from the please-just-stop dept

Of all the things in the gaming industry that annoy me, exclusivity deals have to rank near the very top. The idea that any title, but in particular third-party titles, could be exclusive to certain platforms, such as Xbox or PlayStation, is anathema to how art and culture distribution is meant to work. I understand why they’re a thing, I just think they shouldn’t be. And exclusivity deals tend to taint many other aspects of the industry. You need only look at the all of the convoluted fights Microsoft engaged in with regulators after gobbling up a bunch of large game studios to see the vascular reach exclusivity has in the industry.

The PC gaming community has had to put up with less of this sort of thing, generally. Sure, some titles are console exclusives and that sucks, but there hasn’t been much in the way of PC gamers having to pay attention to the base hardware and software they have to play games. And, yes, certainly there is some of this, particularly with those who want to play games on MacOS or Linux systems, but it’s generally been at a much smaller scale. One Reddit thread I uncovered from several years ago even noticed this and began wondering out loud if hardware exclusives in PC gaming would ever become a thing.

The latest squabble on r/gaming between console owners over exclusive games has got me thinking. What prevents something like this from happening with GPUs? After the GPP thing, I think it is pretty clear Nvidia is willing to do almost anything to control the market. I despise the idea of selling hardware with exclusives: I think hardware should stand on it’s own merits. The whole idea of pc gaming is to have choice, to have control over your machine. GPU exclusives would ruin this idea, in some ways. Could Nvidia pay for a popular game to run only on their hardware?

Well, it didn’t exactly happen in that way with the recently released space epic Starfield, but a specific graphical feature within the game did. See, Bethesda, parent company Zenimax who’s parent company is now Microsoft, inked a deal with AMD. The result is that one of the more popular graphics features found in Nvidia graphics cards, DLSS, is not supported in the game, but AMD’s version of it is.

As IGN noticed, the open-world RPG’s settings menu currently only supports the latest iteration of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution feature, FSR2, meaning players with Intel or Nvidia graphics cards that use different machine learning upscaling algorithms are out of luck. AMD gaming chief Frank Azor wouldn’t confirm if that was a requirement for its partnership with Bethesda, but recently told The Verge the studio could support DLSS if it wanted. “If they want to do DLSS, they have AMD’s full support,” he said.

Frankly, I don’t believe that and I don’t think you should, either. If all of the graphical features in AMD’s rivals’ chipset were free to be used by Bethesda, then what is the point of the deal AMD signed with Bethesda? And why in the world would Bethesda want to deny Nvidia chip owners the graphical abilities of machine-learning graphics upscaling? If you’re not a PC gamer, this might all sound like gibberish to you, but DLSS is no small deal.

For now, if you’re an Nvidia owner, this has all sort of been fixed for you thanks to the modding community.

The good news is that a “Starfield Upscaler” which allows players to replace FSR2 with DLSS or XESS was one of the first mods uploaded to the NexusMods website after the game went live. It’s not bug free and some PC players are still reporting issues getting their preferred upscaling tech to work, but it’s a start and will no doubt continue to get refined in the days ahead.

Bethesda’s exclusive partnership with AMD caused a big controversy when it was announced earlier this summer precisely because of the chip company’s pattern of locking out competitors’ features. The whole point of PC gaming is that it’s supposed to give players freedom to pick and choose their preferred builds, unlike on consoles where fans are locked into the manufacturer’s ecosystem.

Exactly. And the fact that this splintering of the PC gaming ecosystem ostensibly as a result of exclusivity deals with hardware component manufacturers is beginning to rear its ugly head is not a good thing. I’m loathe to make slippery slope arguments generally, but this sure does feel like the very first shot being fired in what might be a longer, and very dumb, war among chipset manufacturers.

Filed Under: exclusives, gpu, pc gaming, video games
Companies: amd, bethesda, microsoft, nvidia, zenimax