February 28, 2017 – AMD and Bethesda Softworks have announced a long-term strategic partnership to advance game technology development and fuel new PC game experiences. Bethesda Softworks, whose 30-year history has produced games including those in The Elder Scrolls series, Fallout 3 and 4, DOOM, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Quake, and Dishonored, with more than 80 million copies sold, will work with AMD, whose CPU and GPU technologies power the experiences of 400 million gamers worldwide.
Announced on stage at the AMD “Capsaicin” webcast and press event during the 2017 Game Developers Conference, the multi-title agreement will see the two companies collaborate to develop and accelerate the implementation of new technologies, including the full potential of low-level APIs, such as Vulkan, and the computing and graphics power of AMD Ryzen CPUs, Radeon GPUs, and AMD server solutions across existing Bethesda franchises. The close-knit strategic partnership will combine hardware, software and game engineering specializations at both companies, with Bethesda content developers delivering experiences on upcoming hardware architectures.
“This is a disruptive moment in the industry as games demand increasingly more power from today’s graphics architectures to deliver detailed worlds and characters at ever higher resolutions, frame rates, and quality settings,” said Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group. “Working independently, game developers and graphics companies will eventually address the challenges of this new era of gaming; but working in close collaboration, the pace of that progress can advance exponentially.”
Bethesda President Vlatko Andonov commented, “AMD Radeon graphics architectures represent a true commitment to developers, inviting them to use the hardware as a blank canvas through low-level access to the silicon, and empowering them with architectural advancements that enable them to bring their gaming visions to life without compromise. AMD Ryzen represents one of the most important disruptions to the CPU market in a long time. Our relationship with AMD represents an exciting and powerful opportunity for Bethesda to further advance game experiences for our fans, significantly expand our presence in gaming and VR, and engage with new generations of gamers around the world.”
The potential of an AMD/Bethesda strategic partnership was demonstrated just last summer in a collaborative engineering effort to inject Vulkan API technology into DOOM. According to the companies, the result delivered enhanced performance alongside improved visual fidelity, as well as an improved DOOM experience for AMD Ryzen processors and Radeon graphics card owners.
Image credit: AMD/Bethesda
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Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.