Starfield’s missing Nvidia DLSS support has been added by a free mod | Hacker News Reader

Starfield’s missing Nvidia DLSS support has been added by a free mod

arstechnica.com

36 pointsmannylee126 comments

It's an AMD sponsored game, so it's unlikely to get DLSS support. Digital Foundry's editor said he spoke to devs of 3 other games where AMD made them remove support for DLSS. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F5H1OrKWYAANDPJ?format=png&name=...

To be fair, AMD also responded with this publicly, "AMD claims there’s nothing stopping Starfield from adding Nvidia DLSS": https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/22372077/amd-starfield-dl...

This is also mentioned at the end of the linked article.

> For anyone hoping for a more official (and less morally fraught) way to add DLSS support to Starfield, AMD hasn't completely ruled it out. In a recent interview with The Verge, AMD Gaming CEO Frank Azor said that "if they [Bethesda] want to do DLSS, they have AMD’s full support... If [our partners] ask us for DLSS support, we always tell them yes." No public word yet from Bethesda on whether that "if" will become a "when" any time soon.

These sorts of things are usually said with a wink.

What are they leaving out though? "Yes, sure, implement DLSS but then whatever money we're giving you will be 50% less. But you can implement it if you want!"

They aren't obligated to give developers any money, so I don't see the scandal here.

> If [our partners] ask us for DLSS support...

The fact that they have to ask them if it's okay...

Also DLSS has pretty strict requirements in advertising, requiring nvidia logo & adverts on splash screens and give nvidia any rights to use your app in their own advertising. [0] It's certainly not "free". A completely night and day difference to FSR, which just uses MIT [1]

Lots of people online seem to believe both are "free", so the only reason why you wouldn't implement one is some back room deal. But in my experience, just getting everyone into the same room to sign off on things like that is hard.

One "advantage" to this mod is they can completely ignore the license I guess.

[0] https://github.com/NVIDIA/DLSS/blob/main/LICENSE.txt

[1] https://github.com/GPUOpen-Effects/FidelityFX-FSR/blob/maste...

The relevant question isn't "are they doing it at this exact moment" though, it's "have they ever done this since DLSS2 launched". And GN specifically did ask them that, deliberately and repeatedly.

as GN said when they broke the story, the sensible PR move for AMD here is to quickly change the contracts and then go "there's nothing stopping devs!" and hope that nobody realizes the ink is still wet on the contracts.

Since they announced that, jedi survivor has suddenly announced DLSS support in an upcoming patch too. Wow, what a coincidence.

Again, this is a case of AMD already getting a ton of benefit of the doubt that wouldn't be awarded to any other megacorp here. If the tables were turned here, I doubt we would be equivocating about whether NVIDIA GPP really might have some benign goals and intentions, people would call a spade a spade and be done with it. Intel didn't get any benefit of the doubt on chipsets, people made a reasonable assertion they were doing it to sell more chipsets and that was the end of the dicussion for most people. But with AMD you have to exhaustively rule out any alternative possibilities and engage in lengthy discourse to disprove alternative "AMD is my friend" theories. Maybe they couldn't do X370 and X470 chipset support because, umm....

The chart looks pretty damning - really only sony seemed to get out of the provision. And now all of a sudden they come out with a statement after weeks and weeks of dramatic radio-silence (which of course NVIDIA did not do) that they "don't limit devs" (which wasn't the question) and suddenly studios are announcing they put it into games. Yeah, sounds like they dropped a new contract and took the terms out, and hope they can shout down anyone pointing out the implicit "anymore" in their statement.

https://i.redd.it/ev5skgvbw4bb1.png

youtuber moore's law is dead reported nvidia sources told him nvidia did this on purpose.

they caused a stir with clickbait-tubers and they just sat back and laughed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPSB_BKd9Dg&t=650s _ RX 7800 / 7700 XT Benchmark Leak: AMD doesn't need Starfield to Win _ Sep 2, 2023

aand DLSS support has been officially announced by the devs.

You can keep DLSS if we can get some subsurface scattering on the heads + better eye materials.

When I look at the texture resolution budget the hard surface art team got vs. whoever is in charge of the dead eyed bethesda faces, I wonder if they were bullied. The clothes look phenomenal full of all sorts of nice greebling, buckles, varying specularity, then your eyes move up a bit to see a plastic person with painted on eyes that blink about 35% less than they should.

Unlike DLSS, AMD's upscaling tech works cross vendor, so I am not sure what the big deal is. I have a 3080 and I don't notice any difference between DLSS and FSR on games, and Starfield is running fine and looks great at 4K with whatever the default settings are at 'High/Ultra'.

In other games, DLSS2 looks better to me, but the difference is mostly apparent at high scaling factors (like the "performance" preset).

...And I briefly launched Starfield just because it came with my CPU, and to be blunt, it looks hilariously dated, and runs like a pig. Cyberpunk 2077 looks better on my laptop 2060 than Starfield does on my desktop 3090, at about the same framerate on a 4K TV. The resemblance to Oblivion is uncanny.

Don't get me wrong, I love the old BGS games and don't really care about their dated visuals, I'm just saying Starfield is a horrible test for upscaling technology.

no idea what you're getting at, SF looks mighty fine :)

FSR has way more noticeable artifacting and in general looks worse than DLSS

You might not notice a difference but neither does grandma notice motion smoothing on her TV.

FSR2 has a bunch more fizzle in high frequency detail (specular and foliage), more severe disocclusion artifacts causing streaking and ghosting behind moving objects and it runs worse than DLSS since it eats into the raster budget instead of using discreet hardware like Nvidia's tensor cores.

I'd suggest that in future discussions you refrain from metaphors which use insulting connotations as it makes it difficult for the person to follow up without getting defensive. Perhaps try: 'you may not notice a difference, and I don't notice the difference between really good wine or mediocre wine, but there are people who can'.

I know this discussion is about a game, but lets not turn HN into a toxic gamer forum where we try to belittle each other and drop tech terms to gain cred.

There's a lot of bullshit in wine tasting. It's not total junk but double blind tests show experts assigning different flavor profiles to the same bottles/vintages and vice versa and non-experts coming to many of the same conclusions re: quality which mostly comes down to a lack of balance between acidity and sweetness. With DLSS vs FSR2, there is an objectively measurable difference in quality.

Apologies if you felt belittled. The "grandma doesn't notice motion smoothing" metaphor was used because of it being a shared experienced among the technologically savvy, though I get how it could be interpreted as insulting. Nothing wrong with being a grandma, they don't know any better.

I like the idea of "discreet hardware".

"Oh, you have tensor cores? I had no idea."

"One does not like to brag."

In my experience, people are sensitive to different aspects/weaknesses in game graphics. For instance, I don't really notice any difference between 60 and 120 FPS. I am also not very bothered by traversal stutter.

What I AM sensitive to however, is temporal instability - it just draws my attention and hurts immersion. Here DLSS makes a huge difference, as shown here[0].

Therefore it is sad that Bethesda chose[1] to deliver worse than possible image quality for 80%+ of their PC customers[2].

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[0] https://youtu.be/ciOFwUBTs5s?feature=shared&t=336

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452149

[2] https://archive.ph/mqPLK, nvidia has 75% market share here, but you have to look at the higher end parts only and exclude Intel as Starfield does not run at all on their GPUs[3]

[3] https://in.ign.com/starfield/193351/news/starfield-intel-fin...

If you don't see differences between DLSS and FSR it's on you there are numerous tests and reviews from well known outlets that just tell you that.

And more importantly for Microsoft it also works on game consoles.

There is a free frame generation version on nexus. And a free dlss 2 version there as well.

Free publicity for Starfield. :)

There's also an alternative mod that does DLSS3 as well as frame generation that isn't behind a Patreon paywall

https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/761

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