AMD and Bethesda's Starfield Collaboration Displeased Many Fans
AMD is drawing criticism for its „exclusive partnership” with Bethesda on Starfield. Fans are concerned about the game's technical issues and blocking competition.
Yesterday we reported about the exclusive partnership AMD has with Bethesda on Starfield, and today we can learn more about the reactions it has elicited from the community. A sizable portion of it is, to put it mildly, disappointed. Some have gone a step further and outright call for a boycott.
Potential lack of DLSS and a possible repeat of the release of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
The biggest argument of opponents of AMD and Bethesda's collaboration is the potential lack of support for image scaling technology from competitors - this includes DLSS from Nvidia and XeSS from Intel. AMD is accused of deliberately blocking competing solutions and favoring its FSR 2.0, which strongly affects the perception of the company.
If AMD wants to improve its ratings with the community, it should make it clear that it will not interfere with the introduction of other corporations' upscaling technologies. Similarly, did Nvidia; the company has indicated that they do not intend to impede the implementation of competitors' solutions.
Moreover, some commentators on this exclusive partnership cite, on AMD's subreddit, technical problems from the launch of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and suspect that the same situation may repeat itself at the debut of Starfield (September 6).
"Once I watched a transition in Survivor and saw many FSR slip-ups. "Wow, what a crappy implementation from lazy developers," I thought. Then I found out that freaking AMD was sponsoring the game. How could they let this happen...," in strong words spoke kimmyreichandthen.
A similar opinion is held by kapel999, who rarely comments, but on this issue spoke out on our forum.
"I rarely write comments, but AMD is slowly driving me crazy. They create an image of the company for the people, and their conduct says the complete opposite. All the games that have been developed in cooperation with AMD lately have been tragically optimized (Callisto Protocol, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor), and FSR makes the graphics worse, offering virtually zero help when it comes to game performance. Nvidia is no saint, very far from it, however they do not block FSR technology in the games they promote. I hope that soon people will start talking about this and AMD will stop such anti-consumer ploys."
Calls for a boycott of AMD
Emotions after yesterday's video, in which Todd Howard announces a partnership with AMD, are strong enough that some people have begun to calling for a boycott. Twitter user Joker wrote:
"We need to start a boycott of AMD for these anti-competitive practices. They deliberately block DLSS support in the games they sponsor, which Nvidia does not do at all. This is terrible on their part. [...]"
This tweet was replied to by AMD technology fan account, giving examples of Nvidia's exclusivity - Physx, GameWorks, RTX, etc.
"Nvidia psychofans crying about AMD exclusives are hilarious. Nvidia has been plaguing the industry with exclusivity and anti-competitive tactics for years," AMDGPU commented.
However, these are minority voices. Under AMD's material published on YouTube, there were also many critical opinions. The negative opinion of those watching the video can also be seen from the ratings - a total of about 5,000 were issued, of which only 1,600 are positive. About 3,400 take a bad view of AMD and Bethesda's close cooperation on Starfield.
