AMD’s FSR 3 and Intel’s XeSS come to Starfield
Bethesda’s shiny new spacefaring RPG Starfield has had something of a tumultuous launch, arriving to tepid responses from both critics and gamers alike. But the company hasn’t left its fledgling franchise lost in space. After months of bug-squashing updates, the latest patch adds compatibility with both AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 and Intel’s Xe Super Sampling, alternatives to Nvidia’s DLSS added in November. The new update, version 1.9.67, is available to PC players now.
Starfield has been something of a showcase for AMD graphical tech since its release, so it’s a bit odd that it took this long for the company’s most recent and powerful version of super sampling upscaling to arrive — FSR 2 was available in the game’s initial version. FSR 3 improves upon its predecessor with frame generation tech and, unlike Nvidia’s solution, is available with any modern graphics card regardless of supplier. FSR 3 has recently had some bad press, being removed from the new early-release crafting game Nightingale.
AMD
The company’s promotional statistics show its own Radeon cards outperforming Nvidia’s cards by 18-26 percent at the same level and intensity, with both cards running FSR 3. Of course, that’s hardly an apples-to-apples comparison; prospective upgraders and system builders will no doubt be more interested in seeing how FSR 3’s frame generation technology running on AMD cards compares to Nvidia cards running the competitive DLSS 3 tech. These things are always fluid, of course, but initial comparisons from gamers on YouTube seems to show them to be competitive with each other.