Newest videogames are broken. Take Starfield for example. It has been released with several issues, but to be honest not so much as other titles like Cyberpunk 2077. Recently, it has been confirmed that Starfield would add NVIDIA DLSS and the first performance tests are promising. The new Starfield update brings balance to the AMD and NVIDIA conflict.
Bethesda associated with AMD to optimize the game, mainly to run smoothly in the Xbox Series X/S. The story goes like this, Microsoft bought Bethesda to make Starfield exclusive but it was originally designed as a PS5 exclusive. An unbalanced development that can be seen on the different technical issues the game presents.
The new Starfield update
The association between AMD and Bethesda added FSR 2 support. This is the image escalation technology from the AMD developers. In the PC version of the game it didn’t include NVIDIA DLSS support and the performance was cut. The NVIDIA technology wasn’t present because of the Bethesda and AMD agreement. But modders worked on the game and now the DLSS support is present in the space warships game. Although it’s not an official integration, the results are pretty good.
The ChipAndCheese analysis reveals that AMD still has the advatange. Radeon graphics optimize the L2 cache bandwidth whereas NVIDIA chips design result in less performance. The NVIDIA graphics deal with smaller registry files and the workload is lower. This makes it harder to keep a stable load on the execution units.
Thanks to the CapFrameX software we can see the DLSS 3 technology offering a 23% plus in the general performance. The FSR 2 in RX 7000 XT only increased an 8% the benchmark results. Both results are taken from a 1440p resolution session with no additional adjustments. The performance tests also compare Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Core i9-13900K. Both components are pretty similar and AMD wins by a very small margin.
A new addition with no tricks
Even though the difference seems striking, in fact it isn’t. The normal difference between both technologies remains the same. DLSS also requires dedicated hardware while FSR doesn’t. The DLSS 3 only works on the RX 40 Series and the FSR 2 on the RX 7000 Series.
Other technologies included with DLSS are Super Resolution and Frame Generation. Both technologies can give you a small boost if you activate them simultaneously. But the results of the benchmark tests indicate that both technologies are available with no tricks or optimizations whatsoever. Normally, developers only include the compatibility but they don’t invest time or money on improving the performance.