Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 15, 2024) (Patreon)

Hi there! Sorry this one's a little bit late, but the Digital Foundry #content meeting did indeed happen this morning at 9:30am sharp and with the working day now fully out of the way, I can circle back to talk about what we have cooking!

Before I go into the person-by-person breakdown, I'm happy to report that Marc 'Try4ce' Duddleson will be taking point on our coverage of the Xbox Series versions of Final Fantasy 14. This video will act as a sequel of sorts to Marc's initial video on the PS5 version (which was a DF Retro EX episode in all but name). Marc will also be taking a look at the much vaunted graphics update coming further on down the road. In the meantime, if you've not seen his FF14 video, I recommend checking it out - even if you have little interest in the game. It's a wild story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trIiUXdEyo0

Now let's get into the other content!

• Rich (ie me) should hopefully deliver that long awaited handhelds video this week. It's all been a bit complicated, but we're finally there. I'll be showing the likes of Horizon Forbidden West, Alan Wake 2 and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora all running very nicely on 25W Z1 Extreme/Ryzen 7 7840U systems with a focus on the premium end machines.

• Oliver has almost finished his Steam Deck vs Ray Tracing video and I'm looking forwards to it! Beyond that, he'll be commenting in much more depth on last week's Hellblade 2 preview assets.

• John has essentially finished the next BIG DF Retro episode on Sunsoft. The episode is all but complete barring some final assets. John will then be previewing No Rest For The Wicked from our friends at Moon Studios - and assuming the timing works out, he'll be on point for our Stellar Blade review coverage.

• Tom is circling back to take a look at the Alone in the Dark remake, examining the original game and its new manifestation on PC and all console platforms.

• Alex is going to taking a look at the brand-new DLSS 3.7 and XeSS 1.3. Faster? Better image quality? He's looking to find out. I can say that having swapped in the new XeSS DLL into Horizon Forbidden West, it's the upscaler of choice for handheld play. The idea here is also to bank the image quality comparisons on Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, which we know is going to be the first title to use the refined FSR 3.1 we talked about on last week's Direct.

• Will continues to deliver great work on Eurogamer, with a recent emphasis on gaming wheels, as well as continuing to handle the e-commerce stuff. Oh, and we're happy to report that we're ramping up our 'merch' offerings and Will is in charge there. Here's a look at what he's been up to on Eurogamer recently: https://www.eurogamer.net/authors/will-judd

Oh, I'd also like to direct your attention to this tweet: https://twitter.com/AscendantStudio/status/1776325211400376340

We've been in touch with Ascendant Studios - creators of Immortals of Aveum - since before the game came out and we're looking to take a look at FSR 3 frame generation on consoles as soon as we can. Quite when that will be remains to be seen, but I'll do my best to keep you updated. My post on Eurogamer gives some expectation level on how I think the studio will be using it: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2024-immortals-of-aveum-set-to-receive-hdr-and-fsr-3-console-frame-generation

Meanwhile, in this week's Direct, we speak about some of the ways we want to change/improve our PC testing but we're also putting considerable efforts and resources into updating our console tools and improving our workflow to be faster and more efficient. I think we spoke about the graphing system being updated for PC, but it also needs hardware acceleration (renders take ages) and amusingly, we're finding new ways that games are presenting screen-tearing - even now. So I'd hope to be presenting some visible - and invisible - changes to our tooling over the year. Benchmarking? Big plans here on a new system we want to have ready once the next wave of GPUs arrive: more data, more games and hopefully the beginning of a massive, constantly updated database.

All of this is a significant expense/investment so at this point I'd like to say - once again - for supporting Digital Foundry. Your support genuinely makes a big difference.