A big special thanks to Ha$$an Mujtaba for the news tip and financial backing for this article.
Initially I reported on the blatant hypocrisy of moronic consumers and the tech press for hilariously slandering AMD for allegedly withholding developers from using proprietary black box technology from their competitor in the upcoming open world RPG title from Bethesda, Starfield.
Their competition being NVIDIA’s DLSS which is only supported on GeForce GPUs, whereas AMD’s open source solution, FSR or FidelityFX Super Resolution is a one size fits all solution, similarly to Intel’s XeSS upscaling solution, which is supported across all three vendors rather than arbitrarily locking it down to their own hardware exclusively.
AMD’s marketing is woeful at best and quite honestly they were sorta screwed whether they decided to comment on the issue or not, this bullshit circulated the web for over an entire month with AMD’s Frank Azor finally stating that Bethesda are free to add proprietary cancer to Starfield to The Verge but obviously most AAA developers instead opt to utilize a technology that benefits all parties rather than a singular entity unless financially incentivized.
But I’m not convinced, especially after witnessing this latest case I am totally sure that AMD are using open source technology as a scapegoat to maliciously push FSR upon developers for their “own” selfish benefit, how else but accomplishing this feat than to totally bribe developers into incorporating the technology right on NVIDIA’s home turf, the Nintendo Shield.
I am absolutely cereal, AMD are totally bribing developers into blocking out proprietary technologies and instead using ease of integration open source technology on the Nintendo Shield.
And in all honesty when Starfield launches a broken and buggy mess as per usual of Bethesda, if you haven’t already played No Man’s Sky already I’d highly recommend giving it a go considering the blatant similarities in open world space exploration traversing from planet to planet.
No Man’s Sky is an oddity in today’s video game climate, it launched a buggy and broken mess, every single promise said by the developers, Hello Games from announcement to release was a flat out lie. But rather than abandoning the broken mess they shat out, Hello Games instead kept at it and actually turned the entire game around bringing forth the promises initially made such as in-game multiplayer.
There’s a really in-depth video from Internet Historian that covers the botched launch and endearing updates to No Man’s Sky.
But why am I bringing up No Man’s Sky? Well, Hello Games have announced yet another expansion to the game, that being “Echoes” which adds a lot more content to the game, new settlements, expansions and more.
But more importantly, the game initially released in 2016 and eventually came to the NVIDIA Tegra X1 powered Nintendo Switch console, by far the most popular video game console on the market, in October 2022 with the new Echoes expansion providing something unprecedented for the Nintendo Switch.
You’ve obviously guessed it by now that I am referring to AMD FSR support, on the NVIDIA Tegra SoC powered handheld machine, and no I am not making this up. AMD’s open source FSR technology is now being used to upscale and “enhance” the detailing of the Nintendo Switch which contains a nearly decade old graphics chip at this point, with the Tegra X1 utilizing the prehistoric Maxwell architecture.
“A highly customized version of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2), tailored specifically for No Man’s Sky on Switch, now provides higher image quality for Switch players. This temporal upscaling technology has been combined with dynamic resolution scaling to offer not only a boost to visual quality, but also improved and smoother framerates.”
This just goes to show how malleable open source technology freely utilizable across all hardware vendors can truly be, or rather how deep AMD’s pockets can truly go to withhold such amazing and superior technologies as NVIDIA’s DLSS from being imported onto a platform that does not support DLSS on an architectural level.
Honestly, if the tech press are going to launch a cabal over the fact that Bethesda’s Starfield doesn’t wish to use anti-consumer garbage in their game why aren’t they bitching about the fact that with the Echoes update to No Man’s Sky it now becomes an FSR exclusive title on Nintendo Switch, where’s the real outrage over undermining players with anti-consumer tactics like this?! Where is DLSS for No Man’s Sky on Nintendo Switch?!
Because this shit does in fact work, it genuinely sharpens and increases the crispness of No Man’s Sky on the Nintendo Switch which runs at a pitiful 1152×648 resolution when docked and that drops down to 896×504 when in handheld mode.
Because of course to use NVIDIA’s DLSS, you need to of course have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2000 series graphics card at the bare minimum, never mind the fact that the Maxwell architecture predates RTX Turing by a whopping four and a half years.
This is clearly monopolization from AMD who are obviously taking advantage of the Nintendo Switches outdated hardware in pushing their INFERIOR open source technology onto the platform.
Despite the fact that NVIDIA’s own software is so advanced that it’s capable of providing real time upscaling to a max resolution of 4K of movies and media with the Tegra X1 powered Shield TV / Pro.
Decade old hardware legitimately able to upscale and enhance the quality of streaming services, YouTube and whatever digital content you wish to consume, all without the need for DLSS, RTX, Tensor trash or whatever other marketing gimmicks NVIDIA wants to throw down our neck.
Amazing, shame that this isn’t actually applied to low resolution handheld devices like the Nintendo Switch which would be the only actual gaming platform to truly benefit from upscaling technology rather than pushing DLSS upon PC gamers to prop up demand and incentive into buying RTX hardware to play increasingly unoptimized games built on the Unreal Engine.
This is truly shameful and gutless from AMD to encroach upon NVIDIA’s territory like this with visually inferior and anti-consumer open source technology that’s fully capable of being utilized on a decade old ARM SoC, the equivalent of a glorified smartphone, now I understand why over 80% of PC gamers across the entire world opt to arbitrarily boycott the company and instead buy Intel and NVIDIA at every available opportunity even if their products are vastly inferior for more money.
Just in case you’re not smart enough to understand sarcasm in text this article is entirely satire, it would be pure retardation to slander / boycott AMD due to the fact that FSR has taken another massive leap in becoming mainstream alongside becoming a thorn in the side of NVIDIA loyalists online.
