Starfield datamine confirms fears over lack of Nvidia DLSS & Intel XeSS

Starfield fans have been digging through the files available in the preload and it appears the supersampling news isn’t good.

After announcing a partnership with AMD, Bethesda, and Microsoft hit PC players where it hurts. The AMD partnership put fears that there’d be no chance of alternative supersampling options in the game.

As Starfield has gone up for preload, technically savvy players have been rooting around in the files looking for any evidence of Nvidia’s or Intel’s options. They haven’t surfaced with good news.

Within the files, Twitter user Sebasti66855537 has found that there’s no trace of the files or folders in Starfield usually associated with the two supersamplers.

So after combing through Starfield preload files on PC, I don't see any sign of it supporting DLSS/XeSS. If true I think this would generate a lot of backlash for Bethesda & AMD (due to their refusal to confirm whether they block rival GPU vendor techs in their sponsored games). pic.twitter.com/U67On3x6Kt

— Sebastian Castellanos (@Sebasti66855537) August 18, 2023

Nvidia DLSS has become the gold standard for supersampling, offering not only excellent quality in the blown-up frames but allows for performance boosts with certain hardware. In our review of Spider-Man: Miles Morales’ PC port, we found that XeSS gave the second-best quality for supersampling.

AMD’s FSR isn’t bad by any stretch, and each update does improve the quality. However, we’ve found that FSR can lead to muddy images in comparison to the other two.

The Twitter user mentioned above, Sebastian Castellanos, also points out that developing an implementation of the two for Starfield should be much easier, given that the work has mostly already been done. However, this is the AMD method, and games like Resident Evil 4 Remake have been locked out of other supersampling options.

However, not all hope is lost. A modder who specializes in adding DLSS and XeSS to games that don’t have it is already on the case.

What is supersampling and why is it important for Starfield?

Supersampling takes an image at a lower resolution and blows it up to another. It then uses algorithms and machine learning to smooth out the look of the image. This is an attempt to give you much more graphical fidelity at a higher resolution while taking the work off of the hardware.

For Starfield, it’s been speculated that the game will be quite heavy on the CPU side of things, rather than GPU. The world is full of interactivity and plenty of things to keep track of, which the CPU will handle. By alleviating the graphics load from the hardware, it should help the game run much better under intense loads.

In every performance and visual metric, DLSS almost always comes out on top. With Nvidia cards still dominating the PC gaming market, DLSS has become a key selling point.