We’ve said on many occasions that Starfield is one of the most anticipated games of recent times. As we’ve already told you, early professional reviews have been largely positive, and during the first days of early access Bethesda granted to buyers of special editions of the game, the number of concurrent users on Steam alone grew by nearly a quarter of a million. Of course, the reaction of the general public remains to be seen, but with more than adequate caveats, it looks like it’s going to be an enjoyable title from day one.

In this regard, and I have already commented on this more than once, I belong to a large number of people who they eagerly await your arrival. It goes without saying that it won’t be anything as big as what Bethesda has been selling us lately, but it’s level at the release date of September 6th will be well above what we’ve unfortunately seen from quite a few games this year and into this list I’m including Redfall, which is also from Bethesda (though it’s developed by Arkane Studios, not Bethesda itself).

Now there is a point that can be honestly criticized in the Starfield that we’ve talked about on several occasions but I’d like to expand on today, and that’s it is somewhat incomprehensibleand it’s the lack of official support for many upscaling and image enhancement technologies. The most glaring case is the lack of DLSS 2 support, although we will tell you how to add this support here thanks to a third-party mod, but it is also notable that XeSS, Intel’s technology for Arc, was not used.

However, this is not the most striking. As mentioned on numerous occasions, AMD is Bethesda’s technology partner for this game, which might explain itexcluding these Intel and NVIDIA technologies in favor of FSR 2. However, AMD has said that it is not opposed to the implementation of third-party technologies, so the ball is in Bethesda’s court, which would choose to get rid of them in Starfield.

Now, since AMD and Bethesda are partners in this development, why wasn’t FSR 3 included in Starfield? Recall that AMD announced this technology at the end of last year, so Bethesda would have about a year to implement it, a process that AMD says is frankly simple. Recall that in the recent announcement of the arrival of FSR 3, the company announced that the first two games with this technology will be Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum, but advanced some other titles, in addition to showing the list of developers (along with Unreal Engine). Neither Bethesda nor Starfield are on these lists..

Early ship I can think of two reasons that would explain the lack of FSR 3 in Starfield by launch date:

• AMD was way ahead of its time last year and announced FSR 3 to take on NVIDIA and their DLSS 3. In other words, they announced a technology that was actually still very green and wasn’t finalized until recently.
• FSR 3 support in games may be the element that makes buyers choose an AMD graphics card over an NVIDIA card. So the company is interested in great titles like Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty having this support as soon as possible. However, with their exclusivity in Starfield, they don’t have to worry about implementing the latest version of FSR.

Both possibilities are of course theories and I personally prefer the former to the latter… with one caveat, AMD has included some games in the list of future FSR 3 titles that won’t arrive until 2024. Why not include Starfield in that list as well? I don’t really mind, really.

And yes, I’m fully aware that FSR 2 supports GPUs from all three manufacturers (AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA) and I appreciate that, but after testing both technologies on a machine with an NVIDIA GPU, it’s also clear to me that DLSS, and especially DLSS 3, gives me slightly better results than what I get with FSR 2. And it may sound like I’m speaking for myself, but if we go through the latest Steam hardware and software survey from last August we see about three out of four graphics cards, 74.93%, are from NVIDIA

So, if AMD really did not limit Bethesda from implementing other technologies (either directly or under the threat of withdrawing all or part of its contribution to the project), I do not understand the absence of DLSS support even if Intel represents 8.77% in the said survey.slightly more than half the value pointed out AMD with 15.94%Nor am I excusing the decision not to support. But whatever the terms of the collaboration between the two companies on the birth of Starfield, I can’t imagine the game not having support for FSR 3.

What do you think? What do you think is the reason Starfield doesn’t have support for FSR 3?