DF Direct Weekly #135: Alan Wake 2 - A Tech Masterpiece, MGS 'Master' Collection, Star Citizen!

well hello everyone welcome to the 135th edition of DF weekly after a week's absence uh I'm finally back yes Co finally got me but um hopefully my voice will hold up for the next couple of hours joining me first of all Alex battalia hi I can't um guarantee that my voice will as it just cracks right there hold right now I'm fighting back a cold apparently that just came upon me last night as I was falling asleep just like some deathly virus dear oh dear um John how are you feeling uh I feel perfectly fine thankfully okay mercifully let's hope it stays that way good stuff okay well we've got a lot to get through so let's crack on uh first news story I guess has to be Alan Wake to which um well we were expecting great things from it but I think the bottom line is that um it's not just a technological showcase but the review reactions to the game have been Absolut phenomenal the Metacritic is currently above 90 uh there's a huge array of 10 out of 10 nine out of 10 for the game I've got to say I'm hugely thrilled for remedy this is richly earned richly deserved the game is incredible uh certainly in terms of digital foundaries um sort of audience statistics uh based on just the first video we put up State stacked up against our first Spider-Man video it's right up there so this is like this is it's just incredible John I'm going to go to you first let's talk about the game just generally first of all um obviously ni it's now weapons free we can say whatever we like about it what would you like to say what's your big takeaway for Alam m 2 okay there's there's three sort of let's bust out the John pillars shall we there's three pillars on which this game is is built that I I find very compelling uh there's the visual side there's the game itself and then there's the storytelling right and I think it really Nails these three elements in ways that is that are both expected as a remedy fan but also surprising as one as well which is what I didn't expect so obviously uh well let me just start with the other stuff first then we'll get to the graphics I I I'm a big fan of what remedy's always done they always try to sort of pull the rug out from under the player introduce fun new Concepts and sort of take you down this road of uh what's going on that sense of like confusion and wanting to know more you see interesting visual designs there's things that pop into the story strange things happen you don't understand what's happening games are the perfect medium for this this is something that I that used to be more common in games actually I mean this is one of the reasons I was a big fan of like say the metal gear games because they were all about this kind of stuff uh Silent Hill does this as well and remedy has always been great at it and Allen wake 2 really pushes this to the next level because you're playing between these two characters Saga and of course Alan Wake himself and of course Max Payne is in there as well but Mr Casey I guess actually uh and this it's kind of one of those games where there's layers of reality that you're exploring and the game takes you on this journey through these different layers and it slowly peels them back leaving you in this state of confusion yet Amusement if you will and I just find that stuff really comp telling like it's it's much more so than Allen wake 1 Allan Wake 1 plays well but it's actually my least favorite of Remedies games I would say uh because I feel it got very repetitive you're just running through the the landscapes for like hours shooting the same guys over and over and over again it gets very tedious I thought even though the core mechanics are good Allen wake 2 is nothing like that in fact it's so different that I was actually a little bit surprised where especially early on on it starts more as almost an adventure game there's dialogue choices there's exploration you're piecing together puzzles you're going into sort of like figure out the the crime scene if you will uh and all this kind of stuff and then obviously Allen comes into the story and he too is figuring out like what's actually happening here and slowly but surely they introduce more shooting into the game but it's just this feeling of spiraling through some kind of like uh portal into Madness and I love that stuff but obviously the big thing for the digital Foundry side is the visuals and I'm just going to say it right now Alex I I don't want to spoil things too much but I'm going to spoil it this is the this is the best looking game of the year uh and probably one of the best looking games ever made uh this is this is a technical showstopper and I would say both on consoles and the PC which wasn't the case I would say with cyberpunk 2077 which we awarded our graphics of the Year award in the past that was just for the PC version and while the PC version definitely is a step above I think they actually did do a great job with the console version as well and it's really just it's about the lighting the lighting model here especially on PC but wow the path tracing just the way like there's the the way ambient light spills across the scene and sort of like you can almost feel the photons moving through the world bouncing off the surfaces it truly uh demonstrates the the whole concept of the world as just a series of mirrors that are more or less rough uh cuz everything is reflective as it should be from the most uh like the roughest surface to like the most mirror like Sheen everything uh reflects correctly and it's awesome it's not always in your face necessarily it's it's often more subtle but like once you notice it it just starts to feel somehow more realistic in a way that I'm not used to seeing in video games anymore so or anymore I say I mean that I'm not used to seeing in video games full stop uh so there's a lot to do with this and I actually want to hear some some other thoughts here so Alex no uh well it is very good I don't know if I'd call the best game I've ever had in my life but it is incredibly wellmade um uh in a lot of ways and just to talk about the technical things I think uh John hit it uh the nail right on the head there about uh being accomplished technically across all the platforms we have yet to see Series S though um as of typing this so I can't say too much about that but I presume series X will be right up there with PlayStation 5 maybe it'll have differences in performance kind of like we saw in control when that released um I can't say anything about that yet CU I haven't there's no photo mode in this game though Alex that was one thing that so disappointed me while doing this because I wanted to make I want to see what I can do next week uh because I'm gonna be working on another video covering the path tracing and R tracing recommended settings and all those kind of things and maybe a little bit more holistically about the game but I want to show like the how dense like the geometry is how dense the lighting interactions can be but your camera only gets so close you know and that that's that's that's a bit of a bummer way so I'm going to have to see what we can I don't know I don't it's got to be that uh that control thing when when you highlighted the performance difference between the consoles using photo mode yeah it's got to be that and that was very controversial there was lots of comments like uh we're benching photo mode here photoe what are you guys doing over there bunch of jackalopes we should it should be pretty easy to see any performance differences right in the beginning of the game if there's any between Xbox series X and PS5 because there's bits in the beginning of the game that that the not not the very very beginning but the four sections in the game are heavier than other sections and I think that's borne out a bit some of the benchmarking that's being done where if you Benchmark like the town or some areas where Allen wake is there's not the like vegetation is always really expensive to render so it's definitely expensive here as well too um but on the techn level it looks really good on any platform currently that I've seen that you can play it on uh the lowest settings on PC are like the high settings in other games and I think that's one thing uh that we'll talk about a little bit later where even if you turn down the settings in this game you're going to get a really good-looking game and that isn't the case for everything it wasn't the case in the original crisis you you know you turn down the graphics in the original crisis uh they scaled to like lower than Far Cry it didn't run that well always but like you can really make that game super ugly on the low settings here the low settings only go so far because they want to keep obviously a lot of the artistic value in the game without letting you go full potato mode uh but it still runs really well I would say given the hardware they're also using mesh shaders or primitive shaders on PlayStation 5 and actually when we were at Gamescom uh I did talk with Tatu Alto about this who was their TD technical director and he mentioned that they were using mes shaders or the equivalent of uh primitive shading on PlayStation 5 which is something that rdna 1 has it's very close to mesh shading just doesn't have like the amplification stage that's about it um and they're they're using to F grain Callaway geometry using meselet which is a way to like break up the geometry of an object so you can get like really like fine understanding of where the the vertex edges are and where the geometry is so you can call away the stuff you don't see the player doesn't see this is all good stuff because that means you can pump up the geometric quality everywhere across the world and I think that's really evident in Allen wake too where almost every object you walk up to it's super dense in terms of geometric quality it's one of the first things that I noticed uh not in the opening cut scene but the one thereafter just like a lot of the stuff going on and uh that's without even talking about the path tracing I'm just very happy with the technical quality of the game at release um and that is in spite of the uh I would say like feverish hate that the game got for uh putting out recommended specs um there's a lot to talk about that rich I don't know do you want to say something about the recommended spec situation yeah I mean basically uh and I think remedy itself said post embargo that they were somewhat conservative with their kit recommendations um the minimum kit requirement um on the AMD side is the RX 6600 which I find to be a really interesting GPU because you know there's not so many decent gpus you can buy these days that are sub $200 this thing's been as low as 180 wow for ages right and so you know this is a minimum spec um uh GP which remedy has specified so I thought I'd give it a go and I'm not going to make it easy uh on the on the on the GPU here i' just dialed in exact PlayStation uh specification settings for the quality and the performance modes so you know basically it's like 1270p uh medium high low hybrid for the quality mode and uh FSR 2 scaling up to uh 4K uh quality sorry performance mode is basic um minimum settings uh 1440p output I think it's 870p internal resolution and you know bearing in mind you know it's not going to be as good as a PS5 right but it's not a million miles away so you know that quality mode alternative a 6600 is not a 4K card but this is what we're forcing it to do still doing 27 frames per second average across this sort of uh foliage heavy bench uh can go low of course it can go higher um but you know it's not bad um the performance mode uh equivalent basically 52.9 FPS so you know that's just kind of nuts good um for you know bearing in mind uh remedy is specifying like 720 P30 on low for this GPU I believe based on the recommended specs is obviously much higher you also see there that I've done a third um run which is essentially 1080p FSR 2 quality mode which is kind of what you would be using this GPU for and um I believe it's the quality mode I'd need to check but it's 56.2 frames per second there and you know that's for 1080p GPU that sits well within the vrr window on a 60 HZ display this is this is really good stuff so yeah I do think they were somewhat conservative uh which might have stoked some of the Hate In terms terms of the uh in terms of the specifications man I hate to I hate to thr use that word hate though it's more just like people being upset that their systems can't run a game and I understand where they're coming from but was that it though but was that it I think it was more about no so like there I think I really think it was a very low amount of people being like I have a 1070 and I want to play this game I think a lot of it a lot of the comments I saw a very different discussion yeah I think a lot of the comments were about I'm playing at 1080 P performance mode on a 3070 which is what it said it was basically saying like one dlss epsr 2 are recommendations here and um the concept of what is medium was very insulting as well to to I think a lot of people that read those specs and then commented on it okay so so that's what I that's what I read it's the age-old problem of uh they don't like the names of the presets they get I also saw I did actually see if we do want to use the word hate I do I did see some thrown around towards the reconstruction people are really anti- dlss and FSR and I just don't get it uh because they they take over it's going to be one of these TAA situations where people are just going to accept it over time simply because guess what guys if you want an inter you know a big leap in Fidelity if you want the developers to aim high you've got to understand that it's about quality of pixels not quantity of pixels and and yes um upscaling techniques are the m ation strategy to make it work and it's not as if it's a bad looking game well I was going to say it's like specifically with dlss I think dlss often looks better than the native solution like a native res TAA solution because it takes over the TAA duties basically and I think it does a better job at creating a more consistent coherent image uh with really clean edges especially on very fine detail correct me if I'm wrong Alex but remedy have actually dumped their own t a Sol their own and their own upscaling solution and effectively you need to use FSR 2 as a baseline for upscaling right this is very true and also um both so there was some reporting out there that the game forces you to use dlss or FS 2 that isn't completely correct in the aspect of is you can always run the native resolution of both it using daa Andor FSR 2 native AA which is the new mode for episode 2 that I think that was a Gamescom thing um but um so you can always run the game at Native resolution it's just a matter of whether or not it's worth it to run it at that native resolution given what it's giving you in comparison to other um graphical features you can tweak and that's always like the thing like obviously adding more pixels is going to somehow increase quality if you if you're comparing baselines of the same AA technique in use but is it worth it in comparison to having for example would you rather have uh slightly lower pixel density or would you have Reflections not disappearing off on screen you know like uh like turning on FS SSR versus turning on RT like what is more important to you as a player and the options allow you to do that in this game and I think people freaking out about the the settings we'll talk about meshers whatever later maybe but um but at least in regards to what is medium medium is just an arbitrary word to describe anything they for their for for whatever remedy decided they said medium is actually like a mix of high settings and alra settings and medium settings and some of those settings are much more expensive than others right so yeah that's the way it is I I there's I don't know what else to say about it but that is they kind of hand handicapping themselves there though by calling medium medium but then using a mix of settings in within the preset because it does it it's just a wording thing it's just a wording thing although I do wish I wish they had gone all the way though and added like a potato mode it's like the low end which unfortunately thinking of potatoes I did see some people testing it trying to get it to run on Steam deck and thus far I have not seen anyone succeed with this I don't know I mean yeah that that'd be really hard to get it running on Steam deck because the game is ridiculously GPU heavy and I think then it would also start maybe taking away clocks from the CPU at that point so you might start running into other issues it's really with those power constrain devices it's really hard to throw ridiculously heavy content at them and get really uh good performance everywhere across the entire experience absolutely um yeah there is an extra wrinkle I mean we'll talk about the mes Shader thing because I do think it is worth discussion a because um well fundamentally um we've kind of realized that there is a Day of Reckoning upon us where older gpus are not going to be able to effectively run new games but I'm not sure anybody ever predicted that it would be mes shaders that would be the the defining factor that separates one generation of gpus from the the prior one I actually did some testing for you and it's m with 1080ti 5700 XT and I put the 2080 in there as well the 2080 seems to I think generally underperform based on what it should be doing possibly but it does have the mesh shaders and it annihilates the 1080 TI 5700 XT seems to be well it's it's still obviously not running anywhere near as well as a PS5 but you know it seems to be doing a bit better uh one thing I did want to test though and I actually did this just before the direct and shared with you some results Alex the 1660ti which is this kind of weird touring card that didn't have rt or um uh tensor cores it does have mesh shading and um you can in that again that foliage heavy sequence averaged 42.94 FPS 1080p FSR 2 qual uh quality mode but running on ps5s um performance mode preset set which is effectively as low as they go across the board you know it's still it's perfectly playable on this really old GPU it's just because the mesh shading part of it is in there uh which I found quite interesting but again it's it's still massively outperforming what um uh it is still massively outperforming um what remedy is saying a 6600 could do 7 720 P30 so wait Rich maybe I blanked and missed it put if you try to run this on a card without mes shading support what happens it does run ites do run it's very very po usually yeah basically the 5700 XT seem to be about I'd say sort of 50% of where you would expect it to be and the 1080ti which should be faster I think the 5700 XT uh it's just really really running bad there's some really weird stuff going on you go into the Mind place and it drops down to like 12 frames per second 12 to 15 frames per second there's some weird stuff going on with Pascal Pascal's really not doing well so I'm actually curious because I know the Mind place is resident in the memory when you're playing the game wait isn't it the Mind D I think that's uh Sherlock Holmes isn't it they've they've yeah they've tweaked it they say in the when you first access it hey I've done my own version of the m so they didn't keep the same name right yeah um but I I'm wondering if it's actually something that's off the map uh off the side of the map and because they don't have uh the mesh shaders doing the calling anymore it's just like doing a really bad calling and you're actually rendering like the entire game alongside of it like behind it you know that's something that could actually happen I could imagine if you're not using M shaders um but the 5700 XT holds up fairly well on that so yeah it it is a weird thing for sure but basically you know when they say when the when that little eror pops up saying uh you don't have mesh shaders this is is generally a bad thing um but you know if you do have mesh shaders and I include the 1660 TI in there 1660 super any of those old touring cards without the RT cores you should be kind of able to get something fairly decent out of it I think you know bearing in mind that this is a really GPU heavy game but yeah it's fascinating stuff um do you want to say anything more about mesh shaders anex it is a bit weird that it would be mesh shaders that are that kind of dividing factor I didn't expect that to come first before an RT game just blowing everyone out of the water um but it is so fundamental to like the drawing of the game's rendering like it it's just it's like how do we do geometry do we use the old system which has existed since direct X9 with some modifications in dx10 and 11 or do we use something that is entirely programmable and very different and gives us more control and potentially quite a bit better performance um and they made that leap a lot of other devs haven't um another engine that has technically made the leap but offers a Vertex uh based uh they they have a fallback that is semi- performant is Unreal Engine 5 Unreal Engine 5 actually uses mesh shaders too for the triangles that are bigger than like I forget how many pixels um but this is the first time we've seen a game actually do this in a while and I'm very happy to see it like I I don't get teary eyed when a seven old GPU can't run the game I just don't anymore um the 5700 XT is an interesting one rich pointed out the fact that his performance is semi okay all things considered but I mean Lally semi yeah it's half it's like half yes semi um but uh that one is one where back when that GPU came out I think there was enough press at the time that said it doesn't have a lot of features that the competition has and and that was actually part of the revieww process back then and there was an asterisk I think on the review saying like you won't be able to use these things eventually and this is the first time we're seeing it I don't think every title's going to do this people like alen wake 2 is remedy is yeah it's a special thing like it's going to take a little bit longer before we see mes shading it took this long it took five years after the introduction of mes shading to get the first title actually really even use it like wow like that's so long in terms of direct de time usually these things are like one year a little less um so it's the first one of hopefully many over time but I don't think I think Alan wakes 2 is going to be special for a bit and then like maybe two or three years we might see another title we'll see Rich uh remind me here did you test the radi on 7 I think that's the most important one to know I me that was the same year as the 5700 XT I think but it's like it is I think it's an older generation or is it uh I mean I could I mean it it's basically a d shrunk Vaga oh yeah yeah it is using the Vega architecture it's gcn it's it's old I mean I might you know you you've peaked my interest yeah right uh I mean it does have 16 gigs of memory but weirdly enough Alan Wake 2 seems to be quite you know as long as you turn off raid racing it's very memory seems to be yeah very memory efficient which I thought is is quite interesting um yeah I could give the radon 7 a go that's just to see what happens there I mean it would be sort of like a faster Vega 64 I guess but uh yeah I mean you know it's just been really interesting to see this dividing line between you know GPU generations and there is the whole question I mean there's no doubt that there's still millions of 10 series cards in circulation but at some point they're not going to be good enough right I mean that's that's the bottom line and you know it's kind of akin to you know you're not going to if you're sitting there with PlayStation 4 that you bought in 2016 you're not going to be playing Allan Wake 2 either no I I think the the 1080 the 10 series cards have had an exceptionally long life for PC Hardware up there I would argue with like I don't know famous cars like the 8800 GT maybe or I don't know there there's been others along the way that have been like this but it's a great card that has been very long lasting the GTX 970 that that lasted for a while that was a classic in the 80 yeah the 1080 is an amazing card it's gotten you had seven solid years and it's not over yet right like just because a game like this comes along and doesn't really work on it doesn't mean that that's going to be the case going forward for every game right it's just it's starting to show its age but it's still perfectly usable yeah absolutely yeah so you know I was kind of um yeah I was intrigued to see the actual PC results that were coming out based on the fact that the recommended specification were very onerous you know and they did cause some concern um I guess the the the funny thing is is that the whole mesh shading thing came out as a kind of PS in a tweet from a r staer as opposed to being a part of the of the whole spec sheet so um yeah that was that was a bit of a a bolt out of the blue actually I think the botom sorry I think the bottom line though is that you know um in terms of scalability there is scalability here it is decent but there is a very much a cut off point where you know unlike many games there is no potato mode here you know if you whack down everything down to low it's still recognizably Alan Wake 2 it is basically the PlayStation 5 version in performance mode right it looks you know with a couple of extra tweaks here and there but it you know it still looks really really good so yeah it's sort of six of one half half dozen of the other really where it is a graphically intensive game and you know maybe some people are hearing well you know 1080p with upscaling low settings on a 1660ti it's 42.9 frames per second that's pretty low but it's it's not when you actually see what low settings is so yeah really interesting for me it's like uh beyond the GPU requirements and all that I just want to say that the experience of loading this up on PC was one of the most positive I've had in a while where it just I fired it up it loads super fast there's no weird stuttering hitching anything strange I mean I literally just started the game first time you know I'm using a high-end card so I put Max settings and decided let's see what happens and then I continued to play after that point I didn't have to restart the game I didn't have to fiddle with anything it just worked no hitching no weirdness none of the typical stuff we often see with day one PC releases the whole thing just felt like rock solid and awesome uh which I think is an impressive feat especially in in 2023 where that cannot be assumed with a new pc Rel assumed no um I still have yet to try I mean you tried the RTX 2080 Rich I'm going to drop the RTX 2070 super and at some point maybe it doesn't make it into the video depending on how much time I want to uh spend before I get it out because it's almost ready it's like the video is almost ready um but um but you know maybe that could be thrown into the article but I'm just very curious about how the RTX 2070 super Affairs against the PlayStation 5 because we've seen that depending on the title it's like up down it's below it it really depends the testing I did for you um was before we had finalized console settings right so um uh it was on medium settings which is actually quite demanding yeah the the high the high post processing setting people the high post processing setting is super expensive and you probably don't need it just going to throw that out there it's it's one of the things that drags down performance a whole lot just for like better looking depth of field that's the big difference so it is good it is good looking depth of field though it is it's it's also it's high it's full resolution which it wasn't actually in in control so there's like a lot of things that are subtly better in Alan W 2 other than just geometry and stuff like that just like uh the post-processing is higher quality in Alan W the other thing to mention is uh the ray reconstruction dlss 3.5 uh right we thought it did an amazing job at Gamescom but I noticed with cyberpunk when it actually did hit there is this sense that it it adds an most AI upscaled waterc colory look to the visuals that I always found slightly off-putting so it has its benefits but it didn't look as good as I had hoped in practice but in Allen wake 2 it works flawlessly where the image just feels Rock Solid it doesn't have any of that weirdness obviously it eliminates all the fizzle and and and other issues that it's designed to do and it really showcases that yeah maybe the cyberpunk Imp implementation needs a little bit more work to get to this point right I'm not really sure what's going on there but it's definitely noticeable the difference could it be content I mean Alan Wake is fundamentally a Le a slower game right yeah but I it's hard to say it's hard to say too because I thought about this a bit I was like maybe there's less lights in Allen wake 2 is one thing I thought of too so there's less noise to deal with for certain aers I don't know but also the model is probably evolving uh to a little degree and maybe it currently fits some content better than others it's really hard to tell I would have to send a right couple of questions over to Nvidia to get an idea but since it is a black box it's pretty much impossible to know so great let's round off this discussion with a supporter question this one from roel hidf crew the recent drama surrounding Alan Wake 2 requiring a GPU with rest Shader support made me wonder when we might see other technologies that are currently optional become mandatory I guess the most obvious one here would be RT so at which point do you think that developers might start to rake RT the only option for certain graphical features without non-rt fallbacks could Spider-Man 2's inevitable PC port in a year or two require RT given how it is used across all modes in the PlayStation 5 version or do you think nixus will still be adding some fullbacks for older Hardware well um Alex and indeed John I think that Spider-Man 2 already has those fullbacks in PlayStation 5 that is not used technically reflections they use it for secondary refle as we know I mean in in the first version of your review video for Spider-Man 2N you actually found a part of the game that was still using screen space ref flections Cube maps maps yeah but they actually patched in you had to edit the video yeah I they they fixed that in a patch I had to remove that part sorn yeah so there there's definitely still fallbacks in place the question I guess is how they're generated if it's the same way as it worked before because if if they kind of like pushed that out of the pipeline as of January of this year uh one has to wonder how good that fallback system actually would be when used across the entire game you know what I mean yeah yeah it's a fair point um yeah I mean Alex nixus are the masters of fullbacks and uh supporting older Hardware really aren't they yeah I mean maybe if they do want to support something like steam deck or Rog Ally um they would do do this and they maybe would um go in there with some QA and art to fix it up because they've they've gone in there with art before to fix things up they do it for their 21 by9 and 32 by whatever modes uh they put in their games you know to clean up um both UI as well as any of the cut scene issues that could appear in these games so they do do art changes for these games nixes they're not just a straight porting studio um and I could almost feasibly see them doing that but at the same time I like I said uh a couple I think it was a couple DF directs ago it's going to be maybe two years from now it would be interesting if it was actually like a year from now that'd be very interesting but um I imagine it's still going to take longer just because this the way things are and by then we're going to have so many years of real-time rracing existing that I would hope we start seeing some titles just say actually we don't want to spend the QA time doing this actually just using an RT card I mean if the consoles can do it by that point and they'll be XX so old by then why can't your PC no five years old I would love it if somebody uh tried to troll the users with the fallback and all the fallback textures are just like the you didn't say the magic word Jurassic Park gift uh and you just see that in all the refle it's just that tiled uh uh uh oh I that'd be great I love that that that would not go over well I think that not go well potato I think that's what we' really got to say about Alan Wake 2 at the moment except to so we got a ton more coverage coming so look out for that because it's a genuine I'd say it's a moment uh in in in gaming technology and we like to savor it um but let's move on to the next news topic okay so this one's quite interesting obviously with the release of the upcoming uh revision for the PlayStation 5 we've got a really intriguing possibility here which is to say that you can buy a digital Edition PlayStation 5 and then you can upgrade you can actually slap on an optical drive and it's happy days you've now got access to the whole you know basically the pantheon of PlayStation 4 PlayStation 5 titles in physical form this is a good thing however it turns out that um once you've actually bought your optical drive upgrade and you've uh attached it to the unit there's some sort of online connection required to pair the um the two units together question is why um I'm actually going to get the supporter points and questions out the way first before we tackle this uh this one from Johnny 5A somehow knew it wouldn't be that easy with the Blu-ray Drive on new PS5 should we be worried for long-term repairability of these looks like it could potentially be another Avenue of planned obsolescence authentication servers don't last forever hope you're feeling better rich yeah I am thank you uh this one from ishra suban not a question so much as a potentially unpopular take the requirement to have an online con ction to activate the detachable Blu-ray Drive is a necessary compromise to ensure moders won't be able to bypass any anti-piracy measures that were easily defeated in previous generations ah uh I think Xbox 360 was pretty much the the only optical drive hack that I'm aware of in recent or semi recent times but it is a it is a reasonable point it is a a vector for potential access to the system and for circumventing copy protection I am going to go to you on this one John because obviously you're insens and not happy when you heard of the news but you know is there is there an ex a reason slash excuse as to why it needs this online verification well the thing that quickly came to light after this was brought up is that it may be due to uh a dmca uh basically a a section that they passed that basically says to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work is illegal and I think that there may be an issue with uh basically US law allowing people to tamper with drives that can accept copyrighted work like this uh which kind of goes against the whole right to repair thing that we're seeing elsewhere but it it seems like basically American law may be the reason for this which sucks frankly and I if if that is indeed the case then sadly I don't think that there's much they could do about that the other Theory and I think this is actually less likely but maybe the case is that uh Blu-ray movies and such have like a license cost associated with it and maybe they only have to pay that cost when you activate the drive like it it could be either of those things or both of those things but it does seem like there are things in place that would cause this to have to be the case which I hadn't considered when it was announced and that is obviously a gigantic bummer especially when it sounds like this the same warning is printed on the box for the model which includes the dis Drive which makes me wonder if you actually have to activate it basically if now the ability to activate your PS5 offline is now gone that's what I'm woring we haven't tested that yet right we don't have one yet we don't we don't have a slim the original uh this is a great feature is that you can can actually pull it out of the box set it up and go you don't have to connect it to the internet at all it will just work which is great for the future uh down the line kind of thing and as before if the if a game requires a certain level of firmware that game dis will have the firmware on the dis it seems so which is Sony's been doing that since PSP so technically the PS5 was still an offline machine much like the switch uh but not like the Xbox and now it seems like the PlayStation 5 is going to become more like the Xbox and in a very bad way uh so that is unfortunate that it seems like this new model is going to require online connectivity and of course there's going to be people saying oh but everybody has internet and it's really not about that it's yes it's true but it's about long-term preservation which frankly I don't feel very good about it for these systems given the potential lifespan issues with the SSD the whole connectivity online stuff it does kind of feel like these are systems that will not last like unlike everything behind me here which I could pull out from like 30 or 40 years ago and as all you know you replace a few capacitors here and there they still run just fine uh I don't think that's going to be the case after this point I feel like this ability to repair and maintain a console long term will probably end in the post PS3 360 era those will probably be the last machines that are really easy to keep running uh I guess technically the which aside from the battery issue I think the switch should be pretty good long term um and you know battery stuff that's that plagues every handheld portable thing right and there's there are ways around that and batteries continue to be made and probably will and maybe there'll be a circumvention for getting around the requirement to have a battery as well that'd be GRE MH uh but I guess my hope here is that whatever Nintendo announces next continues to use carts and does not run into this problem and will remain in offline POS potential an offline usable machine from the beginning right I think there's a good chance of that John and I also think you know these recent rumors of digital and physical switches are probably off beam simply because you know the cost of a cartridge Port is nowhere near as high as the cost of a um of an optical drive right it's just a question of the extent to which they want control over the ecosystem more than the actual cost of building a system um and you know typically Nintendo been pretty good about that kind of thing um I am sort of slightly concerned about this uh online connection required to pair the optical drive for the new PlayStation 5 on the flip side there does seem to be a growing movement to actually Champion right to repair yes that is good which means yeah which means that at some point I mean maybe not now maybe in the future that you know it might even be legislated and you know there might need to be some kind of fallback to actually make this possible without a connection or at least a strong commitment to actually in you know keep those servers going whatever happens which I don't have a lot of faith in I'll be honest with you um I don't have a lot you know I don't mind it you I think it's going to be fine in the next what 10 possibly even 20 years but I'm just reminded you know the last time we talked about this on DF direct the guy who got his Zed xect from tape out of the attic yeah and you know he bought it he owned it and decades later he playing it and you know that's that's something which is quite valuable which is in danger but you know what can I say um I am curious also as to once whether you know once a drive is actually paired with the new PlayStation 5 whether it's a you know you can't unpair it and use it on another machine I suspect probably not probably that' be interesting unless you activate it on the new machine and then it's no longer activated on the old machine that might that might be the way it works maybe that's something we should should be testing which means I need to buy two PlayStation oh my God we we should def we should test that though I I think that's something that's important to know yeah absolutely and we will be testing it um there's rumors that there's going to be U units coming early November with Modern Warfare 3 um so yeah I guess we'll be getting one of those in and um let's move on to the next news topic okay so this week um the Metal Gear Solid Master collection uh finally arrived uh obviously there had been some cont controversy surrounding that in the runup to launch simply because um well you know when they're talking about PlayStation 2 games running at 1080p on the PlayStation 5 and switch games running at half the um half the frame rate of the original PS2 versions that's slightly problematic and I don't know what what we can really say about this except to say well our fears have been confirmed uh no review code actually came our way um just to to make make clear so I've actually spent £150 on buying all of the versions of of this particular thing only to discover that yes I our worst fears have been cons uh confirmed it's um I think there's two ways to look at this there's a kind of document of older sort of metal gear solid material there does seem to be a lot of great bonus material in there but the actual quality of the emulation of the games seems to be really disappointing Tom's working on this now for content and uh yeah post various things in the slack Channel which just look really really bad yeah uh John do you want to take up the story here what are your thoughts on this I mean it is exactly what I feared but actually slightly worse I would say okay uh the thing that I was surprised so despite their announcements as I confirmed before from captured footage it is 720p across the board it's this okay in regards to mdal Gear Solid 2 and three uh because yeah and we'll talk about mgs1 separately but mgs2 and 3 they're they're 720p on all platforms I believe blueo used msaa uh on the 360 PS3 version yep and you can tell because whatever they're doing in the master collection the image quality is worse uh there is significantly more shimmering and noise to the edges and looking at straight like sort of like slanted edges you can see the coverage is so much worse than the new version so not only is it still 720p it's better B 720p like compared to the original like it's actually worse how does that's insane to me that that happens uh furthermore um the switch version of course still has the they it's all 30 frames per second for this those two games uh somebody was digging I think at Metal Gear cell 2 is actually I think derived from the shield version which which wasn't great anyway but midle Gear 3 isn't Metal Gear 3 isn't and the the the way somebody theorized this is that there was some visual there was a visual bug in a very specific part of middle Gear Solid 2 that showed up in the HD Collection uh but it was fine in the shield version and the switch version shares the same correct rendering of it as the shield version but the other consoles don't the other consoles don't they're broken it's a very minor thing but they have the same flaw as the PS3 360 version which is fascinating to see uh but so that's a bummer also so I mean man it's just so it is just confirmed to be it's just a Unity shell that they built uh I don't know how they ported these things over it's pretty obvious that they just had blue Point's original works and they just kind of reworked them somehow to make them run on the new machines or rather than actually doing like a proper update conversion kind of thing obviously unfortunately blueo was not able to work on this uh I mean they are Sony own now so that but I still feel like I don't know something could have but I'm sure they're busy with their own projects right going back to this would have been ask I think uh I was thinking I don't I haven't seen the credits yet and I hope it's not who did it but I was thinking what about hexa drive that would have been a good choice do you remember them they yeah they did uh they were the ones that reported zone of the Enders 2 to PS3 because Konami released that very bad collection for zone of the Enders from high voltage software and then they had hexad dri go in and Patch the game by essentially redo doing the entire port and making it much better and that shares similar technology I believe as as these other games so that that would have been an interesting choice for this and I'm surprised that they didn't take that approach I mean technically for all of these games the real approach would be to decompile the code if you don't have it and then make it native in every single way like if fans can do it reverse engineering a game on the PC with none of the original source code for things like metal solid or whatever or any game Perfect Dark is one exactly like then that is the real way to do it that's the real way and they didn't do that the real way interestingly there was a mod to fix the resolution on PC within like an hour or something after release although it does still have some issues with middle Gear Solid 2o because they didn't there's a bunch of visual effects that that are essentially rendered within the 1280 x 720 window that blueo went back and actually redid for their original remaster but they haven't been touched up again obviously so what happens on PC if you run in 4k you get like a little box up here in the corner with the effect inside that small 720p box uh and it doesn't apply to the rest of the screen could probably be patched I think this could be fixed by the modders Konami is not going to patch it cuz you know it is like that also things that occur to me and it's is not a big deal cuz it was like this some 360 already but uh with the original HD collection if you played it on PS3 you get the original pressure PR sensitive button controls uh if you recall which is so those games were designed to be played on the PS2 with the pressure sensitive buttons and there was specific actions like pulling out your weapon like I actually think this worked great but on PS2 you would hold square lightly not you just kind of hold it normally and you pull out your weapon if you let off of it lightly it would actually put the weapon away if you pressed it Fierce and then let off he would actually shoot it and it ended up feeling really good just is like pulling out your gun aiming and then either like popping off a shot or letting off uh and they had to change that I think it's like clicking In The Sticks now to fix that that's a bit awkward uh it is possible uh there's the PC Port which is hilarious uh it has like no Graphics options really it has like the most confounding controls like when I saw the control options in this thing I was immediately reminded of Batman Forever the DF retro let's play that Audi and I did did where I had to pull out the manual and like investigate how to control the game it looks like that you're just like how like I understand it's a game pad Style game yes but come on you've got there has to be some work done to make this play okay on a keyboard and mouse I it's possible they could have done it is 100% possible I mean like oh my gosh yeah so that part is bad um so there's just so many issues there with that it just it's it's surprising and and feels really lazy I that's that's probably the first time I would actually use the word lazy to describe something right because I usually I hate that word in in regards to game development and I'm sure there was still some challenges here but this feels maybe it's more of a budget issue maybe Konami just didn't give them the resources to actually do what needed to be done and they just had to do a quick thing to get it out the door but that's still on them for that uh yeah absolutely the problem is that you know ultimately these are some of the most important games certainly in's Library very and the concept that the concept that they're just not going to treat them with respect is is just simply unacceptable called the master I you know yeah it's just it's just astonishing there's nothing masterful about this I will say though that um so Metal Gear Solid one this is an interesting position so this one seems to have been done actually by M2 which surprised me and from what I can tell the actual core emul of it is perfectly fine uh and the it it's just it's like kind of a low speec thing where they're simply targeting uh delivering that original experience right there's no real enhancements to it the original experience there's just two flaws well no there's one major flaw is that it's just upscaled to higher resz from the original 240p and it's blurry so it's just like a bilinear upscale I don't know whether that's on M2 or if that's actually part of the the the wrapper because if if you recall maybe you don't when the Sonic Origins collection came out that was running on Christian Whitehead and and Cruz retro engine right but it was horribly bilinear filtered because of the Hedgehog engine shell around it uh the way it presented those frames it treated it like a texture surface and it just like applied filtering to it so it it's blurry and ugly even though we know darn well that the actual underlying Tech was good and I'm wondering if that's the case here with the M2 Port where cuz they've done PS1 emulation before and it doesn't have this problem in their other versions uh it's just blurry and nasty looking when it should be sharp but the bigger problem with Metal Gear Solid one I think and if they really wanted to do a true collection this is what they should have done optional um duck station like features where essentially they fix the the presentation issues of PlayStation texture perspective correction you could down sample to 240p or not allow a highres mode as well but down sampling the 240p get a super clean look super anti-alias you know fix all the texture warping issues it could look really like the art is so good it looks awesome that way uh they could have also if I were doing this if I were working on this collection I would have pushed to have two other things one have a conversion of the PC version of Metal Gear Solid one just just just for fun right even though it is inferior I would say it would be neat to see I think but more importantly and this could be tricky because Nintendo's involvement I think uh twin Snakes should have been in here whether people like it or not doesn't isn't important to me I think I think it's just it's part of middle Gear History and I think it needed to be here as well to really complete this and I really really think it should have been but unlike uh the blueo stuff and unlike you know emul lady PS1 twin Snakes never got re-released so they would have had to handle that situation right either Port it or emulate GameCube and that presents its own problems so I'm not surprised they didn't do it but the whole thing just feels like a cash grab very cheaply done and it makes me so sad to see it because they could have the potential was off the charts here for something truly definitive if they just done it right and they just clearly didn't allocate the resources and the right teams to it to make that happen uh and so frankly I don't recommend buying this and and honestly if you have an Xbox just get the HD collection on there instead it looks not only does it have the benefits of the 360 original which is good enough that with better anti-aliasing you also get forced 16x anisotropic filtering so like it's just that is better that's a better version of middle Gear Solid 2 and three and then if you're like but I want to play middle Gear Solid 1 well guess what you can uh you can install duck station on your Xbox through the dev mode you can uh I think you can do dolphin I know you can do dolphin on there you can get that stuff on your Xbox as well and it's freaking great that awesome man so you know I yeah they messed up they dropped the ball it's not good there's also the lack of games on the actual switch cartridge oh my gosh yeah oh that's yes that's even stupider like it doesn't they don't even include the the main games on here it has like Metal Gear 2 and one the MSX stuff or something on there but the actual main games they have to be downloaded it's just a hunk of point it's a waste of plastic like you may as well have made it all digital at that point it's are those m games even more than a megabyte like seriously they're very very tiny so I suspect the thing that's been happening on switch and I hope that they change the cost structure for the cartridges for the next switch is that um Publishers obviously they don't want to spend more on a switch version than the dis version right and if you go over 8 gabt on the the card size suddenly your cost to manufacture is way above uh doing a Blu-ray disc right and I suspect it's it's literally just that issue right there where they don't want to spend more than a Blu-ray disc on it and so they cheap out and take the the cheapest possible cartridge and I think that's really unfair to the consumer yeah is basically this whole thing is a spectacular lack of ambition a spectacular lack of investment spectacular lack of ECT for the franchises that they're they're returning um it's just astonishing and it's really actually upsetting because done right all of these games would look great so you know and we've got examples of that right so you know for example uh duck station just shows how to handle a Playstation One game on a more modern system how to make it look really really good I mean this this wouldn't have been unknown to M2 so I'm assuming it must be some kind of um uh uh budget restriction which is C we know they could have done better and they have with PS1 games they've done high-res versions they've done enhancements they they've done this stuff before mhm Metal Gear Solid 2 and three I mean um the thing the big takeaway from um blue Point's work is that the quality of the original artwork is such that it it looks great at high resolution was beautiful so you know the concepts that you can't go beyond 720p are on the latest generation of Hardware or PC is a nonsense so you know it's just a complete disaster from top to bottom oh oh another funny thing if in some of the games when they would have a voiceover clip where it would identify buttons on the controller to press like the colonel talk like press this button I guess they updated that for ps360 I believe so the Xbox and Playstation versions have those voiceovers but on switch uh they just turn off the voices for certain scenes like that like they'll be speaking speaking speaking and suddenly it's just text and then it FES back to speaking because they didn't want to record Go I mean that's difficult but still there's like no actual like proper fallback for that it just feels really bad jeez I mean even the worst thing you could do is just use AI I know and I hate to say that but they should have done they needed literally they should have just done that it just feels so cheap that yeah it really is it really is a profound disappointment and you know again I would say the fact they didn't really seed revie code oh points out another thing it the the the European version the dis version if you buy the European version the only version of middle Gear Solid one on the disc is the freaking pow version and all the other versions need to be downloaded as language packs which means it plays 50 htz it's 50 HZ within a 60 HZ container so it sucks that's awful so bad I mean not that I shouldn't even be upset cuz I'm not not going to buy this this is but it's not it's not good enough to Warrant that but like still come on guys come on what are you doing it is awful um but yeah we we'll have content on that and you can see the full Glory of these titles in due course um but yeah I think the the PSA right now is uh if you really like metal gear solid and even if you don't there's no real reason to buy this so let's move on to the next news topic uh we're going to stay on all matters related to Metal Gear Solid because the recent Xbox showcase there was our first uh more in-depth look uh quote unquote in engine look which basically means anything at this point um mle Gear Solid 3 Delta um and we got this question from very professional dodo with the release of the latest quote unquote in engine trailer for redle Gear Solid Delta snake I was immediately struck by the Sam of the graphics looking back at the original mgs3 it's clear that the game had a visual identity that made it almost immediately recognizable the remaster looks a bit like a run-of a m ue5 title or be a pretty one do you think the shift for ue5 in the AAA space will generate visually similar results with Studios pursuing photo realism at all costs using nanite and Lumen or do you believe there will be a push for a boulder art direction to differentiate from the crowd um John I'm going to come to you first on this one but I guess my takeaway from that trailer was that it looked like uh the original game but with a Lumina nanite rapper and there was there was some severe discontinuities there in terms of the quality of the visuals and say the way the animation basically seemed to look a bit weird I don't know what you think about that there's something odd about it for sure yeah before I even commented on that I do want to note that this push towards realism doesn't have to mean you sacrifice style and I think Allan way 2 that we talked about perfect example this this game is super stylized and gorgeous art Direction but it's obviously going for extreme realism as well it can be done right it's not it's this just being on real Engine 5 and pushing these new technologies doesn't mean you have to sacrifice that aspect of the visuals easily this here is a weird one because on the face of it like the detail levels and everything it actually looks pretty good uh but and I don't know man this is a I don't know how you would do this right this is a tough one to do idea but okay okay well just like the original game's really yellow yeah right you could just postprocess it to make it more yellow if they wanted to to get that yellow you could change the sky color to be more yellow so Lumen just propagates that yellow in the scene anyway I think there's ways to do it like right now the the sky color is blue so all the Shadows start getting a bit blue um you know actually I think it is literally this could be color graded to look a lot more like the original with everything that we're seeing right here I I I'm I mean I I also like the look of that original game it is very but it is very of the era like don't forget there was like sure I'm sorry Oliver let me hit the button the piss filter era like like the original game is goodlooking and but it also is like very you know color corrected and like yellow fog in the to be fair it's not always yellow though right yeah I know but like that when people point out the differences it's mainly about color tone and that's the thing that game has each section of that game has own very specific color tone and it follows that throughout the game to give it a unique look and I think you're point about the lighting with Lumen is really interesting because it reminds me actually of Quake 2 RTX where it's really neat to choose the Earth style Sky with the blue sky and everything and it looks awesome but it also doesn't really look like Quake 2 anymore right it completely changes the tone which is why they provide that original strog Colored Sky which which works with the path tracing in that case to create a much more accurate and realistic or sorry less realistic but more accurate to the original game kind of look and I think that's very possible here as well but there's just um man whenever they show the close-ups of snakes model uh it just something about the way the models look seems off I don't know it's just everything about it it feel it does feel kind of tech demoy in a weird way and it's lacking lacking something man it's it's almost hard to put in words but like when you see the original and you see this you can see what they're going for but it just feels this feels I'm gonna say it this has higher this man Nintendo energy all over it you know where it's like you put Mario in like a realistic field and running around kind of thing like it's that that kind of feel a little bit like that like it's better than that but it's still that's kind of what it REM is it though it is because like it it does look like one of those it's very reminiscent of of taking Mario and putting him in an Unreal Engine demo that's that's you know there are some bits that look pretty good I think but ultimately it just looks weird there's there's there's a visual discontinuity between the way it looks and the way it moves in my opinion maybe it's maybe it's simply because the fact that you know it's got to play like the original or we don't know yet we don't know that yet one of the things about the original games depending upon I mean there's some analog movement there but also snake is pretty Nimble he can turn really quickly and that would look really awkward I think with modern visuals like some of the Turning animations that's the thing Metal Gear those Metal Gear games have very I would say granular animation actually there's a lot of movements in there but it's designed to be very gamy as well so things are very Snappy and quick and that helps it feel great and it looked it looked good within the stylistic like visuals of that era but I think when you translate that to like more photo realism it starts to look strange and I don't think they're necessarily doing the exact same animations here either but it does it does kind of have that feel is it's a weird mismatch and I think this is just you know what I'm still interested in playing it and I'm curious about what they're doing and I would say that whoever is working on this has been given an unbelievably difficult job like I don't think there's any world where you make this and everyone is happy uh I think this is just this is it's one of the most beloved games of all time I'd say people love Metal Gear Solid 3 I love middle Gear Solid 3 trying to remake this stuff it's so hard it's so hard and um but I'm still I still hope that it comes away a little bit it almost reminds me of in a different way you know when blueo remade Shadow of the Colossus and Demon Souls there were people that weren't happy with the art Direction and I would say I actually really liked what they did with the art Direction in those games I think it looks pretty good I don't think this is on that level yet but you're always going to have people that aren't happy with those choices made but I think if they there are still things they could do here to make this look a little bit more authentic if you will and I hope they find a way to make that happen the problem I think is that you've got to reestablish a relationship with the gamer right when you produce something like this the way to do that was to do the master collection right okay and um basically with what they've done with the master collection which is basically the bearest minimum way to get these games running on a modern platform it basically sour you know the whole Enterprise right from the off it lowers expectations for the new game and obviously there's things here that do look really really impressive right but based on the way they've handled the franchise in bringing it back it basically just sets expectations at the lowest possible level and um yeah it's just really disappointing that um that that you know what that basically has meant is that we can't really look forward to what this whatever this turns out to be simply because you know with their first example of how they've you know tried to bring the franchise to Modern systems it's it's Fallen flat on its face it's it's it's a disaster but you know I guess you would just have to wait and see how the game uh sort of pans out it really did grind my gears I think you know we need to bring an end to in engine trailers at this point it just really irks me maybe it's the fors of Motorsport experience maybe that was the straw that broke the camels back but you know show us the game for God's sake someone playing it yeah my God just show us the game don't make up stuff if you can't deliver maybe you can deliver with this but and I I do think it's I think it's okay to show stuff that's very work in progress as well please I do think the audience I don't think they give people enough credit on that stuff and I I think especially if you go from something that looks a little bit rough initially and then it gets better as it goes on that actually gets picked up in a positive way where people are like oh they actually they enhanced it they made it better and by the time it releases you know there's excitement around that versus the opposite where you show something that looks outstanding and then it releases and it looks worse that never goes over well but it's It's tricky because you need to get the marketing going and maybe there's just an argument that this stuff shouldn't be shown until it's much closer to being ready and finished yeah okay uh well I guess we just have to wait and see in the meantime let's move on to our final news topic uh so yeah last week basically citizen con returned and um there was a big bunch of amazing looking new technologies announced um the announcement that it looks as though is it Squadron 40 42 appears to be content complete yeah that's it man um Alex this is basically your bag there's a lot of stuff you wanted to talk about yeah are you excited what are you excited I'm excited for um well first thing to is because I backed the game in 2012 um back when it was just actually I I don't think I even did the kickstarter I think I did the they did like the original website back then um and back then it was actually just Squadron 42 more or less the original announcement trailer was like cry engine stuff a lot of it is like assets actually from the original crisis if you look um but like them announcing a new Wing commander and I like Wing Commander I've got Wing Commander three and four on the shelf behind me right um and I like those games and I was very excited for that so them showing Squadron 42 now and it looking kind of like a wing commander game except with you know like on foot and stealth uh so it's not just flying you know it it's also got like like the win commander games there's like downtime in your ship it's you know interacting with the crew very Mass Effect like I think that's all great stuff so I was very excited to see that uh and that means uh content complete means the games it's a matter of time polishing phase and uh optimization stage is what we're at right now and obviously that's different for each game I think Starfield had a year of that um if I recall so who knows how long um they uh they'll do it for squadron but uh coming out and people can play it at some point in time and I imagine they'll probably shop Squadron around to like Xbox and Playstation uh because it's not the massively multiplayer online thing it's a single player campaign you can optimize that in a lot easier way yeah to get that running on Console so that's great um should for the Star Citizen update they had a number of panels talking about how they're advancing the game to make Star Citizen requires making entirely new technology that just doesn't exist so that's why it's always been in interesting that's also why it takes so long all these other things it's like it's like a stupid ambition it's like this most stupidly ambitious thing ever no one should ever want to try and make this and it's like literally the weird Crow crowdfunding model that star cist has is like that's why the only reason why it exists it's so bananas um but they showed off finally that like holy crap they're actually making ridiculous progress now and actually uh like the biggest thing that is the least flashy is they showed off a demo server meshing and so uh right now if you load up Star Citizen uh is the Alpha version of it you'll just be stuck in a server I think with like I think a Max of 150 people or something like that and it takes place in one system and one server is doing all the simulation for that one system with like and they had like a really great slide of this it's like millions of entities that are updated per frame the server's like destroyed essentially when you try and play over a long period of time so the idea is to make it so that more people can play on one server so it's actually an MMO and not just like a big Battlefield 2042 server um is that you need to split up the ren the the simulation workload across multiple servers well to do that is ridiculously complex and they showed off a demo of how it works and it's very fascinating actually essentially like there's a server that is called the replication layer that every single client connects to and also all the simulation servers connect to and they share across this like web uh different responsibilities for simulation and when you cross zones in the world as they showed in this demo different servers will hand off who's doing the simulation but since they're all connected to the replication server they can visually show things on screen that are being simulated in different servers and it's fascinating to see um and it's the first time this has ever been done in a game to my knowledge uh most MMOs do like shards and stuff like that which is very different uh so this this is like the thing that makes star cist actually work as an MMO and they actually have it working now so it's a matter of bringing that to The Wider course of the game and I hope in a year I can report back for the first time like I said back in 2020 I'm going to report on this game again when they add in server mesing I hope I get to do that at the end of 2024 at some point um that would be nice very open Target you've got there H it's is Chris Roberts Target what can I say um so and then the rest of the present was all really cool stuff because it's stuff we don't see usually in games like games like yeah Allen wake 2 awesome looking game uh control had a lot of physics in it that's interesting um but a lot of games are like very static not very simulation driven and it's a that was like a stylistic thing uh that happened at the end of like the Xbox 360 generation that games went from being less Sim heavy to being more I don't know how to say it like less so hey and weirdly enough that's exactly what the Zelda recent Zelda games offer they're Sim like yeah they're they're like Mims with physics in like an open world context it's very interesting um and this is the a lot of the demonstrations that they showed off were like saying like actually star ciss is going to do all these things that you saw like in the original crisis and more and they had a really awesome uh water uh physics demo that they showed off that is very very cool it's like a like a virtual textured Bas version of water so you can get like super high detailed wave cresting and foam up close to the camera as well as like massive stuff in the distance that that demo they showed with the Rocks where they're like putting increasingly large objects and moving them around in the mouse and like creating waves upon waves and ripples upon Ripples and all the foaming is happening and everything's just I was like wow I've never seen that before in the game that's super cool and then yeah and they got the stuff where it's like if a ship flies close to the water it actually causes the water to behave as you'd expect you know buzzing the surface right it creates a wake behind it causes w waves and ripples as it passes that stuff's amazing yeah so stuff like that that's stuff that's kind of required for like if you have like a giant planet that has like oceans on it otherwise the game just looks like a weird you know like a fact simile of real life and it just doesn't interact so it's like these are all things to like live up to that whole living and bable world but the one thing that I think was most interesting in terms of these graphical demos there was a lot they showed off like rtgi they showed off new hair rendering they showed off tons of other stuff star cloth yeah that's actually soccer ball up up the uh the dude like there was a lot of giggling to say the least in the audience when the soccerball peeped out of the man's gown um but um they showed off a physicalized damage system which I think was really cool because um it's kind of hard to say like a lot of games obviously you you shoot an object and it breaks apart into preconfigured pieces right and that's usually how it's done and this is a bit more like a DMM back from uh my God the Force Unleashed where like an object has physical constraints and break uh and it breaks upon physical constraints uh and like with inertia and all these other things and in the demo they showed off for like a couple of things but the entire reason why that's really cool is because you can finally do some really interesting things with ships in the game that you otherwise couldn't do before like beforehand like a ship would have a death State uh and it's like very much so based upon Health that just some arbitrary health value for different sections of the ship Etc but if it's actually based upon physical constraints well you can have things like part of the ship breaking off while the rest of the ship is still working and these are things that are like you know like the entire dream of star Sy is all about like really cool interactivity and like a multi-crew environment it's very fun stuff like that so I thought I would take the time to talk about it right here I would love to have done a dedicated video on it but alen wake 2 came out um so I'm definitely doing Allen wake 2 right now but I'm going to report on the game again like I said I think when server meshing is in and maybe do like a do you have direct segment on again if they add in Vulcan very soon because that's going to be coming in we've been waiting years for Vulcan yeah like they said in the presentation this has taking longer than we wanted U but they actually showed off Vulcan running too so that's another good thing um okay yeah so Alex if I bought a spaceship of you would you do a video on this game bought a spaceship off of me I uh seems to be the funding model for yeah do you want to buy a JPEG of a spaceship actually Alex is there a way I would love to I still want to do this video with you I would like to go into a game with you and be where put around where we put basically I want I want to be the Star Citizen newbie who doesn't know much about this game and I want you the master to take me on a journey to show me what's cool about star Star Citizen uh together right I actually think this would be a fun video and we should try to do this we should probably when the new year starts uh as I described earlier there's going to be a l period where there's less releases and let's hope that it stays that way because then we can have some fun videos like that that would be cool cuz I think I could represent what most of the audience is thinking about this like going into not knowing much about this and wanting to learn more yeah it leads us into this uh this question from unnamed player who's added some random numbers into his username there uh hi DFT exclamation point does it make sense to just start playing Star Citizen I was always impressed by the idea and scope but after many years I can imagine uh it can be as hard as joining a Quake 3 server now with only hardcore players annihilating others for over 20 years or is it somehow accessible to new players um there's a lot of good stories about this um if you do not announce yourself and you spawn at some location like I don't know it used to be Port olsar um but like if you'd spawn there and you'd leave the safety zone there would just be Pirates there that would just kill you immediately this is awful awful that's a bad thing to do but if you type into all chat if you if you really do want to try it they have like free weekends every once in a while where you can play for the whole weekend I'd say wait to do that and expect bugs and all that crap um but if you do do that type into the all chat of the server think it's like F12 and just type I'm a newbie can someone help me out and I'm serious people will literally come and tell you how to play the game it's very cool um they obviously have a new onboarding system in terms of like you spawn at a place and it teaches you how to play the game as you after you spawn in which is nice uh used to be very much so like you started a Spaceport and you have no idea what you're supposed to do um but nowadays it's a bit more streamlined so I think you should just try it on a free weekend whenever they do the next one I have no idea when that is okay sounds good well you know this is one of these games that you know whenever we produce a video about it we get like 250,000 views minimum and I think it's one of these things where it's a a weird one right because you know there's very little faith in people that I speak to that the game's actually ever going to be in a complete state but at the same time they just keep aiming literally aiming for the stars and trying to do better and better and you know what that the the scope of what they're attempting now is far in excess of what they ever promis to begin with I guess at some point we'd like to see some kind of end product and I guess Squadron 42 actually appearing would be a good thing BL that would be the good one I mean that would it also would like show people like what Star Citizen like it's going to be very different obviously it's a single player game but it would also be like oh you get on a ship you fly to a planet you get off the ship on the planet it's like you know gameplay Loops That You Don't See like Starfield obviously very different game entirely but like I don't think a lot of people see games where you just like start in one discrete location and go to one very far away I guess actually I'm curious about that one of the things with Starfield for better for worse is that that even though it's a big game it felt very small because of all the loading screens and the Fast Travel it it felt like you just warping between planets as if you just going to it around the corner uh so it kind of took the the feeling of space out of it and I'm wondering in Star Citizen how that works like right can you just bounce around to different places freely like that or does it actually require you to engage in real space travel um so uh Star Citizen not Squadron right oh okay so Star Citizen you have like a normal flying mode okay which is very sublight it's meant for dog fighting it's like I think it tops out at like one like 1 kilometer a second which is obviously still very fast yeah but it's not it's nothing in terms of like it's not like quarter impulse or something like that quarter impulse in the game exists as a Quantum Drive that you engage and it does move you through space at that speed uh last time I played it was a beline to wherever you set on your map and it would take as long as it would take to get there at whatever the quarter the speed of light is um so it could take quite a long time to go across an entire solar system that way and the game does let you do that but while you're doing that obviously you can get out of your seat of your ship and do anything in your multi crew ship environment or you could literally like I've done it sometimes where I open the back of the ship and I jump off of the ship while the ship's going like quarter the speed of light and I'm just like left rooing in Dead Space uh you know it's a yeah you can just in casar citizen you can just go anywhere you want really it's kind of interesting okay cool all right sounds good cool okay I think that's the end of our new section for this week um but it was certainly packed um let's move on now to supporter Q&A which is as always I mean every week I put up a call for questions and our patreon always get like 50 60 responses amazing stuff in there guaranteed I think we possibly for Christmas we'll need to do a Q&A special since there won't be a a direct Christmas m M um but let's start off with this one from Dirk hodin um in light of news that Alan Wake 2 won't support Pascal gpus perhaps it's time for a eulogy for Pascal and the GTX 1080ti I suspect he means to TI the little GPU that good it's actually pretty massive GPU massive but at the same time uh I did get where he's coming from because there are certain gpus that do somehow managed to you know uh remain relevant years beyond their sort of projecting uh sort of lifespan and the 108ti well until Alan white came along you know it did offer sort of broadly equivalent rasterization performance to uh to a console you know it falls a bit short in some titles I kind of really like this idea of going back and looking at Classic gpus but um I've seen other sites do them and typically um it's it's kind of fan service in a way validation for people that have bought these gpus but I think there's also maybe the the concept that um hey you can buy this GPU now and it'll still be great and I think if you actually sort of went through a big bunch of titles the latest games and and actually tried the 1080 ti ti ti on it you you'd be struggling at even 1080p60 right yeah and yeah I I do kind of like the idea and I think it's quite easy content to do because if you actually Benchmark the GPU for you know a graphics card with you you've got the bones of a story that you can tell there the issue being that I think when you actually take these products into gaml um it doesn't really often reflect uh the kind of impression that you get from the benchmarks I don't know what do you think about this Alex um this is a hard one actually because I I think a retrospective video to a certain degree a sendoff video for this generation of GPU could literally start with like this the the games that it uh showed off really well like I think you originally did a 4K video about The Witcher didn't you unlike the GTX 1080 TI back in the day uh I can't remember but you know we looked at basically when freesync came to it was Nvidia cards yeah I mean we tried a whole bunch of games there and it was really good you know that was it was a fantastic ad for for 4K gaming which you couldn't really I mean it's the first card that I guess the 1080 got there as well but the 1080ti you know had proper use cases for 4K display it was it was a really great product it was really cool for that and I I think it' be kind of interesting to chart that like oh Witcher 3 you could play out High settings at 4K and get a great experience but now take the Witcher 3 enhanced Edition or something like that or take cyber Punk and be like actually this is how Graphics get better you can see the L you know like they're trading pixel quality I think it would be an interesting thing to say like Graphics get better you could take the this old this GPU that used to be a 4K GPU and now it's a 1080 GPU or it's a don't play the G A 1080 talking it's a 1080 kiding so yeah Alan Wake is a bit a bit problematic with the 1080 TI um but yeah I mean I I kind of enjoy this concept of revisiting truly great Hardware I've done it before with GeForce and with the uh 3D effects cards right that's going way back obviously but still yeah I mean you do end up with this sort of double-edged sword though because people do want to see the latest titles running on it right and sometimes they hold you the card holds up better than expected over time I think I've seen some coverage on like for example the 5700 XT uh which is St cheap to buy now used and uh you know it does a job but at the same time you know we to produce this kind of content in a transitional period you've got to be really careful saying hey this still has a role to play today where where's my Fury x video Rich that's what I'm waiting for Fury x video you mean the overclocker dream yes uh which I couldn't overclock by 50 megahertz without it crashing Yes actually real quick I want to looking at this question it did get me to think about something right CU right it's a it's it's you Alex you are the key here I'll tell you why because you basically started working for us and really became big in the scene right when they announced the RTX line of cards that's right you joined us around the origins of Ray tracing so there's kind of like a before Alex period and an after Alex period and the this the point where it shifted is in fact related to Ray tracing so it's incredible actually basically I would like to refer to these gpus going forward as the before Alex era or the after Alex era the ba and AA yeah yeah yeah the ba and AA let's do it from now on so there we go fair enough thanks Chad yeah I think there is a role for this kind of content um but again you know it's it's there is the kind of thing that you know as as I've said you know we are in this transitional period where this Hardware is really going to start to struggle now but you know it is it is fun to see some occasional sort of uh things that you can do with the 1080ti I mean back in the day I did a bit of bonus material for patrons where I just play to um with r tracing on a 1080ti yeah and you know it works it's 30 frames per second 1080p but it works and it's just kind of one of those weird things that that happened where they actually introduced a software path for RT for the Pascal cards and it's fun but it's uh you know it's it's just kind of like you know it does show the limits so to speak I'm reminding of Rand random gaming and HD videos of like you know like some really old Intel CPU versus a newer one of the same class and seeing like how much gen gen's going there one thing I've always kind of wanted to do is take the original was it core i7 980 which is a six scoree 12 thread CPU from yeah when was that 2008 I don't know um and I'm curious what if you plug that into Windows 10 obviously there's some SS2 games I think or was AVX games that won't run on it but a lot of games will and like what does a six score 12 thread CPU from that era do in games now that are actually coded for it like six 12 what is what even happens there yeah and there's also a big thing about um uh the zons that you can buy for nothing now right I think there was a video I saw I'm not sure if it was random gaming in HD but it was like 16 cores for $16 oh that's awesome which is a which is a fantastic headline yeah I mean man this is just a sort of thing where you know if we had time we'd do it but I don't mind now but have to have think about it let's move on to the next question a quick one this one from gorguts any thoughts on Intel's 14th gen specifically with regards to APO will you will you be updating your test PC CPU to 14 900k uh so yeah I mean um will did a review for the uh 14th generation Intel and it's basically a kind of placeholder uh I would I would suspect you know basically the 14900 K is a 13900 k uh it's just basically they've um upped uh uh core clocks on a lot of products the i7 is slightly more interested interesting they added more ecores um with regards to APO that gorguts is talking about here it's basically an extension of um the thread director that came in with all Lake which basically um I don't know what to make of this because the cynic in me just thinks that it's just turning off ecores right and and peores when they're not required if you looked at Alex's content recently where he uses a 12900 K to see how a game engine utilizes all of these cores and threads you'll see that there can be degradation in performance when you actually use all of the facilities of this CPU the cynic in me suggests that all the APO is doing is basically looking to see whether a game uses all of the caes and threads and if it doesn't just basically blocks them off to the application which will give you a performance uplift in you know there's talk of of like 10 20% on some games um but why aren't they deploying this to Old Lake and Raptor Lake why is it 14th gen only surely it it should apply to everything because they're fundamentally based on very similar architectures and in the case of 3900k it's basically the same chip it is literally the same chip almost right so like will we be updating our test PC CPU to 14 900k probably not um I think we were I think AMD actually I've just got an email hot in here Alex they're going to be sending you a 7800 you think is going to be great I got it I got let's just say I got a phone call while we were talking earlier which distracted me I couldn't pick it up but I'm pretty sure that was AMD actually sorry Joe I mean that's the thing right I mean um typically we put in uh uh the the the top end gaming chip in your gaming reviews and you know that is the 7800 X3 at the moment what we want to move on to yeah qos to AMD there they're doing some amazing work on CPUs right now but that's really all we've got to say about that one let's move on to the next question actually it's two questions I'm going to lump them together the first one from Helen X I was wondering how herizon one and Last of Us 2 could be meaningfully remastered for the PS5 and the only uh customer friendly slash not stupid form I can see them taking would be as launch titles for the PS5 Pro with extensive raid tracing is this likely it make the base PS5 versions of these Masters remasters a side grade at best considering the performance hit that any RT upgrade would have on these games some guy here High DF exclamation point I'll preface this by saying I'm a huge Horizon Stan but I'm surprised that there's no real interest from the team in the rumored hzd remaster the original still looks great but there's a lot of improvement that could be made to the quality of the water and character animations this could be a good opportunity to experiment with raate facing in desima in an environment that's more forgiving than a new game and it feels like there are ever fewer proprietary engines being used today am I being too optimistic or could there actually be some interesting enhancements here um I think there's the basically the from my perspective there's the philosophical side of things versus the the points being raised here philosophical side of things is that if you've got developers of the caliber of naughty dog and um and Gorilla Games you kind of want them to to progress you want them to move on to new things you want to see amazing great new games rather than you know taking old ones and and essentially remastering them especially when they're relatively recent still I think that's kind of my point on that John what do you think of this concept of basically making them showcase products for a PS5 Pro uh well I get the feeling that if these exist it's probably not the primary teams at naughty dog or gorilla doing the most of the work right uh we don't we don't know you'd expect the engine enhancements to be core technology which could be leveraged for whatever they're doing next right uh The Last of Us two thing I think Alex your comment last week kind of made sense as to why it would happen is if they do a PC version of of that game why not also have it on PS5 natively but Horizon you know I think Horizon zero dawn it's a good game but I don't I don't really like remasters of open world games GES usually because I just I I don't think that they're worth replaying usually or I don't find it exciting to replay but purely from a visual perspective that's a different matter and it could be very interesting indeed to see what they would do with these and yeah if this showed up alongside the PS5 Pro I wouldn't be that excited about the games but I would certainly be curious to see what they do with the technology uh although the man The Last of Us Part Two it's like it looks so freaking good now as is like I just I don't see I don't know it would be weird to to go in there and do a remaster thing at this point somehow I feel or like I don't feel like they could make enough progress to drastically change it and so much of what looks good about it I mean if you're going to say like do ray tracing features in there like I it would be nice but I don't think it would dramatically change the way it looks because all the art and the lighting everything was designed very specifically to look the way it does and Horizon would obviously be a larger undertaking I think because it is an older game at this point and it would probably I guess look I would assume similar to the sequel which would be fine it just again would be a visual showcase maybe but I just can't understand the purpose of it's already 4K 60 checkerboard on PS5 right yeah I just what do you really need be better quality Maybe need to remake that game good Lord yeah they wouldn't do it but if they got to go back and remake some old stuff why not they go into the Kill Zone games again I don't know i' I'd rather see see that shadow I think shadowfall especially even though people are pretty down on it I think it's a very interesting and a cool game and it's let down by a few things that I think a remaster could dramatically improve uh but it's more of a crisis style shooter than say the other Kill Zone games were which were much more Call of Duty like uh and maybe that's part of what people didn't like about it I don't know but I know what you mean know um rtgi I think would be a big deal for desimo and would be cool it's just well the thing about rtgi for Last of Us would be a weird one because I mean their baked lighting is very specifically excellent at simulating what you would get with rtgi offline and the game doesn't have Dynamic time of day it's it's actually reminds me of Allen wake 2 in the forest areas like they are doing pretty amazing baked Lighting in that game and I think you know rtgi would obviously enhance the Precision and fix some of the edge case stuff but I don't think it would be that transformative without them doing major major work to it which I don't worth it stuff there' have to be a lot more maybe texture detail up the detail on some of the meshes you know just like increase the granularity of everything Maybe yeah I think rtgi in the case of the Horizon zero Dawn potential remaster makes more sense that makes a lot more sense that that would be that would be fun whatever interest yeah and and you could probably slap in the exact same assets and it'd still look generally great just because the lighting is so so so much better we've already talked about it before like the original game good looking but like as soon as you go into any of like the places that are just like overhangs or the cities the lighting quality goes down quite a lot so I mean but it's also like I'd rather see them doing something else with their but I mean again we don't know what the main teams are doing and I I think it's pretty obvious that these things are now being used to fund the the longer development cycles that it takes to make the big stuff and this kind of highlights a problem I have with the current state of PlayStation and actually it applies to a lot of companies at this point it's just games have become so complex to make and there's they're relying on too few developers to get it made and this was a strength of PlayStation in the past as they had a lot of smaller and mid-tier teams as well creating interesting fun often quirky kind of content that would fill in the gaps between these big AAA releases and now we don't have many releases at all and then some of them are just like remake stuff now and it just feels like like we're in a position where it's becoming maybe you know they don't have the studio power do this anymore like they used to and just takes so much time to make these big things like the level of quality they need to reach to actually live up to what people expect like that's so much Manpower like that's why I laugh when I see people arguing about the specks of these consoles and like you know that has so little to do with the way these games end up looking now like that's just that's one of the least important parts I'd say it's everything else that's causing them to take as long as they do uh and yeah so I just wish there was some smaller stuff in there or at least you know some of the creative stuff like where's uh teamobi or whatever with uh that did astrobot games right we haven't seen anything from them and surely they've got to be in something I mean I would assume psvr2 but like Astro the first astrobot was one of the greatest platform 3D platform games ever made I would say these guys are super talented and it just it's been silence so going back to The Last of Us Part One do you consider that to be uh uh not worth doing no so that one in the end I was kind of pessimistic against that initially but in the end I think it worked out pretty well because it brought it up to par with The Last of Us Part Two and maybe even a little bit beyond and they they became like two parts of a hole right and it feels consistent when you play them back to back uh they both look amazing uh whereas you know going back to the original the last of us and into the sequel they definitely you know you can the age was evident in that original but now they're on that same level I don't feel like the last of was part two really needs that kind of boost right it already looks good it already looks great I would say but again I as you suggested Alex I think it is probably more likely just like hey they want to bring the Last of Us Part Two to the PC which is great and if you're already doing a PC version I guess why not just release a PS5 version as well that also makes sense so why not that whole situation probably does make sense especially with the with the show that had happened and why not do that it's just the Horizon one that really sticks with me is like it just feels like a I don't want feels like a waste of time I'm sorry I feel bad for anybody working on it but it's yeah I'm sure it's going to look good if it happens but man maybe there's something we just don't know about yet is a bit of a well wait let's let's wait and see what it is that's true just it's just the premise that I take issue with but maybe there's something more okay fair enough let's move on to the next question this one from Garfield yes the Garfield hi DF yeah it must be literally the the the comic's character um anyway um Garfield says hi DF team after finally seeing some current gen only game releases this year I was wondering if this generation would continue to be plagued by noisy and ghostly visual quality if modern games need to upscale from sub 1080p to even reach 30 FPS are we sure we really want to move to highly expensive realtime effects at any cost Crossen games actually look and feel much Superior at this point compared to slightly accurate but highly noisy and artifact ridden current gen onlyi games or do you think this is mostly devs getting used to the new consoles right after the difficulties of developing in a pandemic what are your thoughts on this Alex I think from my perspective it's you know it's kind of like um hopefully it'll be up by now but your video on the first generation of Unreal Engine 5 Games it's basically Growing Pains at this point right and it is just the beginning of the journey really and there have been some issue I mean even Alan Wake too on consoles does have some image quality concerns yeah I'll talking about them yeah I mean what do you make of this I mean well if you're going to be you're eating up to push those next gen visuals like Garfield says um Garfield uh you you're eating up a lot of the compute power just to push those next gen visuals so you then start pushing back on resolution and we're fine with that to a certain degree obviously uh when it does get down to FSR like I want I don't want to just say FSR 2 is a big issue in this but it is a part of it like you have to think about ways to scale that resolution and effects quality and all these other things down to a way to make it a grade at I don't think there's been 30 FPS games that have really big image quality issues I think probably alen wake 2 is U pretty fine at 30fps with its image quality obviously could be better but uh I think it's mainly the 60fps modes is where image quality issues start being the big deal and that's when people start complaining about it the most and at that point it is just kind of goes with the territory it's hard to complain so much so when you know like these these things are very expensive to render at that point um I think it's good for if developers if you don't like that Trend um it's probably good to make a deal about it online on the internet uh so developers start targeting 60 FPS Maybe by not using nextg Technologies or I mean there's the fact that unre Gen 5 is going to keep evolving over time that rich just talked about so I imagine it will get better over time I think I think maybe Dev should look at using TSR instead of FSR 2 sometimes as another thing and uh lastly if you're really upset about um the image quality you're getting there on the console there's always ways to go above that if you just look at a PC uh it's more expensive obviously uh but you get what you pay for to a certain degree so um it's a bit of a tough luck that I'm saying to you like tough luck Garfield but like it will get better but like also there's only so much you can do with a certain amount of silicon and I I don't want to fault devs too much for saying like yeah 60 FPS doesn't have great image quality always it's kind of just like it happens it happens yeah yeah I mean Charlie Brown sitting there pretty with his RTX dlss isn't he yeah he is probably oh dear um okay I think that's fair enough John what's your thoughts on image quality for these new games is I mean you know when Jedi Survivor came in it was it was bad I think uh I don't think it's this bad across the board but I think there have been some key releases where it's pretty bad and maybe it is due to pushing this stuff but I also think we've seen an increased Reliance on FSR I and I kind of feel like there's a little bit of this magic bullet syndrome going on where they're like well you know this promises to let us render lower resz internally and still get X result when in reality it's not actually the case and it's more I actually I don't want to fault FSR 2 here too much it's not so much FSR 2 can look amazing it's more that I think that developers are perhaps pushing it a little bit too far like trying to upscale from way too low resolutions and I actually think they've just gone too far with it and it sort of breaks what FSR 2 can do it's not intended to be used at these absurd resolutions like I think what would that that Lords of the Fallen thing which I know that got there will be a video I think still happening but it keeps getting pushed back due to patches that keep happening over and over and over every day like what you do you can't cover that I was looking at that screen Tom Sent of when the game was on Series S running at 576 by 324 resolution at seven frames per second the image quality and just the way it looked was so bad I mean the and that shot in particular was funny cuz the performance and image quality is actually worse than like Shadow of the Colossus running in 480p on a PS2 and much worse especially because of the attempt at upscaling I say attempt when you're down to resolutions like that like it just doesn't work it's bad it's broken and I think we need people to realize that these reconstruction Solutions have limitations there is like a minimum you need to hit and I think that's what's causing a lot of these issues is it's just games going too far below it and I do actually think that scaling back in other ways might behoove them as as well uh there's got to be but finding that right right balance is difficult right and maybe this is all learnings that will happen we'll see especially on Series S yeah yeah well Series S is potentially useful in that it kind of sets like this minimum requirement that maybe has a positive impact on the other machines right if you got to run on Series S I mean conceivably without the series s who knows how low they would go the other ones yeah right like they have to just like there's a minimum threshold of quality that Series S kind of has Series S though man it is like I've been playing some old PS3 and 360 stuff somewhat recently through the retrotink 4K and I I I do actually think that image quality is kind of worse now in some ways what we were getting there like you play like a 360 game with like msaa enabled versus like this like 324p Series S game with reconstruction and it it genuinely looks much better modes man these 60 FPS modes again that was another 60 FPS mode special I think though yeah that well yes it was technically in the 60 FPS mode it was just down running running at 7 FPS which I believe they fixed by the way yeah so it's hard to know oh my God yeah but like I would like to see if more series s games maybe just didn't have a 60 FPS mode then I mean I like the option everything's always an option give it give it the option to go down to 20p whatever I had a feeling this was going to be the case least have a 30 FPS mode cuz I remember dirt 5 came out and had its 120 FPS mode on Series S and that's like freaking it looks like 480p or something it's super nasty looking uh and this opens up a hold of discussion about resolutions though because having a low pixel count does not inherently mean your Game will look bad it's all about the combination of display type the way it's scaled or not scaled to that display type like you know 640 by 480 and a good VGA PC CRT monitor as you know Alex looks awesome it's so it's so beautiful looking 480p upscaled with FSR 2 and then output to 4K and blown up on a large flat panel screen looks bad my goodness yeah it's very different Beast it's switch on a you know on a HD okay sorry rich just too much tangent get back on track let's do this okay well let's move on to our final question and actually there's two questions in one again the first of all from Tamer escanda hi DF crew and welcome back Rich exclamation point would' love to get John's impression on the quest 3 since he's the resident VR expert what do you think of the graphical update shown for certain titles running on the new device seems like a potential Leap Forward thanks this one from Simplex will someone from the DF crew make the ultimate sacrifice and review The Meta Quest 3 definitely check out red matter 2 is optimized by actual Wizards Pro tip get a replacement strap either a official Elite strap or a replacement like Bobo VR the default elastic strap is bad uh so John I'm not sure we got any plans to do a spe specific review of The Meta Quest 3 stuff however you have now experienced both the Quest 2 and the quest 3 and uh I'd love to get your your thoughts on both of them at some point I kind of want to do like a VR headset Showdown and just talk about these cuz you know it's hard to Showcase VR in a video so if you just talk about them all but I'll talk about what I've experienced so far so I have a Quest 2 and I have borrowed a quest three temporarily and I've played with them both and my thoughts are that the the quest 3 makes some nice improvements uh it is less uh it it's less thick it's lighter uh they use pancake lenses on there so it actually the Optics are slightly improved I wouldn't say it made as big of a difference as I expected but it's still it's it's definitely better uh and it's just it does feel like a a more premium nicer headset so I I like that but the Quest 2 still it holds up surprisingly well it's a good headset too uh the big thing though with regards to Graphics so I tested a few games and the big one that I I tested a hubris which I also tested on psvr2 by the way and this is a really cool game that combines like shooting puzzles swimming all kinds of stuff into it and this is an Unreal Engine based game and right away on the quest 3 the big thing I noticed is just there's a massive incre inrease in Clarity and just general sense of distant detail like it the Quest 2 I would say playing that game on the Quest 2 it looks pretty good and runs well but it feels a bit like playing a PSV VR1 game you know you know the you know the look rich right where it just it feels like the game pixels are just pretty chunky and big and it just the whole thing feels a bit lowfy right but it's still immersive you go to Quest three and it suddenly starts to feel more like a dedicated VR platform like it feels more like I what I might have imagined experiencing in PC VR several years ago right like all this now feels more like a PC VR head headset experience except for it's all done within the S so built into the unit so that is kind of a revelation that's kind of the sense I've gotten from everything I've looked at so far between them is just the resolution tends to be higher uh asset quality textures especially seem better I noticed things like in some games there's more grass you know more distant LOD stuff happening it just feels richer and filled out and more closer to what you'd expect from a higher-end VR experience and I would describe it as like this halfway house between the Quest 2 and like a psvr2 experience at this point maybe closer to psvr2 not quite that level mind you I would say although there's a lot of psvr2 stuff that's derived from quests so you you kind of feel that uh we're not at the point though where we're seeing like halflife Alex level Fidelity on one of these portable headsets I suspect that's still not really feasible I mean I actually don't know how far they could push the quest 3 Hardware but that's that seems like a gigantic ask it won't happen obviously but I I don't know about that uh I will say though both of them are really interesting when used with virtual desktop for your PC uh I actually tried this down in my living room right next to my router so my PC's wired I stood next to the router and I could connect to the PC via virtual desktop and use both headsets on the PC wirelessly which is a revelation I must say being able to use these things suddenly I've you know I'm down in the living room there's no wires connected you can spin all over in playe like halflife Alex that way feels freaking great uh it is very very cool and obviously the Optics improv screen and all that kind of stuff on the quest 3 helps make that experience feel it feels like you're playing a a highend VR PC experience which you are but you're not you know connected by wires which is awesome and neither of them are OLED right no they're not it's still LCD and that actually that's the biggest thing so this is seen some interesting things so the psvr 2's oleds do really nice deep black and it does get pretty bright it's pretty intense but then I'm also testing the pimax crystal which is like the opposite of these because it's so freaking heavy it's a ridiculous headset uh I don't even I don't find it very comfortable but holy heck like the I I mentioned this last week I think but just the clarity of the screen that uses LCD but it uses really good quality local dimming and it's super bright super intense and it goes up to 120 htz uh and just like the clarity of that is unreal and the fov is unreal it's it's it's like a preview of like where I would like VR to keep moving to like obviously you still need like to be connected to a PC to make this work uh at that Fidelity I would say but man it's it's very promising and yeah the quest two experience Quest three experience it's not there yet I would say but uh I like I like the quest I I do like the quest a lot I actually another game I played this week was the seventh guest it got a VR release and it's a it's a new game that's been rebuilt to sort of retell the story of the seventh guest and I got a bit emotional when you first walk into that mansion that that initial hallway with the staircase and it's like you're there being able to look and walk around in 3D uh I it would have been like a dream I could never even have imagined back in like the early 90s when I first played that on my PC so and they actually integrate FMV into the 3D models as well kind of it looks like I need a better experiment but the characters look like filmed actors which they are but when you when you move around it's like a 3D object so I think they've like somehow mapped FMV stuff onto these models in a weird way to make it look like you're watching video uh which is really compelling and cool and it works in the quest too even it looks awesome so well this is my final question for you John because prior to this Hands-On and actually spending time with it you weren't actually boted with the concept of the quest no I wasn't and part of it was just it just seemed underpowered the first demo I saw wasn't great and then I only had used a quest a friend's quest with the included head strap which I freaking hated it's very uncomfortable uh I got the pro strap for this Quest and that basically that's the game changer it basically behaves more like a psvr or you know any of those other headsets we get little knob in the back and it sits more comfortably on your head once I switched to that and got a lens insert so I don't have to wear my glasses it's fantastic so no complaints there okay interesting good stuff uh I'd be really interested to see your VR headset face off particularly if you can get the pimax in I no I want I want to get the pimax in there because the pimax actually what I think the pimax is probably best suited for it's less the room scale VR which it can do and it's cool but it's more for the hardcore PC guys that want to do Sims right right whether it's racing spaceship based games anything with a lot of granular detail like when you look at like a cockpit in VR inside the pimax crystal it's so freaking clear that you just it feels like you can reach out and touch the buttons there is no screen door effect anymore it's just gone it just looks like super ultra high-r normal PC graphics but in 3D VR with a bigger larger fov uh it feels awesome in those kind of cockpit games so but I I think again it's a so you kind of have to know what kind of VR gamer you are and yeah I would like to break down in more detail what makes each headset special why they're all different you know because I think they all have different use cases and uh the pimax is weird though because it also has its own s so built in and apparently is going to have its own store and wireless stuff as well and I'm curious to see what its s so actually can do I guess we'll find out soon enough that feature is not activated yet so I don't know the VR headset space is wild right now there's there's there's still stuff happening okay that's enough enough er sorry it's interesting no no I was fascinated because we've not really talked about it but uh I know you've been spending a lot of time with it recently so I was really it's great to see these questions come up but that is the final set of questions and therefore the end of the show so please do like subscribe share if you enjoyed it uh ring the bell for notionally instant notifications uh a surprising lack of notifications during my time off a bit disappointing no random gaming in HD no random gaming in HD and like I get the DF uh notifications like like 4 days late now oh man which is great not that I need them anyway but there we are uh yeah DF supports program join us join our amazing Community uh submit your questions for the show and uh yeah just generally get involved got an amazing Community there but that's all from us for this week thanks for watching oh

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 209,564

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Id: fsBw1galvPY

Length: 119min 20sec (7160 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023