Support for Nvidia's DLSS tech was added in November 2023, and now it's AMD's turn.
When Bethesda added Nvidia’s DLSS tech to Starfield back in November 2023, it promised that support for AMD’s FSR 3 would be added “in a future update.” Today it announced that update will arrive, in beta form, on Steam next week.
“We’re excited to share that AMD FSR 3 is coming to StarfieldGame’s Steam Beta next week!” Bethesda tweeted. “FSR 3 will be available to all PC players later this month ahead of our next scheduled update.”
(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks (Twitter))
If you’re like me, the announcement led to an immediate question: What is FSR 3? It stands for Fidelity FX Super Resolution 3, and as we lay it all out in our guide, it’s an upscaling technology that’s essentially AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s Frame Generation tech in DLSS 3. Unlike Frame Generation, which requires dedicated hardware, AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames is software-based, but it performs a similar task by generating and inserting frames between frames in order to improve visual fluidity.
AMD released the FSR 3 source code in December 2023 and modders immediately went to work with it, quickly delivering some impressive but occasionally wonky results. This official implementation should be a big step forward from that, though, in terms of performance, stability, and sheer simplicity.
Bethesda said the patch will also make a change to FormIDs—hex-based numbers used as identifiers for items in the game—that “should improve stability for saves that have visited many locations.”
FSR 3 support is a welcome addition, although as we noted last year, the choice to roll out DLSS support first, even though Starfield is an AMD-sponsored title, demonstrates that Nvidia is still “king of upscaling.” FSR is hardware agnostic which is a big plus, but for those with the Nvidia hardware to properly make use of it, there’s no question that DLSS is the way to go.
As with previous updates, the Starfield FSR 3 update will launch first as a Steam beta, meaning you’ll need to be opted into the beta branch if you want to put eyes on it before it’s fully rolled out. Do note, though, that the Steam DLSS beta required an entirely different build of Starfield, and progress earned in that build did not carry over to the live game—Bethesda hasn’t said whether that will be the case with the FSR 3 beta, but I would assume it will be. We’ll keep you posted on the full patch notes for the next Starfield update on Steam when they’re released.
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