Microsoft and Starfield partner with AMD

It’s not uncommon for powerful games and their publishers to partner with companies to power their monstrous products. However, Microsoft has announced its partnership with AMD for the upcoming space-sim Starfield and power users are clutching their pearls.

AMD, in its own right, offers powerful options for gaming in all of its products. While there is nothing inherently wrong with AMD power and performance, it's just that Nvidia and Intel both offer strong gaming features as well that Starfield likely will not take advantage of.

Historically, Bethesda games are known for glitches and issues during gameplay. In the opinion of this writer, it has become part of the standard Bethesda Gaming Experience. The fact that Microsoft has decided to partner with AMD makes people fear that they’ll be locked out of scaling applications and specific technologies that might improve gameplay.

Image: AMD / Bethesda / Microsoft

The Todd speaks about AMD and Starfield

Todd Howard, director of Starfield and long-time Bethesda head, spoke during an AMD video about it all.

“We’ve built all new technology for [Starfield] with Creation Engine 2 and working with AMD on that to make it look great and run great has been really really special,“ Howard said. “We have AMD engineers in our code base working on FSR2 upscaling and image processing and it looks incredible.”

The video didn’t go into any of the nitty-gritty of the partnership or how the technology can handle such a beast of a game. But, past exclusivity deals have affected the possibilities of games.

For instance, FSR, or FidelityFX Super Resolution, is AMD’s tech that offers machine learning for higher resolution gaming. FSR competes with tech from Intel and Nvidia, such as Xe Super Sampling (Xe Super Sampling) and Dead Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), respectively. Games like the recent port of Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart support all three options on PC. And it’s better off for it.

Fans of the game fear that Starfield’s heavy strain on PC hardware will take a toll on performance. As mentioned, recent memory of glitches, bugs, errors, and issues in the Bethesda library games weigh on the minds of PC gamers. Despite these issues, the fantastic gameplay and story that keeps all of us hooked as post-release patches and fixes trickle in.

One way around the entire situation is Bethesda’s high end, very well-known mod market. Once the game comes out, give it time and someone will make a mod to solve the problem. We await more word on how PCs will handle Starfield as its set to release this September 6th.

Going from high-end space simulators down to 27 year old fantasy RPGs, did you read our obituary on The Realm Online? Or did you see that Starfield publisher Microsoft admitted they lost the console wars? Check them out on GameCrate!