Moore’s Law is Dead has shared an interesting report on the whole Starfield issue. As per Tom, Starfield was in a sorry state as late as early 2023. The team had initially used Vulkan as the base graphics API, but things got out of hand, and a broken release seemed imminent. This is where AMD was hired to clean up the mess on account of their Vulkan background (it was built on AMD’s Mantle API).
Bethesda and AMD worked closely together in the development of the DirectX 12 version, with the latter making sure the game ran acceptably across all Radeon GPUs, explaining the advantage RDNA 3 has over NVIDIA’s Lovelace offerings. The integration of FSR 2 into the PC and Xbox versions of the game was another key reason behind the partnership.
That said, the YouTuber claims that AMD didn’t force Bethesda into nerfing performance on GeForce or Intel GPUs, nor did it block support for DLSS 2 or 3. The fact that the Deep Learning Super Sampler is officially coming to PC in future patches lends further credence to this rumor.
On NVIDIA’s side, their Starfield Game Ready drivers were incomplete at launch and lacked a resizable BAR profile as well. As Bethesda works closely with both vendors to optimize the game, we should see notable performance improvements in the coming weeks. Seems like there was no conspiracy after all.
Source: MLID.
