We saw it coming, but we’re still not happy. According to a recent leak, gamers who want to playStarfieldmay be unhappy if they have an Nvidia or Intelgraphics card. It’s increasingly looking like the upcoming Bethesda game will only support AMD’s upscaling tech,FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0. Such assumptions have been floating around for a while, and a look into the game files seems to have confirmed them, bar any unexpected findings closer to the release date.
Sebastian Castellanos on Twitter dug through theStarfieldpreload files on PC, and there’s been no sign of any support forNvidia’s DLSSorIntel’s XeSSupscaling technologies. We’ve seen it coming ever since AMD announced an “exclusive partnership” with Bethesda — andStarfieldin particular. Both the game studio and the GPU and CPU maker have been worryingly silent on the matter ever since. While this might come as no surprise, it’s still disappointing if it turns out to be true.
Right now, the files only appear to confirm support for AMD’s own FSR 2.0. While FSR 2.0 is definitely an improvement over the previous version, it’s still no match for DLSS, which is supported by Nvidia’s own hardware (Tensor cores). This especially applies to DLSS 3, which generates entire frames instead of just pixels and can deliver a pretty massive boost to frame rates. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty impressive. As covered in our review of the $600RTX 4070, enabling DLSS made it reach 73 frames per second (fps) inCyberpunk 2077at 4K withray tracingtoggled on. It drastically outperformed the $1,200 RTX 4080, which didn’t have DLSS 3 enabled.
— Sebastian Castellanos (@Sebasti66855537)July 18, 2025
An important disclaimer is that you don’t need an AMD graphics card to run FSR 2.0. Unlike Nvidia’s DLSS, FSR 2.0 can run on every GPU, be it AMD, Nvidia, or Intel. While that makes the disappointment a little less bitter, it’s hard not to assume that many owners of Nvidia’s top GPUs from theRTX 40-seriesmight want to enable DLSS 3 in a game as demanding asStarfield. Unfortunately, they might not be able to.
What makes matters worse is that it shouldn’t be difficult forStarfieldto include support for all three upscalers. If the game can support FSR 2.0, there’s almost no reason why it wouldn’t be able to support DLSS and XeSS. Nvidia even tries to simplify the implementation of DLSS for game devs with Nvidia Streamline. Sure, it adds some extra work, but it’s almost certainly possible.
Assuming thatStarfieldreally won’t support DLSS and XeSS, it might all be down to theexclusive partnershipbetween AMD and Bethesda. However, it’s hard to determine what AMD might have to gain from this — after all, users with GPUs from other vendors can still use FSR 2.0, so there’s no reason to swap to an AMD GPU just because ofStarfield. Let’s hope that the other upscalers might still show up somewhere in the game files or be added at a later time.
