technology. The company has often framed itself as a bit of an open-sourcey, ‘gaming for all’ antithesis to Nvidia’s glossy corporate dominance, but a move like this would all but shatter that illusion.
Crucially, it would bodge the game’s performance simply for the sake of marketing, which is all the more bizarre as most people are decidedly unimpressed by the deal. The exclusivity announcement video on Youtube has 70% Dislikes; it’s such a bad look that you’d sooner think AMD would try doing this deal in secret—briefcases under park benches kinda thing—than proudly shout it from the highest mountain. But exclusivity has a lot of currency in the gaming world, and clearly some suit at AMD thought it sounded like a good idea.
Maybe this is all just a big misunderstanding, and AMD was somehow unaware of what throwing around a word like ‘exclusivity’ means in the modern gaming world (I mean, they could just look up the dictionary definition:“the practice of excluding or not admitting other things”). Alternatively, given the backlash, I wouldn’t be surprised if at this point AMD is trying to find a way to backtrack on what they said, and will soon turn around to say ‘Ofcourseit doesn’t mean we’re blocking [the far superior] DLSS from Starfield. We believe in gaming for all!’ or the classic ‘We’ve listened, we’ve learned our lesson, we’re backtracking on this BS arrangement.’
There’s enough exclusivity in gaming as it is, and it’s only going to get worse as Sony and (primarily) Microsoft continue to buy out third-party studios and make once-multiplatform games single-platform. For exclusivity to start infecting graphics options, and in this case hindering the game’s potential performance, would be a new low.
