By Richard Lawler, a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget.
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Bethesda is almost ready to officially add Nvidia’s graphics upscaling technology to Starfield, but it will look for help from the PC gaming community first with an opt-in beta test available via Steam.
The company says the game’s next update will support DLSS with frame generation (which would mean DLSS 3, if not 3.5) as well as display and HDR controls for supported systems.
The RPG’s lack of support for DLSS was an issue before it even launched, with “exclusive PC partner” AMD forced to come out and insist that Bethesda would have its full support if the developers wanted to add support for the Nvidia technology. Once the game was available, modders quickly added unofficial support for the tech, showing how it could improve performance on gaming PCs with Nvidia graphics cards.
As for the stock version, in a Digital Foundry video, Alexander Battaglia said, “If you’re on Intel and Nvidia you’re getting a bizarrely worse experience here in comparison to AMD GPUs in a way that’s completely out of the norm.” Starfield already supports AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2), but in a subsequent post, Bethesda noted that an upgrade to FSR 3 with AMD’s frame generation technology would have to wait for a “future update.”
There are other fixes Bethesda has already promised also on the way, like an FOV slider and 32:9 ultrawide monitor support. We’ll see what else is available when this beta test starts next week before the update becomes available
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