Following a swathe of good news aboutStarfieldas part of the recent 45-minute gameplay showcase, some PC gamers were disappointed to discover that developer Bethesda Game Studios is partnering with AMD, which is almost certainly going to mean no Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS, for Nvidia graphics card users. A modder specializing in unofficial DLSS implementations has now announced that they’ve got big plans for the game, however.
Notably, the issue withStarfield’s partnership with AMDis that such deals have historically left Nvidia upscaler implementations in the dust in lieu of AMD’s less performant FSR and FSR2 upscalers. Nvidia game partnerships, on the other hand, usually include all available upscalers, with DLSS, FSR, and even Intel’s most recent XeSS solutions so that the user can choose whichever they like the most.
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According to PureDark, a popular modder specializing in upscaler implementations and DLSS in particular, they’ll see to it thatStarfieldsupports Nvidia’s flagship upscaler before the game’s five-day early access period is up. PureDark has already had ample experience in adding DLSS features to games that do not support the upscaler by default, as was the case withJedi: Survivor, another flagship-level AMD partnership. PureDark’s mods allow Nvidia users to not only leverage DLSS as a superior alternative to FSR, but in some cases, even enable DLSS 3.0, which Nvidia uses to refer to its AI-based frame generation framework.
There are some complexities to consider here, however. PureDark said that the first version of theStarfieldDLSS mod would specifically be the DLSS 3.0 package, which is the frame generation feature, limited exclusively to Nvidia’s RTX 4000 graphics card generation. Only afterwards would PureDark follow up his initial release with the regular DLSS 2.0 upscaler, which can be used by any Nvidia GPU from the RTX 2000 series upwards. PureDark said that they did something similar with theirStar Wars Jedi: SurvivorDLSS mod, so there’s precedent to this approach.
Taking into account all of the above, it is worth pointing out that some AMD-partnered games have indeed featured Nvidia DLSS as well on launch day, the recentSpider-Manports from PlayStation being a prime example of this. AsStarfieldis supposed to be a modder’s paradise, implying openness and flexibility, it is possible that Nvidia won’t be pushed off the table after all, though Bethesda is yet to comment on the matter.
Nvidia DLSS supports hundreds of gamesalready, and the upscaler has proven its worth as the best choice on the market, its only real downside being that it’s exclusive to Nvidia GPUs. SinceStarfieldis seemingly very CPU-bound in regard to its performance, as suggested by the hard 30 FPS cap on consoles, an upscaler may well not do much at all to improve performance on PC, but such claims will need to wait until actual testing can be completed.
Starfieldlaunches September 6 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
