Developer Bethesda has entered into a partnership with AMD for its sci-fi role-playing game “Starfield”. This is causing trouble for both parties: the community has been complaining about the feared preference for AMD for weeks. Now AMD is also getting into trouble with hardware recommendations for “Starfield”.
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Because AMD has now published its own system requirements for “Starfield” on its website, which differ from those that Bethesda itself has published on Steam. For a “heroic experience” in Full HD resolution – AMD’s lowest hardware recommendation – the company suggests a not exactly cheap Ryzen 5 7600 (from €227). Bethesda, on the other hand, lists the minimum requirements a much older AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or an Intel Core i7-6800K – the fact that you can also play “Starfield” with Intel hardware is something AMD obviously fails to mention in its own recommendations.
Advertising or system recommendations?
The system recommendations from AMD and Bethesda cannot be directly compared. Bethesda names the absolute minimum requirements – and leaves it open which resolution, frame rate and graphics settings the minimum hardware creates. AMD, on the other hand, speaks of “great graphic effects and frame rates” in its “heroic experience”. That’s vague, but it suggests high settings of at least 60 fps.
Nevertheless: Smooth frame rates should also be possible with cheaper processors – but AMD would then have to advertise older CPUs, because there is nothing cheaper in the 7000 series than the Ryzen. What’s more, the company even suggests different motherboard chipsets, although they don’t affect gaming performance. All AM5 mainboards can supply the proposed processors with enough power and connect the graphics card and an NVMe SSD with at least PCI Express 4.0. So it’s not surprising that the community looks at the AMD specs with great skepticism.
AMD’s hardware recommendations for “Starfield”.
(Image: AMD)
“Starfield” probably without DLSS
This aversion is probably also due to the fact that AMD has already made itself unpopular. Because AMD, as a partner of Bethesda, is very likely to prevent technology from competing companies from being used in “Starfield”. Specifically, many players are concerned with the DLSS upscaling technology and the DLSS3 frame generation technology. Both Nvidia developments can massively increase frame rates in video games with small optical compromises.
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Trailer for “Starfield” (Source: Bethesda)
But instead you will probably only be able to use the alternative FSR developed by AMD in “Starfield” because of AMD sponsorship. At least that’s how it has been with some previous games released in partnership with AMD, including Star Wars Jedi Survivor. This annoys many users because FSR is considered inferior to Nvidia’s DLSS product. AMD has not yet offered any alternative to the DLSS3 frame generation technology
One Demand from GamersNexusThe company did not want to answer whether AMD is also blocking the use of Nvidia technology in “Starfield”.
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