Starfield's Missing Nvidia DLSS Support Added By a Mod - With DRM (arstechnica.com) 48
tlhIngan writes: Starfield, a Bethesda space-based RPG that was recently released, was criticized for not having Nvidia DLSS support -- instead the game was primarily written to feature AMD's FSR support. This isn't too surprising since the major consoles all use AMD processors and GPUs. However, an enterprising modder created a mod that enables players with Nvidia cards to enable DLSS. This isn't the unusual bit -- the mod makes DLSS2 (ca. 2020) available for free, while the version enabling DLSS3 (which adds the ability to use AI to generate frames in-between) is behind a Patreon paywall. This has lead to several other people to crack the DRM protecting the mod itself (note: this is not the DRM on the game itself -- the game's Steam page doesn't seem to imply use of 3rd party DRM beyond Steam). Imagine that -- DRM on a game mod because it requires payment.
What DRM? (Score:3, Insightful)
Requiring payment is not DRM
Re:What DRM? (Score:5, Insightful)
Copy protection is DRM.
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The mod will not activate unless you authenticate after launching the game with the mod installed.
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Well, apparently it will, you just need to apply a patch that fixes the problem.
Re:What DRM? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Some people just don't make the distinction between big greedy corporations and some dude toiling away in his spare time as a side income (which, depending on their current financial situation, might actually be necessary to stay on top of their living expenses).
It's especially bad with gig economy jobs, where many customers fail to realize how poorly such work actually pays.
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Some people just don't make the distinction between big greedy corporations and some dude toiling away in his spare time as a side income
Because there isn't any. Once money is involve, it is not a hobby or something you do for fun, you become a business. And boy do bedroom coders like following the same playbook as the big company. Overpriced, poorly designed software that I have to pay monthly for? Sign me the fuck up.
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Dude is raking in $50k/mo off other peoples work.
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How do you figure? He came up with a novel "jailbreak" for someone else's product, adding additional functionality not available elsewhere. It's no different than someone making an aftermarket part for a physical product - like the hardware code scanners/programmers for vehicles.
And how long is that income going to last, anyway? The game has been out for a couple weeks, at most, at this point. New game installs are only going to tail off from here, especially considering how dull the game is.
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What I am annoyed at is its not included in the original product, if some can put in a week of work without the source code, then why can't Bethesda do it? Running at the best graphics performance for your hardware should not be an optional extra. That I have to download from an untrusted source, I might as well get a pirated copy and then its free.
The answer is Bethesda prioritized what they saw as profit over providing the best user experience, just like they prioritized marketing hype over setting realis
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It's basically Space Skyrim with a major graphics update, with all of that Bethesda jank you've come to love about Bethesda games over the years.
FSR looks like big poop at the scaling required to make the game run well on my laptop's RTX 2060, so I really with they had DLSS.
Re: What DRM? (Score:2)
why canâ(TM)t Bethesda
Because of license agreements they must abide by
Re: What DRM? (Score:2)
It's no different than someone making an aftermarket part for a physical product - like the hardware code scanners/programmers for vehicles.
That's fair, and let's look at the ethics of reverse engineering and cloning the car, or reverse engineering and cloning some aftermarket add on.
It's just different. I know a lot of hard work can go into this stuff, but to what extent am I supposed to value secondary or aftermarkets? They can be kind of sketchy. When we're talking about stuff that really should be included in the original product especially. Like a market for shovels and a market for shovel handles. I get that it has some small incremental
Re:What DRM? (Score:4, Insightful)
And actually...under the DMCA; what he did was probably not legal. By charging money for it...he is showing a pecuniary interest in this work. The developer would have a MUCH easier time suing for infringement this way. Unless he was absolutely 100% sure he was immune from a lawsuit; then charging money was probably a foolish decision. You can't claim it was a "non money making pet project". This wasn't donations for hard work; it was money required to make it work.
The modder put himself in the worst possible legal position.
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So is no one allowed to make a little money off of their work? The developer made an earlier variant free and asked for money for the latest version. Does not seem unreasonable to me.
Same argument as prostitutes saying shouldn't they be allowed to make money off their buttholes?
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So is no one allowed to make a little money off of their work? The developer made an earlier variant free and asked for money for the latest version. Does not seem unreasonable to me.
The developer might be in violation of the game license himself. Game companies usually turn a blind eye to hobbyists violating their licenses to make some mod, fan art etc. (unless they're Nintendo), but making money out of it might be the red line that gain you the wrath of the game company if you cross it. Corporate lawyers going after you isn't a joke.
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But of course! The developer got paid, the marketeer got paid, everyone got paid. And I even got a bit of enjoyment and fun out of breaking their DRM.
What's not to like?
Oh. Right. Some corporation and their CEO might get upset. Hold on, I'll get out a tiny violin to play you a sad note.
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Re:What DRM? (Score:4, Insightful)
Straw man fallacy, and you know it.
Nobody thinks there is anything wrong with charging for one's work. But many people take exception to the practice of taking control of the end-users machines in order to enforce payment. Especially when such control brings side-effects of its own such as slower performance or compatibility issues, or risks of its own such as increased vulnerability to malicious code or spying on the part of the DRM controller.
Misrepresenting the argument doesn't convince anyone that they are in the wrong, it just makes them stop listening to you.
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You just countered a strawman with a fallacious generalization.
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No I didn't. The strawman was an accusation that people don't want to pay for data products. That's not what upsets people about DRM. The reasons I gave are what upset people about DRM. And it doesn't matter how true those reasons are (in theory or in practice), they are still the reasons that motivate most people who dislike DRM. So my statement is accurate.
It just so happens that most forms of DRM, as they exist today, do also have these failings. Not all, but most.
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No I didn't.
You absolutely did.
You made a generalization of DRM, based only upon examples of bad DRM.
No matter how you swing it, that is a generalization, and such a generalization is fallacious if used in an argument (which you did in fact do)
There is a pretty small list of notoriously bad DRM softwares that I, like you and everyone else, have struggled with.
But also, every single day my ~1500 software titles are protected under a DRM regime that has literally never ever given me an ounce of trouble (Steam)
I wa
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It appears the intent wasn't clear, then. I was talking about the beliefs of DRM haters. Those who hate DRM take exception to the practices I outlined. It is their belief that DRM has these practices. That's the distinction I am drawing: their beliefs about DRM are something separate from the reality of DRM, but their beliefs are what motivate them to hate it, and their beliefs are what I was talking about in my first post.
I can see how that might not have been obvious though, given the brevity of my po
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Steam is not a DRM. Even for the games you bought from it. Games on Steam only have DRM if the developer of the game included it. Steam is just a storefront. You don't even need Steam to launch the games, nor do you need to buy the games on Steam to have them use Steam. Just because Steam keeps a record of your purchases so you can redownload them at any time on any PC doesn't mean it's managing any digital rights.
DRM has never been used in a positive way. Sure, it could be used that way, but it never is. B
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"you don't need steam to launch the games"
TECHNICALLY you are correct. You can start the game's executable yourself. This, does not mean you can play the game, though.
What will most likely happen is the game you launched will either ask of you to launch it under steam (and exit) or launch steam itself.
Off the top of my head I can only remember Nuclear Throne being playable without steam.
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What will most likely happen is the game you launched will either ask of you to launch it under steam (and exit) or launch steam itself.
Only if the game requires online connectivity via Steam services. All single-player offline games bought through Steam can be played without Steam even being installed. Online games that use 100% their own online services instead of Steam's also can usually be played without Steam installed.
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It has DRM so that you can't share it with anyone else.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive in the slightest.
However, neither one is all that favored in the mod communities, so the cracking of it isn't a surprise.
FSR2/3 should work on nvidia cards (Score:1)
The original article even compares built-in FSR to modded DLSS2 performance.
There's more to this story. Either butthurt green fanboys, some limitation from Microsoft (Bethesda), or a lie from red team.
Or some detail like the complaint coming from the green card owners that FSR doesn't support.
Difference in quality?
Quote of hardware support for FSR3 [1] :
- Radeon RX 5000, 6000, and 7000 series. AMD "recommends" running it on a 6000- or 7000-series GPU, mostly because faster cards will g
Re:FSR2/3 should work on nvidia cards (Score:4, Informative)
FSR2 does indeed work on nVidia and Intel cards. However, nVidia DLSS and Intel XeSS both outperform FSR2 from a quality standpoint (more detail, less artifacting). This can indirectly lead to better performance with DLSS/XeSS because it means that you can run the game at a lower input resolution to get equivalent image quality. It's not always a night-and-day difference, but it can be significant, particularly at lower input resolutions. Hardware Unboxed did an extensive comparison video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
FSR3 is not supported by Starfield (and both Starfield and Bethesda were not included in the FSR3 announcement for future support), so the DLSS 3 framegen support added by the mod is a purely new capability.
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DLSS only outperforms on very heavy low-resolution upscaling and they are the same for high resolution.
They both artifact and should be turned off if possible.
Really degrades the experience turning video games into youtube video like smear.
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You are right that FSR sucks less when it has less work to do.
Re:FSR2/3 should work on nvidia cards (Score:4, Informative)
DLSS has better quality than FSR, so users with NVIDIA cards would prefer the option.
AMD is a major sponsor for the game. They partnered with Bethesda for optimization work, and provided them funding. When asked if this influenced the decision to not include DLSS, Bethesda has said "no comment" and AMD has been weasel-wording.
This happens in other games, even AAA titles, but people made a stink about it louder than normal (perhaps due to the sponsorship, which AMD was loud in advertising) and so now it's a news story.
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The original article even compares built-in FSR to modded DLSS2 performance.
That is woefully dishonest of you. The original article compared built-in FSR to hacked in outdated 3 year old DLSS2 performance, and in the process noted that the latter had better image quality.
Yes there's every reason to complain about the lack of first party DLSS support. Even when using 3 year old tech (to say nothing of DLSS3 which gives a substantial performance boost over DLSS2) it is already significantly better.
FSR is universally behind DLSS, not only today, but behind it when compared to the prev
Acronyms (Score:2)
For those left scratching their heads.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/g... [nvidia.com]
https://www.amd.com/en/technol... [amd.com]
Starfield is XBox exclusive (Score:3)
TFS claims "This isn't too surprising since the major consoles all use AMD processors and GPUs", which is true, but what any console other than XBox is doing is irrelevant, since this is an exclusive. A perfect example of why Microsoft's purchase of Bethesda should have been blocked under anti-trust legislation.
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Of course, judging from how hard my Switch struggles to run Skyrim, I don't think it'll be doing Starfield any time soon.
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A perfect example of why Microsoft's purchase of Bethesda should have been blocked under anti-trust legislation.
The Activision lawsuit demonstrated (as per evidence from both Sony and Microsoft) that MS only bought Bethesda after it became apparent that it was going to be a PS5 exclusive thanks to Sony's dumbfuckery.
Congrats on your silly point of view. Had the merger been blocked *less* people would have access to Starfield since it wouldn't be available not just on xbox, but or on PC either.
Fuck first party exclusives, but fuck Sony's 3rd party dumbfuckery harder.
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Fuck Sony, and fuck Microsoft for their I-can't-handle-the-free-market-exclusivity horse shit.
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TFS claims "This isn't too surprising since the major consoles all use AMD processors and GPUs", which is true, but what any console other than XBox is doing is irrelevant, since this is an exclusive. A perfect example of why Microsoft's purchase of Bethesda should have been blocked under anti-trust legislation.
Huh? Minimum requirements on Steam:
MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 10 version 21H1 (10.0.19043)
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6800K
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 5700, NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti
DirectX: Version 12
Storage: 125 GB available space
Additional Notes: SSD Required
The recommended GPU is "Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080".
I'm guessing it probably runs on Proton which means I could play on my Ubuntu machine with a NVIDIA 2070 assuming I was willing to shell out a pile o
3rd party expansions/addons have had DRM for other (Score:2)
I'm Surprised the Game Publisher (Score:2)
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Why would they? It is not difficult at all to prevent the modding of games, and Bethesda have a *LONG* history of happily allowing and supporting any number of game mods. And many mods out there are paid.
What's really funny is that for all Bethesda's previous games there are mods that raise the limits of the number of mods you can install at any given time, because running the game with 255 mods just isn't enough.
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The modding community has kept TES games alive for decades after their release, and I personally have re-bought all of them more than once- would be an insane revenue stream to throw away.
Fucking Scam (Score:2)
I don't think I have ever seen a Patreon that wasn't a straight attempt at greed.