hey everyone welcome back to digital Foundry for this uh the 137th edition of DF direct weekly pack show for you this week and uh joining me to get through all of this stuff first of all John lindman hello Rich if only there was an extra three in that number we would be completely lead so abolutely I'm liking it 137 we'll get there in about 10 years time oh my goodness no oh no yeah you get less for murder and of course Alex Balia yeah I feel like yeah we're all trapped in just these like boxes now we'll never leave it's always DF direct D direct all the time these boxers okay uh well with that out of the way that's sort of nihilistic view of the the direct situation let's crack on with our first news topic okay so this one came out of nowhere and this is part of what I love about this industry is that sometimes not often there is a genuine surprise that we can drop on our audience just comes out of nowhere nobody seemed to guess this was coming but the steam deck OLED is here the reviews dropped yesterday as of this recording we had our video up and um there's a bunch of other great reviews out there as well um well you know what could I say about this uh I just love this this machine right because you can tell yeah I mean well that's actually quite an interesting story there John because you were talking about uh the sort of excitement in the info into Sur my video and it was basically the case that you know I do usually do a pretty tightly scripted video but for that I was just reading the script and I just went off script because it just wasn't really conveying what I was feeling about this machine which is yeah it's quite the thing so you know what are we looking at here we're looking at a steam deck it looks much the same that's you know almost stealth likee in the fact that it looks presents identically to the standard steam deck but then you turn on the the unit the the screen comes on and it is an absolutely amazing OLED display would you say it's an absolute unit it well whatever you like but you know the bottom line is that um yeah I fired up ay in the will of the Wisps which is my go-to game for HDR right and um it's like having an LG television topend LG television in in the palm of your hand right and what bigger recommendation can you have for gaming than that you know it's it's just a brilliant companion to to games it it it just transforms um the likes of AI anything that has a good HDR implementation and even if it doesn't have a good HDR implementation you've still got that amazing contrast I mean we've got some questions that the audience have got here but I'm interested in your reaction to this John because um well actually quite a few people are wondering in in our supporter group whether you're going to buy one because the SC the screen is essentially the reason you didn't buy the original right that is right right yeah I uh I hate the screen in the original steam deck I think I think it's bad I think it's a bad screen it's it's everything I don't like about LCD thrown in there right the viewing angles aren't great the backlight is extremely evident it just doesn't look good to my eye um and I said back then when this was first revealed like I I probably wouldn't bother with a steam deck until it gets an OLED screen and everybody was like H I don't think that's going to happen but here we are yeah and then of course the other problem was the battery life was pretty poor I would say like it's you know reasonable enough but you know you can't get that much for for gameplay time when running higher end applications it's a struggle that's that's the bottom line yeah you you have to be thinking about your settings you have to be thinking about your um frame rate caps in order to eek out extra minutes right and and the the the crazy thing is of course that this is the best case scenario for p PC handheld gaming at the moment yeah yeah yeah so you know yeah that's the thing right is like this one looks like it's just long enough where you can almost treat it more like a switch and just like enjoy the games on there right like yeah the high-end stuff is still going to drain the battery pretty quickly but uh it seems reasonable enough and you know between that and the screen that's basically what I was looking for uh that's and also it sounds like the fan noise has improved so you say rich and the or steam deck had this kind of shrill sound to it that I found somewhat unpleasant you know what I mean yeah uh and you take all those things together I'm just like well you know steam deck whatever but this one does actually genuinely have me tempted uh I might have to treat myself to one of these when we get you know if I can actually get one I don't know I mean the pre-order situation may maybe I won't be able to get one we'll see I would I would like one cuz it definitely looks like like the machine I had wanted from the original steam deck now and there's a lot of stuff I'd love to play on that and really HDR and OLED that sells me big time because the screen it was we saw this with the switch right Rich where the original switch LCD which is better than the steam deck LCD by the way I would say they're neither are good uh moving to this moving to the switch OLED was like gamechanging it felt like a generational upgrade just because it it impacted the quality of what you were seeing on the screen so dramatically and this this one is a step up over the switch OLED uh especially given that it's HDR capable and supports up to 90 Herz which is awesome so yeah this this is going to be a huge deal I think yeah absolutely um the comparisons with the switch OLED are quite interesting because well this is in a different League simply because of HDR right you know thousand nits Peak brightness um again the that's one of the reasons I chose AI is and the will of the Wisps to to kind of show the game because it's it's a killer HDR game right and you get that dynamic range and um you know you just you just see the fact that it is like a you know a proper um high-end OLED with all of the features and I'm actually hoping that this will serve as kind of like a reference screen for developers when they're doing their games because um you know there isn't really anything close to a reference screen out there apart from the LG oleds right right um yeah I mean I'm just sort of Blown Away by it um there's a lot of other stuff to talk about but Alex I'm interested in your initial reactions so like John I I wasn't as perturbed by the scream because uh I just kind of was like whatever it's a handheld like I didn't have any switch olet experience cuz I wouldn't play that thing anyway like I just wouldn't but with this I like knew what like an LCD looks like and I was just like whatever like I just I just live with it but the thing that I even stressed in my original crisis video that I did was like oh yeah but you know like you can play for a while but it isn't that long and I think the added battery life is the thing that I really was happy with valve actually stressing that they're not going to do a steam deck 2 spec upgrade like you know because they have the new apus out there and uh this is not using the latest AMD Tech it's using a die shrink and I think going the direction of a die shrink makes much more sense for a mobile console PC handheld hybrid thing just because want to actually have the most premium mobile experience possible and being Tethered to a wall is the probably not the best thing uh so I I'm actually most happy about the introduction of battery life uh kind of enhancements second to that is actually the screens increased refresh rate 60 HZ is cool 90 HZ is way cooler it's much more um for different types of games you just have a lot more flexibility there um and I think the thing that riches video didn't go into that we'll probably talk about some other point in time is the potential latency re uh reductions because instead of like the old screen when you do a 30 FPS lock which was probably a recommended thing to do for a lot of games you play on the steam deck is it would you know just like most likely double or trip trably triple buffering in most games and the way you do it it's just like a much higher latency thing than other types of software locking to 30 FPS and if you're doing that by actually just running three refresh is of the same image and a 90 HZ container for 30 FPS should have a lot less latency um and we see that on PC if you do um for example like 40 40 FPS and 120 HZ container which is a recommendation so these things are all great and I guess that'll also apply to if you want to do 40 FPS and it would maybe go down to 80 htz I don't know how exactly exactly how it works yeah basically there's a single slider now that you just Define your target frame rate and then it basically works out the multi suppliers for the screen uh refresh rate so yes if you select 40 then it will um switch to 80 HZ uh if you go to 45 it will go to 90 it just it's just a clean you know divisor by two there just OD that it's not vrr capable though they offer you that granular control why not vrr yeah it's interesting let's let's well I don't know let's plow into some support the questions here CU we're covering a lot of ground here um and uh yeah we had this one from Cowboy Lou hey Rich With The Changes to how the screen to how the deck screen handles frame rate caps um have there been any improvements to input latency we're going to check that because there's no reason we can't just strap an an Nvidia l. sensor to the screen but my my reaction is basically that yes it probably does and probably more so for example if you're 40 FPS in an 80 HZ container whereas before you would have been 40 FPS in a 40 HZ container uh something we' have to we'll have to check there um this question from um Ed n mode while the steam deck becomes the go-to handheld for the OLED screen the Rog Ally and other devices can play more games from this generation if you guys had to buy a steam deck OLED or a 78 40u device what would you choose that's an interesting question there and it's similar to one from Mendo shitaro as impressive as Steam deck OLED is does its lack of vrr and a significantly faster GPU put it at a disadvantage went compared to Rog Ally and the Lenovo uh Legion yeah this is an interesting point because um names oh my God those names they're awful they're so bad the steam deck the steam deck sounds like gosh it sounds like '90s PC goodness and those games those things sound all like 2010's PC terribleness you know what I mean I was going to say like mid 2000's PC graphics card boxes is this like they're like sponsored by lip biscuit and cor and all these other things evil Commando evil Commando I was just about to say that's what we needo evil evil Commando oh man oh so next one the evil Commando let's try and answer some of these questions though right because well from my perspective it's it's pretty straightforward right um all of those 78 40u devices and the zed1 extreme device uh devices like uh the Lenovo Legion the Ally look they will play games that the steam deck can't right that's you know that's the bottom line you can have really good experiences with games that kind of struggle on the on the steam deck that's you know that's the benefit of more performance it's typically around 30 to 50% more performance the problem is you're not getting that at 15 watts which is what the steam deck is using and the battery is basically the same the batteries are usually the same size as what's in the steam deck or the new steam deck 40 W hour or 50 W hour so you're looking at an hour of battery life an hour 10 an hour 15 if if you're lucky when playing you know these demanding games so this is the choice that's in front of you right you accept the performance limitations of the steam deck OLED um but you get that amazing screen you get that amazing battery life you get those really decent Acoustics or you go for one of these other devices and well you know we've heard from Oliver he loves his Rog Ally and you know it's a really good piece of Kit right but he sitting there with uh Power Banks plugged in to get a you know to get a decent amount of battery life from it it's not quite the handheld dream is it I'm curious what you think about this Alex would you opt for the steam deck OLED or something more powerful but with with let's be honest here crappy battery life it's it's really up to a use case I think the mobility is the most interesting part of the steam deck because as soon as you're strapping yourself to a wall why aren't you using something else like why aren't you playing on a lap top why aren't you like I don't know there's a lot of so like as soon as you start doing that I think the mobility question goes out the window and the type of games I would play on the steam deck aren't like returnal which you showed in your video Rich where it's like we know that's a Trouble game Troublesome game that doesn't even run on the 78 40u yeah so like like like I'm not I'm not so upset about those things and the only thing that I'm a little tiny bit upset about is the lack of vrrr uh and that would the thing that would be the one thing that where I would say like maybe I'll just wait for steam deck Mark II um unless that's a software thing they can sort out over time given the new screen who knows I I can't say anything there um but I think that's the only thing that I really love in the um the rug Ally right that's got vrr um and the reason why is because it's going to be a bit different now with the new uh frame late frame rate limiter because earlier when you would um have a vsync frame at like you'd be limiting game to 40 FPS which I think is reasonable you'd have uh when the FPS would dip even just a tiny bit the frame time would get a little bit too long uh then you'd have the equivalent stutter hiccup of like what would be like a 20 FPS stutter almost like if you think about it and it's like oh that feels you can feel that way more bad yeah then you can feel a vrr drop you wouldn't even see the vrr drop most likely so vrr is a game Cher I think in a lot of ways and that's the only thing about this new device where I go like man that's the last that's the Holy Grail of the steam deck at this point but the the rest of this the package is so sick so for me I would say if you are interested in these devices really think about how you want to play your games and what games you want to play if you're fine with just playing older titles or indie games uh then the steam deck is for you if you want to do more powerful stuff and are worried about um a jutter from vsync then really go for the other devices that seems fa enough um your thoughts John actually thinking about the screen in general I wanted to ask earlier uh do we know if Special K is available for Linux and if it works on the steam deck because I asked that because considering the the state of hdr on PC there's a lot of games that either don't support HDR or have bad HDR and I find that special K is kind of a requirement for PC games these days in terms of taking advantage of HDR so that would actually be something I'd be curious to see uh but yeah I mean you know the the main the main thing about the steam deck for me when looking at all this these questions here it just comes down to uh the fact that it's kind of built to play more like a console if you will right and you kind of lose that Windows is not a great experience currently on those machines uh I mean I I understand that Microsoft has an intention to improve this but I don't think it's there yet right didn't Phil Spencer call the rag Ally and Xbox yes he did he did which I think is Xbox on the go yeah I mean anything at this point could be an Xbox apart for a Playstation really and for the switch conceivably yeah I mean I I don't really like that um that sort of no no it doesn't feel right to me I don't agree with it anyway I mean that it can run Xbox services but I wouldn't consider it an Xbox mhm yeah but I I understand what they're trying to say there with that but yeah I mean for me like I said something like the rag Ally just isn't that appealing like despite the hardware it really is just it just feels like cramming too many PC components into this little portable Thing versus valve really seems to have spent a lot of time making an experience as streamlined as possible which is what you want on a mobile device usually sleep is awesome I I don't actually like like fiddling with mobile devices that much it just feels less convenient and it's more annoying and all that kind of stuff yeah well right exactly yeah I think that's the issue right is that um steam deck is a great piece of Hardware but it's not just Hardware I mean they've basically created a a a mobile ecosystem that's steam compatible and that is not to be taken lightly and uh yeah basically when you have these windows handhelds I have yet to find one where I haven't had to plug in a keyboard and mouse in order to set things up like like you would with a PC you know go to the Windows desktop and set things up there there's so many things that that just don't really work and so you know these machines are very much for the Enthusiast who want those extra um uh performance features from the latest chipsets but the steam deck is just like you know a really good product for the mainstream and but at the same time you know with stuff like the frame rate caps and and and the various other options there in that performance sidebar there's enough of you know the tweakability that you want from a PC as well I think it's just a really fantastic device and yeah I mean it is basically if you want to play the latest and greatest games going forward you're going to require a different device but the thing about you know I said this in my review the thing about the steam deck OLED is that the quality of that screen just makes you want to go back and revisit your existing Library I mean you know Arkham Knight was my first go-to game and it just looks really terrific on that screen there's another interesting discussion Point that's come up the um release date of the steam deck original was 25th of February 2023 we're looking at November 6 sorry 2022 we're looking at November 16th 2023 for the steam deck OLED and uh some people who bought the steam deck are feeling a bit grieved that this massive upgrade has come relatively soon um and I guess it is an interesting argument to have because if this happened in the console space you know basically 20 months later a significantly better revised console came along you might feel a bit upset um but I'm curious what you guys think about this because obviously I could accept that on you know from the console perspective but 20 months in the PC space is something quite different in terms of the pace of technological innovation Alex what do you think I don't feel this way at all and I if I had bought one I would have known kind of like there's always any single thing that is in the PC environment every single thing you buy something it's immediately out of date it's immediately out not 490 well I mean like 490 f i could I you know you could you could drop some water on that you could do some crazy stuff it's always not the best you know what I mean it's always not the best unless you hard yeah I literally thought you were going to drop some water on it I love that ter it would be obs it would yeah really big paper weight um but you know like there's like there's just with that cycle of things and like you're not always going to have the best like just kind of be happy with what you have kind of thing and it is the first gen product um of a company who does do iterations or either they do iterations or they just drop it completely um so like uh I would say in this case I was really expecting them to do this and they kind of said it in that one interview I forget when that was um they said we're going to do more iterative iterative things and I felt like this was what the hint was an iterative steam deck um so I I wasn't too surprised other than I think maybe the HDR surprised me I didn't expect an HDR screen OLED seemed like the right way to go but HDR is pretty interesting yeah something I didn't mention in my review but is really really cool is that you can bring up HDR scope and get an idea of the um that's Co the sort of uh Peak brightness and everything in any given screen it's like a real time monitor typically you'd have to um you know the way we do that in the past to ascertain you know the the dynamic range of Any Given game is capture some footage take it into Da Vinci resolve and you'll see those EXA pretty much those exact same Scopes that you get with the with the steam deck there it's really an interesting nice feature um we did get a briefing from B from valve by the way uh that was like end of October there's obviously this did come out of nowhere and I've had some messages asking well when did you find out about this and uh did you see it at Gamescom the answer was no and October 31st that was when I got my briefing and you know it's just amazing that this just kind of came out of nowhere uh some stuff that did come out from the uh from the interview though that that we did they just wanted to keep the same power um sort of performance Target just because they want to establish this as a platform I'm sure they could have got more out of this chip right they probably could have increased clocks they probably could have made various tweaks to get a bit more performance as it turns out you do get more performance um and I think it's a combination of the fact that a more efficient chip is operating with the same Peak power ceiling and secondly you've just got much faster Ram which basically uh is like Mana from Heaven to an AMD AP you um so yeah I did some performance tests in the review there and um it was actually more exaggerated than the valve guys kind of let me believe in the interview but it really does depend on the use case right because um seems to be the case that well there's always a battle going on with an APU between you know what resource should I give to the CPU what resources should I give to the GPU it's kind of a balancing act that's always happening in there and basically I believe it's the additional um uh Power uh to Performance ratio from the new chip plus the new memory that's combining to do to do these improvements um one thing I did show in the video which I didn't show all of the sequence um but a plague toil recre I mean that rat delug sequence in the dungeon at the end of the second act is a classic scene right um but we I guess we could actually show the full clip now what we actually see I think is that kind of um battle between CPU and GPU resources there's enormous stutter on the old deck and there's still a lot of stutter on the new one right but it's significantly reduced and when you look at the frame rate differentials there and the frame time graph it's it's quite phenomenal to see um to see just how much better the new one is I think this is just kind of like an extreme load situation there but it's you know it's it's it's pretty big stuff um I'd like also to talk about the Euro gamer interview where basically valve is saying that the technology doesn't exist yet to create a steam deck to which I find quite interesting um valve has always kind of shied away from producing iterative upgrades for the Apu right um because um well you've seen what happens with those apus in those other handhelds you get that extra performance but it tanks battery life These are bigger chips right they have more compute units they have more CPU cores and um they require more power to operate you know even at a decent level you know your base level performance it just requires more power and 30 to 50% more performance for doubling power doubling power it's I just don't think that's a viable upgrade path for a steam deck so I reckon if they can double performance at the same power budget you've probably got a viable steam deck too right but you know we're just not seeing that from these chips at the moment and we've gone through six nanometer we've gone through 4 nanometer with the zed1 extreme we're still not there so um yeah I think steam deck 2 is is years off yeah it'll have to be at that point if they don't think even those things are enough so yeah I mean you know the ru CPU core count in Steam deck the reduced compute unit count it's simply because you know they get best balance of um efficiency and performance with with a reduced amount of components compared to these chips that are being used in the handhelds which are effectively designed for laptops right you know that's that's the bottom line but yeah I mean what can I say it's it's been a really interesting project uh to actually you know do this it's just a lot one other thing to tack on and I mentioned this on socials yesterday is one of the benefits of the OLED screen is that it solves the problem with the 16 by10 aspect ratio yes so a lot of PC games don't support 16 by10 weirdly enough uh and on the original deck you just get the the obvious glowing backlight borders on the screen whereas with an OLED screen it basically just Fades away and it looks like it's part of the bezel right which it's maybe it's a small thing but for me it actually does make a big difference in terms of just the aesthetic of playing that device so sure another benefit of that technology mhm absolutely yeah so um what could I say I think this is a really good product I really enjoyed using it just looks phenomenal um but yeah check out my review and others uh because you know seems It's bit a universally positive reception there um but I guess that's all we really got to say about that at the moment so uh let's move on to the next news topic well I call this one a news topic it's more of an announcement of an announcement um Rockstar has has confirms that early in December which you know isn't so far away we're going to be seeing the reveal trailer for GR Theft Auto 6 I was sort of in two minds as to whether to even discuss this in DF weekly because right you know what have we got to go on what what value can we add to this particular discussion however supporters have got a lot of questions right and it's I guess one thing that is fun is you know the kind of um expectation management and wish fulfillment balance right people want but I I just think we should plow onto the into these questions and see what's what um this one from Ricardo Rak house with the recent announcement of GTA 6 do you think Rockstar will focus more on RT features do you think that this time the PC will not be neglected like it is in GTA 5 and will have better RT features uh well we saw we saw rate faced Reflections added to the console versions of GTA 5 right yeah I believe there were shadows as well so it's pretty yeah it's nice but sort of minimalistic um yeah it's not like a alam wake 2 PC or anything like that but um Alex what do you think of this they've experimented with rt features it would be it would be odd if they weren't in the new game it would be pretty weird but you know if you think about it like control on console with Xbox series X and PS5 launch with rage race Reflections but for the release of alamic 2 same engine iterative upgrade over it but with some big big differences obviously didn't include Ray tracing of the hardware variety on consoles so I would say it would make a lot of sense but if they are for them to have rt for example on the consoles and maybe eventually in a PC version but if they are focusing on using that current GPU power elsewhere um maybe to you know like really pump up like the the sky simulation like we saw like in Red Dead Redemption 2 or do some other things cuz I don't think it's just going to be the same graphical package like we saw in our Red Dead Redemption 2 it's probably going to have a lot of really interesting upgrades over it um then maybe they won't actually be focusing core on RT or at least for the initial launch and maybe it'll be coming in later it's really hard to know with them because they're such a secretive Studio like to to the level of just like like I just saw a comment the other day like Rockstar is one of the few um anything in the games industry where you can they can just announce something and everyone pays attention to it regardless like most you know most other uh you can't just Shadow drop stuff usually like you usually don't get away with that but that for some reason Rockstar gets away with all the the way they act um but yeah it's kind of interesting to see I don't I I don't want to be too speculative here I since they do have since they did have it in GTA 5 uh but that was a game with like a very very different load balance like it was already a last gen game and they put RT on top of that so there was enough load there was enough CPU and GPU to do that I don't know if they'll do the same for a game that has much higher requirements as a base yeah fair enough this question from 1040 stf hi folks what do you expect on a tech level from GTA 6 do you think Rockstar has to push some boundaries on Tech and slash or on gameplay levels uh thoughts on this one John I mean you'd expect to see you know a much higher level of simul in the city for starters yeah I mean this this is always tough to say but you know given their track record when you look at the leap from GTA 5 to Red Dead 2 it was pretty significant and they placed a huge premium on world simulation in Red Dead 2 and GTA V honestly was already pretty amazing in that regard especially considering the target Hardware was a PS3 and a 360 right so um I do expect that actually and I hope for it actually actually um I think that's that's one of the key areas where they could really innovate once again they've always been about that pushing interesting physics ideas you know I I it's hard to say What specifically they might do in this T in this game until we actually see more from it but I'm hopeful that we will see some improvements and changes there I'm also curious to know if they'll oh I guess we actually kind of know because of the leak that there's at least multiple characters again right mhm um so I suspect we'll see stuff from that as well U and maybe they'll they'll take the more Spider-Man approach this time and be able to allow allow instant switching between characters that could actually conceivably mix up missions as well because you you'd be able to very rapidly switch between the different characters in real time now I mean they already did a pretty good job with that in GTA 5 I would say I'm 360 you know already super impressive for that but they could do it almost instantaneously now uh I you know and looking at the last question with r tracing I kind of expect that we won't see it in the console versions and I also don't think we'll see a PC version for like a year or two yeah because it's rockar yeah I mean I'm just really hoping to see um just a better Fidelity city right better physics better interactions and um to actually make it worthwhile in terms of the narrative you know to actually see those systems put to use um I think part of the appeal of of GTA is is basically not just the um uh the story it's just the fact that you can just do anything you want at any time and just experiment with those systems and um yeah I'd hope to see the same but more in the new game that's the thing and that that's what separates GTA from other games like I I traditionally don't enjoy what people refer to as sandbox games because I don't believe that they actually provide an engaging sandbox experience for that to work the game needs to push back against the players uh behaviors in interesting ways and that's where Rockstar is always excelled right when you do something in a rockstar game you're often treated with an unexpected or impressive even sort of reaction from the game it meets you halfway and that's that is so key and I think that's where they have a lot of room to innovate especially given their extremely long time laes for development here uh and infinite money and infinite money effectively yeah so when you look at it like that that's kind of we don't know what this is going to look like cuz we haven't seen Rockstar attempt a city-based game like this since the PS3 era because Red Dead for all everything it's doing it's still fundamentally not like an urban based game right there are cities but it's nothing like Grand Theft Auto and with GTA 5 still being rooted on PS3 era Hardware uh like there's a lot that could happen here and that's that is actually genuinely exciting to see absolutely yeah that kind of answers the question from Paul calamato as well who's basically reminding us that uh the last GTA game was built for the Triple yeah obviously on Twitter this week everyone's been posting the pictures of themselves when GTA 5 came out and when and then now when the GTA 6 trailer is coming out that's when I mov to Europe so yeah just astonishing stuff uh interesting question here from Uncle Uncle Mo uh hidf crew exclamation point now that we know the GTA 6 trailer will be revealed early next month I'm preemptively dreading the likely scenario of Rockstar say staying silent of the existence of the PC version as they usually do however with the massive success and revenue of GTA online do you think Rockstar and/or Take 2 may consider a simultaneous console PC release for a change PC version of GTA 5 was likely in production long before gtao became the money-making machine that it is today perhaps this time around they may want to take advantage of the potential shark card sales by offering the game on more platforms early on thoughts Alex I mean well you know if if if we're sort of in the glass half full terat fee it's going to come like a year later might be better yeah that's the that's the glass full I'm going to be super cynical um no I just think that what they could do is yeah they could take longer with it just because gtao has has yet to show that it is slowing down uh they didn't bring out any of the nextg upgrades there and they didn't seem to do anything I mean the game had like super poor loading for an eternity until a modder kind of shamed them into making it run better so I don't think they they've really shown that they um that like at least whatever the bean counting is doing like is like I think the developers themselves are a completely different thing but like whatever the publishing arm is saying is is very radically different and I think they would actually probably want to extract as much money for as long as possible to hold people playing different games because then they assume like oh then when they eventually comes out maybe they could have them like you know like playing two games at once they be playing on PS5 and they go back the old gtao on PC with their friends and you know they buy the game twice maybe they'll buy it three times if we put it out for switch 2 you know like these are all things that are definitely probably going through their mind so I was going to say like just don't expect a PC version and then be happy if you get one like that's yeah yep it's Rockstar actually I the the the thing about rockstars they're very you know I almost say precious with their with their releases right and I actually wonder if there's this sense that they want this console version which can't be modded to be the way people experience GT GTA first uh they know the modding Community is all over the series right and as soon as this arrives on PC there's going to be mods everywhere and I almost feel like they don't want that right like they want the initial experience of GTA to be free of any of that uh I don't know if that attitude is genuinely accurate but it sort of feels that way doesn't it I know should be like right you know what I mean like they want you buy this version besides they've actually had so much success with this tiered or like this uh staggered release schedule right like uh for better for worse it sucks but that's how it is right you release it first on one platform and then it's so big they could see all right now it's coming to PC uh big hype psycho again and then after that who knows maybe they're like now it's coming to the new Switch maybe and then it's like now there's a ps6 and and Xbox going to get that crossed vers in there yeah PS5 Pro but then again they didn't do an update for PS4 Pro for no they didn't no they did not sorry yeah that's true they they didn't know sh that's wild yeah cuz they did the PS5 version but they didn't do right Pro no they didn't why not who knows better things to do possibly uh final question from estan artavia with GTA 6 de in development for so long and take take two probably to sell hundreds of millions of copies as usual could we possibly end up with a cross gen GTA6 maybe even patch later to do an improved vers or is the current J Market big enough to ignore last J entirely despite probably accounting for tens of millions of sales for them ah God I hope it's not g it's it's not crost gen um it would just I think you know the one thing about GTA games is that they sell forever right which you know you kind of think that targeting the current generation would just fundamentally make more sense because you know rather than looking back they're looking forward um and they're looking at a roll out of a new GTA online and you know um I don't know what the the the the split is on you know titles like uh you know Resident Evil 4 that go back and produce a PlayStation 4 version but I don't think it's you know statistically that relevant at the moment to to justify holding back the game this is Rockstar they they don't need to do that right people will come to GTA yeah that is a great way to put it right they will come yeah they they certainly will I actually misread this question at first though and thought he was talking about next gen cross gen yeah I read that too I was like is this going to be a ps6 game I actually think it will it will be it will be yeah yeah it's kind of mindblowing to think that there wasn't a a GTA game built for the PS4 and Xbox one that pretty funny actually my gosh they went from releasing like a bunch during the PS2 generation three big Games PS2 and then two games during the next gen then zero games and it just shows how much more complex they've become to develop of course but I I'm actually also excited to see this trailer stylistically to see what they do with it cuz they always have excellent trailers uh I mean regardless how you feel about GTA 4 the original coana scoty reveal trailer was uh insanely good I thought having the Philip Glass music time to it with all those like shots they said so much like it set the tone but it was also showing hey now we have realtime Dynamic shadows and doing all these like shots like recreating the feeling of that film but uh using Grand Theft Auto Assets and it was it was phenomenal smart yeah very very well done and I'm hoping for the same here we'll be all over that trailer when we see it but uh for now it's this is just Pinner an entire exercise in basically not knowing anything that's going on which is always fun but I think with that we should move on to the next news topic okay so really interesting things happening with the PlayStation 5 Slim uh by interesting I mean that it is available in the US and I think Japan now I think Alex alil posted a picture of out now yeah unless he got it in America but who knows it's quite interesting because uh in the US it's being bundled with Modern Warfare 3 there's a special MW3 bundle but in the UK and I suspect in Europe that same bundle uses the um existing 1200 series PlayStation 5 it's not the new slim model so we haven't actually seen it yet Sony UK on radio silence um which is great um and um we have seen some tear Downs though lonus did one and Dave 2D did a really really good one I was quite impressed with that which basically answers all of the questions you know you tore the whole thing down we took a look at the system uh at the motherboard level it is confirmed now that it is using the same 6 nanometer processor as the 1200 series right so um there's no real changes uh to to the in terms of efficiency or powered for it's just a cost reduced size reduced version of the uh existing model um I don't really know what more to say about that obviously there's more IO um there in terms of USBS and whatnot uh the stands situation remains ludicrous yes those little sort of Pur specs inserts to make it to go highs on to or $30 to buy uh you know basically a bit of plastic that probably cost them a h h to me that that gets to the heart of this design and when you actually see this thing torn apart with the covers off and everything you realize it is actually very slim now indeed uh they didn't I know they want to continue this brand Synergy but they've completely altered the designs of their consoles before yeah and I really wish they had gone for something that was less weirdly shaped right I don't think they needed to do that for this machine like with with where they're at now in terms of like the thickness they could have done a more traditional looking box they know people don't like the way this thing looks uh even though it's still selling um I will say that the the size is definitely appealing in a sense because the original p 5 remains a gigantic Beast mhm and you know even though it shares that same original design it is the the the size the reduction in size is awesome well some people have been saying that the design makes it look like one of those cheap knockoff uh consoles that you see on AliExpress actually and part of that's because of those those awful um these shiny top plates because they have matte plates on the bottom and shiny plates on top why would you mix Plastics like that that they did on the PS4 the original one of course also but that was that was a very that was a better integrated design it it doesn't have that cheap Ali Express look to it and this really does and I think actually that what contributes to it is the center part the black part of the unit down the middle it's so shiny in a way that does make it look like that that AliExpress style plastic so I don't know man it's a it's it's a weird design it doesn't make me think this is like a state-ofthe-art console but seriously when you when you see this without the covers on like if you look here at this photo in in our chat here you know he got he's got it side by side next to the original PS5 it's really freaking Slim Without those covers why have without the covers yeah they could have done H something more with the design to just make it I don't know sit in the entertainment system the fact that they need these little tiny legs to sit horizontally is mindblowing to me like I I just don't yeah it's it's wild there was some uh there was some further confirmation of the internals there they are not using a standard SSD uh on the internal drive it's just reconfiguration um reduced amount of higher capacity nand modules to get that one terabyte of storage which I think is you know it's welcome um more more storage is always good right um and yes the M2 slot definitely is there now so you can still add in an uh an external sorry an internal drive and um there's no loss of functionality there and um there's been some talk that the Acoustics are maybe slightly better I mean I think that's one of the big triumphs of this generation for all of the platform holders is that these consoles are are no longer you know loud I mean Microsoft had it pretty much sorted last gen but Sony definitely did not and it's great great to see uh an emphasis on the fact that these things actually do need to be quiet they've also retained the liquid metal thermal interface which I thought was quite interesting I was expecting that to go but it's still there leak out baby you remember that R it will leak out oh yeah and destroy your console if you know say he wouldn't have anticipated that the liquid Metal's coming out of the machine it's to destroy everything um yeah I mean we I do still want to take a look at this and uh but I do suspect that any coverage we do will probably be too little too late or too much too late depending on how we look at it I do think there's some interesting things to look at in terms of um I don't know just a sort of overview and and power consumption uh closer look at that um but I think it would all still apply to the 1200 series PlayStation 5 as well never really got the attention it deserved at the 1100 series obviously there was that huge um uh sort of Austin evans's video that caused a lot of panic and you know there was there was coverage from Gamers Nexus and whatnot that helped to alleviate some of that Panic uh but the 1200 series just seemed to appear and nobody really paid it too much attention even though you did get an actual dice rig um but yeah I mean basically it's PlayStation 5 what do you 12 series seems like a great one to get to purchase and keep hold on to because it is it is the die shrink but it's also doesn't have the limitations of this add-on disc drive which requires a server to even be activated so you a spare 1200 back there with the disc drive Fe machine I still think that the concept of being able to upgrade your digital Edition is good oh I I 100% agree I think the idea is awesome it's just the fact that you can't buy buy one uh it now needs to be activated online to use it to use it seems which is the same problem that Xbox has and we've been wanting them to fix that and now Sony's like yeah that's a good idea let's do that and so now both consoles have that same DRM problem yeah I mean if there's anything people want to know about the new PlayStation 5 I could import one cost a fortune but you we could take a look at it we've got the PlayStation portal coming up soon again no sign that from Sony at the moment although I understand the US media have been seeded review samples they have it for sure yeah so I'm kind of curious about that um but I think in terms of that particular product I still think it needed something a bit more than remote play I don't know whether it's still just Remote Play or whether there's some sort of custom solution they've integrated but I guess we're going to find out soon yeah as a later topic we'll get to my opinion on inome streaming has been revised a little bit we'll we'll get that there's been a lot of uh 180 u-turns for you recently with uh with this sort of I think we should talk about this a bit more when we get to the appropriate topic yeah get there but for now let's move on to the next news topic okay so this one well what can I say Alex um for a while now you've been using the core I9 12900 k for your high-end PC game reviews and um I think it was at Gamescom where we met with AMD and we said we said to them come on guys if You' got the 7800 x3d and it's the fastest gaming chip out there why don't you give up you know slide one in Alex's Direction on go on I remember sitting at the table I like look over at like Frank gazor I'm like you know Frank um yeah that was pretty great and this yes uh theyve come through and they've come through they're AMD they they put the you know they do everything they need to do they're great people at AMD when it comes to these kinds of things so yes AMD sent over to me a 7800 x3d uh so the latest and greatest from them for gaming performance obviously if you were going for you know productivity workloads you look at a different Ryon they love uh 3D by the way in their CPUs there was 3D now which I mentioned recently and now there's this yeah but I don't even think anything supports 3D now anymore which is really funny it's did it's dead it's dead dead and the the the um main board that they also with it too was uh which is also very kind now you don't expect to get a main board if you're Supply at any sort of sample at all uh is the gigabyte aurus how do you pronounce that ausus orus xus x670 e master um and for this board this is funny I posted that online with the picture of it and people are like oh no not that board so I'll I'll figure this out over time if there is an oh no not that board kind of thing but um setting it up was pretty easy if you go back in time there's like a video I did of what was it uh flight simulator 2020 where I showed off the uh the uh rig sent to me by origin which is like this cool water loop rig using a Corsair water cooler and Loop in it really great that was serving the 10900k then then I changed out the heat sink and I put in a 12900 K in it and for this for the uh for the ryzen 7800 x3d all I had to do was take out the heat sink put on a different bracket on it which already came in the Box for the heat sink by the way and I then just slid it over it it's like so easy to change I didn't have no problems at all uh installing this thing putting it in the case uh a little bit tight there that's just because new motherboards have these like massive heat sinks that connect to like the io on the back like that's one thing that has changed over time is just like how how much like more monolithic boards are there's like less like visible uh capacitors and less like more space for your fingers and hands to work with it when you put it in the case you you have to do everything outside of the case now it's very different um so I plugged it in installed it I didn't have any member training issues at all mostly went in all fine the only issue that I had and I've had this before um with other boards too is that they don't like outputting to HDMI always initially they prefer things like display port uh to Output initially too and I don't know what exactly that is if that's a GPU thing or if that's a board thing it's really hard to know uh I didn't want to test that any theories there I just wanted to get the board up and running so I got it up and running threw it in stock uh updated the BIOS uh turn on docp is it right it's not called is it docp yeah that's right yeah it's basically the version of um xmb for AMD right yeah yeah yeah and head cam something like that I don't know um but that was and I used the exact same memory that was powering the 1200k system which is 6400 MTS uh cl32 good memory G skill and I like it a lot and I was curious about what does this actually mean because you go underneath all the comments of my videos people are like whenever I cover any sort of game that has problematic things like stuttering or CPU related issues there's always a comment saying like but Alex is using a two gen old CPU is this a reliable review uh I'm not seeing any of this on my CPU which is better than Alex's CPU all right so I've got the best CPU on the market now well you know Alex what could I say you know basically a 2-year-old CPU just can't you know it it just it just doesn't doesn't cut the bastard obv it just doesn't anymore when you're dealing with uh you know anything up to a 200 millisecond pause yeah that's it's all CP a CPU that's 2 years younger that's the state-ofthe-art that that's just going to go away right it's it's all on the CPU there definitely um so if you guys look at it uh I also dropped a video of all the little benches I did I did some benches and these are nothing like uh like your Gamers Nexus style benches or anything like that this is stock and stock for both of these systems I'm not doing PBO Shenanigans I am using the I tped that online today because I was curious to see what people doing about that PBO sh Shenanigans this is just all mostly stock with the memory put up to the way it should be I disabled the igpu as well on both systems I don't think that has any effect on anything um but these are mainly all the same settings there's one thing that is slightly different settings but we'll get to there and there's a reason why okay so first I start off with crisis can it run crisis so one thing I noticed when I was playing the game on the 1200k uh originally uh is that you can definitely still get drops below 60 when you get near the town and as you can see in this video right here it's just like cruising along 55 56 while looking over the town guess what not below 60 on the 7800 x3d it's about like 15% faster here overlooking the town and the thing with the x3d chips that you have to like kind of when you get one of these you have to like assume like not every game is going to benefit massively from this increased cash to the same degree it really depends on it's a game perame basis otherwise you're looking at other factors like memory speed um if you have one of those xpd chips that has 2 cxs this one doesn't maybe you're like looking at like do I disable one of the CCX for this there's a lot of things that in uh influence the uh the performance of a game but crisis just like 15% nothing too impressive but it's also a nice UPG upgrade um after that I actually tried out something that I was really curious about and that was running Killzone 2 in rpcs3 so rpcs3 is interesting because it's I think dolphin does down too but they support AVX 512 and most recent Intel chips 13900 K 1400k don't out of the box support the 1200k I had actually did uh if you disabled the eor so this is a AVX 512 uh test of both of these CPUs and the funny thing is if you look at it they perform the exact same which surprised me and then I had to go up online I was like really and a lot of people are saying actually this rpcs3 in spite of it sporting ABX 512 is a bit more Intel friendly for some reason um and I and it may also be a per game basis thing there but one thing you'll see on the top is I had to use a different scheduler I had to use rpcs3 scheduler versus the system scheduler because whenever I used the rpcs3 scheduler on the 7800 x3d it brought in nasty stuttering and audio stuttering which I just I don't know why so I had to change the scheduler but it ran the exact same so so far I'm like uh this isn't that actually so super interesting of a CPU upgrade but now I'm going to skip ahead to something that I think was that was like oh I understand the 3D cash deal loaded up star citizens Alpha it's like 3.21 uh that just recently released I believe and that is notorious as you're looking over lorville here like it's just going to destroy your CPU and I've read online that this game does not like the latest cores series processors and really loves AMD stuff and that is exactly what I measured now forgive the time of day differences here I swear I'm looking at the exact same thing uh it's just like you load up a server in the time of day is different you can't do anything about it um but here I saw 30% roughly 29% actually it was a little bit over 29% difference in performance and a lot less stuttering while running and the servers were running at the exact same performance too here 30% for just popping in like a different like you know different board different CPU of course but like the exact same memory and I think that is a huge difference um I didn't see nearly always the same upgrades when I went 10900k to 129k it was you know so that was one of those things that I really loved seeing huge upgrade there in performance uh obviously this game is still dx11 so it's going to run better in the future I hope uh and just to be a joker because everyone all those comments I'm like oh Alex you're talking about Shader stutter in this game I don't see any Shader stutter what are you talking about I'm running a 7800 x3d well I loaded up one of the most consistent Shader stutters that I know of and it's like you open up ghost Runner or the demo to ghostrunner one and you start the game you the the headset starts up there's immediately stuttering you drop down you Katana the first dude to death huge stuttering when you do all that um the thing you'll notice here as I'm running VNC because I want those stutters to show up a bit better and like look visually very distracting um so what you'll see is that the stutters are the exact same more or less between the 12 900k and the 7800 x3d so that means once again like I've said and posited in all my videos regardless of how good your CPU is you're still going to see Shader comp stutters and interestingly here you can see that the length is more or less the exact same too so it was wasn't a big different the cach isn't helping against Shader stutters uh reducing their length but when it's not Shader stuttering notice how the performance is a big deal better it's 20% basically uh still below the vent cap there at 4K 120 um so basically doesn't help with Shader stutters okay what about traversal stutters I loaded up um Jedi Survivor a game that I do not like at all and I lo yeah it's not like you know like it you you watch my videos you definitely think this is my favorite game that released this year um on average higher 15% performance when you see them running side by side and you can see it in the average frame rate numbers but if you look at the frame time graph uh more or less all the stutters are there and this is a combination of Shader compilation stutters and as the usual traversal stutters when you just run through the Cobo Area and they're not that much of a different length at all so so the thing that I kind of take away from this and ghost Runner is that really it doesn't matter how good your CPU is Shader compilation stutters are still there you're going to have to wait for much higher CPU speeds and I I um IPC performance to see larger differences over time so we're talking about like 5 10 years from now to actually see differences the solution needs to be on the software side yeah exactly you can't solve these things another game that I was really interested in was um balers Gate 3 the third uh chapter in it and I wanted to highlight something that I saw here and as as well as in cyberpunk where as you see this Benchmark start out and I'm running through what is the heaviest area of this like Rivington balers gate opening area the lines are a lot closer than you would maybe think given the overall performance difference that I measured through the average of this Benchmark here which was 15% in favor of the 7,800 x3d which is great um but at the beginning it's a lot closer but as like the heaviest area you move away from the heaviest area the lines Start Spreading apart a lot more and the bigger difference actually in terms of raw FPS happens later on uh that's a bit of a percentage wonkiness there but also the difference in terms of milliseconds is also growing towards the end of this Benchmark which I think is very interesting and it shows that whatever the thing that is limiting performance it is more similar across these CPUs than it is later on in the bench when it that that thing whatever it is is not limiting performance um and I saw the exact same thing in cyberpunk 2077 running that bench through the heaviest areas of the bench had more similar performance than the areas where they're just like cruising along the highway for example and then we see those bars split apart again the lines split apart on the frame time graph and as well on the frame rate graph um and cyberpunk 2077 once again around a 14 % performance uplift versus the 12900 K I added in there um I guess my overall experience here with it is only positive zero negative aspects to loading up the 7 800 x3d it was not like a terror or anything like that it was actually super easy install loved it um I also I mean I really do like now that the there aren't any pins on the the the processor itself so good way different than my AMD experiences of past I really really loved that in terms of performance over the 1200k it's a little bit variable but it was pretty much always better which is what I exactly what I was looking for I think I would have seen bigger gains if I had different memory kits lying around and for example like I would been playing the 1200 K with like a 5200 mehz kit or you know I see a lot of drop water on it I want to drop some water on drop some water on I definitely want to seen some differences there um basically I think I would went into it with a good enough 12 900k due to the memory uh setup that was already in there and so I see less gains versus when I you know throw in the x3d here um but I think this is definitely still like a super Top Dog CPU and in terms of my coverage it'll allow for more really cool coverage of I now have a 4K 120 capture card I can actually do more reliable 4K 120 capture and which show it on the channel at 120 yeah all this yeah we can totally do that thank you YouTube uh but for like you know know uh for for you know our patreon supporters they can get 4k 120 videos from me from now on in a much more reliable fashion if so and all this footage that you've seen here which you can't even tell because it's YouTube was actually recorded at 4K 1220 unless you run it it slow motion no uh but yeah I I I'm loving the x3d here better than the 12900 K uh I'm not using it for my workstation but it swipes the floor if you wanted to use it as a workstation like you actually have pcie Lanes you don't have to worry about any of that like it's like I have no idea what Intel is doing in that space like why they are so stingy with those PCI Lanes man it's so dumb it's annoying yeah I mean um the fact that you're still seeing the stutters there Alex I mean uh it is you know it is a debunking of yet another of the runs fine on my PC memes it is that we have there's a lot of them that you know there kind of like perceived internet wisdom which you know you just apply the basic rules of common sense to it it just makes no sense whatsoever uh you know basically if if you've got like a let's say you've got a 150 millisecond stutter on a 12 900k um you know what is a Shader compilation stutter doing it's compiling a Shader it's a it's entirely CPU based task so the size of that stutter is going to be essentially related to your clock speed and the capabilities of the architecture but the point is it's not going to go away it's not you're not going to get a stat ofree experience just because you've bought this particular CPU the other one which I find really funny which comes up a lot is uh the fact that FSR might present differently on an on a Nvidia G AMD one you know it's a compute shade of its maths so the you know unless they calculate maths differently from one architecture to another or unless there is actually something within the source code that says hey this is running on an Nvidia GPU I'm going to do it in a different way it's going to present the same way because it's maths 2 + 2al 4 on on a both an AMD and a GPU GPU that's stuff man we have to deal with these myths all the time when I make a video but I you know I love the concept of the 7800 x3d but I love even more the concept of the 5800 x3d which is for the am4 platform which is kind of like the the the products that that sort of laid the groundwork for this whole x3d thing and what I love about it is the fact that AMD introduced bios updates for any board going all the way back to the original ryzen 1000 launch you know if you had like a 2018 2017 2018 class uh motherboard you know you could just do an up bios upgrade buy this chip and suddenly you're back up there with the 12900 K in terms of performance this is like this is you know this is possibly the best best thing that ever happened in CPU terms and the fact that they're actually now doubling down on x3d and actually putting it into the stack uh in their new product lineups I think is great as well I think this is just uh superb it does kind of I mean the whole reason this works is basically because it's got more uh direct access cash right which means that it has to you know it can cash more it doesn't need to call on system memory as much um but that does kind of you know for every one of these games where you're seeing a 20 to 30% increase you kind of help can't help but think well what if that actually optimized the CPU path a bit more there yeah to fit within existing cache structures for for that that's one thing that I do think about sometimes it depend it's very game dependent um and like that's why the Shader compilation stutter thing is very interesting because if you know a Shader program it's not going to be busting cash usually there's a bit smaller unless it's like some massive Uber Shader or something like that but even then you wouldn't be doing that in real time like no one would be doing jit with that um so it makes sense the areas where it does have the bigger upgrades tend to be those games where like that's why I was I'm not doing a Gamers Nexus here I'm not doing a hub uh like spread of benchmarks I don't have CS go here CS2 here you know like or Dota 2 or anything like that like those games where you might see these larger huge differences and even in here there's a couple ones that I know like for some reason scale really well on Intel like cyberpunk is just like one of those few games that actually is okay with eor being in your system you know it it doesn't like tank I didn't uh do Lords of the fall in here for example which runs worse with eor on you know I didn't do anything like that this is just like a it happened to run that way uh I think if I had a larger spread of games here we would see a bigger difference but that's the thing when you get one of these x3d chips it's going to be better overall usually but it won't always be so mind-bendingly better and that's one thing that we'll just see when I do more reviews over time what it how it pans out I think the other thing about your uh commentary on the various games here is that um you just demonstrate how hard it is to properly review a CPU because you know the CPU has so many different tasks to do within any given game within any different any given time slice of Any Given game that the results can vary dramatically and the differentials between CPUs could also very dramatically I mean the Shader compilation thing is probably the most exaggerated point there where you know it doesn't really matter how much better this CPU is you're still going to have a crap experience with this game yeah that's that's the one thing here like just saying the percentage numbers isn't really very valuable to anyone in spite of this being an interesting scientific ex you know thing to go through but like how it's more about like which one helps you get your performance Target more and and that's usually up to your monitors ref fresh rate for a lot of people and in this case for example like very specifically in ghost Runner crisis remastered a little bit in cyber Punk and a little bit in bg3 like it is getting it closer to that 4K 120 that I could otherwise not be getting because the CPU is better but it isn't like it isn't like I'm immediately hitting the refresh rate now as a result of this new CPU it's like it's better it's better but it's not like it's not a generation little difference but it's really good okay fair enough interesting stuff um I'm very happy you're that you're happy with your 7800 x3d and look forward to seeing it in future coverage um but let's move on to our next news story uh this one just made me chuckle because um obviously the switch to is in development is coming probably in 2024 uh but a recent investor uh calls or meetings well Nintendo basically denied everything it denied doesn't exist does exist it was at Gamescom uh it denied activ Visions testimony under oath they' seen the switch to or they've been briefed on the switch to that's funny and I just find this this hilarious I mean it comes on the tale of um mega sales numbers now confirmed for the original switch I think it's up to 132 million systems but it's also on a downturn it is also on a downturn but it's as it should be as you'd expect like why why beat around the bush like this I I don't get it it's I suspect because you know we're entering the holiday period where people are going to be buying consoles I know it's just it's easier to just throw out a no comment kind of thing than this whole like basically saying we've never done any of that this thing does not does not exist it is not real which is what their statement feels like MH one thing I do think they need to be cut a bit of slack on is that they denied anything about the uh Nintendo patent filing for a device with multiple screens and I think that's fair enough right because most patents are just exactly that there AR aren't really any firm indication that this is going to be a actual product right yeah we're where's our where's that PlayStation McDonald's one where it's like it shows the ad it's like say McDonald's to skip the ad and it's like McDonald's that's a famous wow that's that's a great patent that's amazing it's sadly becoming real I think slowly um I don't really know what to say about that um except to say well the switch to definitely was showcased at Gamescom um to developers maybe it wasn't the actual unit right but it was it was Hardware development Hardware or Target specification Hardware so you know to all intents and purposes it was there but I do think that there wasn't any actual reveal of the units to developers because um there's been that's the the crazy thing from my perspective is that we still don't know what this machine actually is right we know that it's going to be uh you know a new mobile device because it has to be hybrid console like the first one simply because of their organization structure for their first-party developers they can't go back on that but beyond that we know nothing about this machine I think that's that's that's great actually I just like surprises in the industry uh but there's not really too much what we can say about this except you know as video games Chronicle points out they've denied press reports in the past and in one case I think it was for the uh revised um DS or 3DS uh it was actually officially announced the day after the denial which is just awesome you know gosh Nintendo doesn't mess around yeah you know one- day development cycle they they got wind of these rumors thought well this is a great idea let's get it out tomorrow let's do that go on then Lads go on yeah just do it yeah go on Lads amazing amazing scenes um I'm kind of curious John when do you think we're actually going to see the switch 2 obviously when the switch one came out we had this trailer that appeared kind of in in this kind of time period but at that point they had nothing to lose by showing it right right you know right I feel like it would make it's hard to say with Nintendo right but I feel like showing it sometime in the first half of next year would make sense and you know I kind of was wondered if they do another early release but I don't think that's going to happen now so it kind of I mean unless they just do a surprise drop where it's like you know here it is February and then it's going to show up in like March or April that's not impossible I guess but um we'll see it just it's it's tough to say yeah okay fair enough don't think there's too much more we can say about this as usual indeed so with that let's move on to to the next news topic so for a while now there have been rumors that Nvidia is going to refresh the 40 series lineup and um I think this week we saw some uh leaks artwork of a 4070 TI super and it looks as though there's going to be a few um uh products that are possibly going to be announced at CES 2024 which is in early January uh the leaks at the moment are talking about a 4080 super uh they're talking about a 4070 TI super I don't know you know a TI and a super it's kind of like Ghostbusters the the streams shouldn't be Crossing in that way TI super yeah it's either TI or super both is kind of like you know has severe implications for the SpaceTime GTX and RTX together yeah the GT RTX the GT RTX uh and there's going to be a 4070 super um the specs have been leaked and what can you say all of them are kind of like iterative upgrades the 4070 super actually looks to have the biggest increase in cuor possibly 7,168 versus 5,888 elsewhere it's uh I don't know I guess they're all sort of small iterative upgrades the 480 super dude the 4080 super really needed to be closer to 4090 I feel maybe halfway between 4080 490 something like with this kind of it just doesn't feel like it's going to be a significant enough upgrade in this regard well the leag is talking about 10,240 versus 9,728 that's not that's not that much of a difference right this is 3070 TI territory for me like that's what I can think of I think the 4070 TI super and 4070 super are more interesting um but it really depends on your use case like the 470 super like it could have a lot greater shading power and it could bring it like more in line with and above the 3090 at times I think that's what you would get from this like in terms of just like raw performance in a game I think that's like what it could potentially do um but like once again 12 gabyt of vram again it's great if you're at 1440p but at 4K not every title is going to like it to the same degree uh so it really depends on what you're doing the 4070 TI super gets rid of that issue 16 gabt is by far enough for 4K I would say I think that's the problem though Alex why does a TI super have to exist it should just be one and it should be the ti super but it should it's called the super I don't know well my guess is that the the supers are going to replace the the cards that are directly beneath them right so the 4080 super replaces the 4080 etc etc and you know if you look at the lineup of what dieses are being used it is essentially uh much the same the difference being the 4070 TI super where it is actually getting the more advanced chip right uh yeah um so at least it's a little bit super I I think well I think um DF supporter busy TRS uh puts the nail on you know hammers the nail on the head uh and he says what would you all consider to be fair prices for gpus we all roll our eyes at the $1,200 480 and but the 380 at $699 felt like Great Value hopefully with the super TI cards this generation can become more affordable if we go back to the last time the Super name was rolled out it was furing right which very similar to 40 series in many ways in that um they came out and they were expensive cards um you know it's like the I think the the 2070 was like $530 which is kind of nuts um so maybe this is the you the whole reason behind a refresh is to kind of rationalize the pricing so you know if you're looking at the 480 super and it's you know on the face of it it's not that much different to the 4080 it does seem like the only Vector to make this an appealing product is to actually reduce the price um and similarly with a 4070 TI super it kind of needs to be um you know that was originally a 4080 card but you know with a different memory allocation but a completely different chip and I think they've basically trying to do a bit more in that pricing uh bracket hopefully that'll reduce the price 47 7 super similarly right I mean it's already facing the 4070 is already facing stiff competition from the 7800 XT so they've got to do something there it's interesting to see the cards that aren't being uh replaced or refreshed 40 4090 stays where it is and it's still you know why would you want to refresh it I guess you know it's still light years ahead of the 4080 and um yeah basically elsewhere 4060 range Remains the Same and I think there's been some organic changes to pricing there already uh yeah so I think it is all down to pricing and this has been your number one issue with 40 series right Alex yeah it's just I I've said it before I I want that console and better performance at a lower price point and it just doesn't happen here I mean the 4070 the 4070 super if you're getting that for the 4070 price I don't know that could be interesting it looks like a reasonable increase in compute power right yeah and that that's really where you usually see the differences because it's usually like trading blows with the 3080 and like falling below it at times right so if you could get that to be better in a lot of cases where it's just always better no matter what it's pretty great GPU in terms of performance um and especially since like just recently shown alw 2 like it's going to scale a lot better the the more titles that we get like later down the line just to architectural advantages it's like Allen W 2 4070 base is really doing a number on the RTX 380 there even though like the RTX 380 and like pure rization and less intense RT titles actually may be better so that that's really cool but like once again it's all about this price and I don't necessarily trust Nvidia enough to actually reduce prices here in a meaningful way um so with they've got to get the I mean the 480 I mean it's just $1,200 it's a it's it's just definition of unappealing yeah man I don't know if I've ever seen anyone with an RTX 480 out there I always see people like yeah I got a 490 or I've got a 4070 Don's got one isn't he oh poor Don sorry Don am I am I am I joking J joking about John's rigs here D's rigs yeah uh yeah I mean it is going to be about the fcing in my opinion but it does look like some interesting orbe iterative bumps to Performance but it's all about getting that that balance of price versus performance sorted and um yeah I mean I guess they can make um sort of just uh adjust pricing um for the 40 60s uh cards more organically more organically yeah love the way you describe that yeah I think it is just basically the the market in in that sort of lower end tier just seems to have much more um leeway for for price adjustments for or sale pricing for that sort of thing you know I've seen the 4060 for like $250 which you know even it's an 8 gig card which is a bit problematic compared to the 12 gig 3060 is it's worth considering right so yeah I think it's just a case of trying to sort out price versus performance on those higher end tiers and uh well I guess we'll find out in January assuming that it is a CES announcement sounds right anything more to add to that I don't know I think it's right um I think one thing which is um swiftly becoming the case is that I think frame generation's kind of established now I think the latency hit is only really pronounced on the lower end kit only to the point where I think there's you know once you're sort of getting really low latencies and maybe you're getting a a 10 15 millisecond hit doesn't really make that much difference I mean you use frame gen all the time right John on on oh yeah I I just use it all the time and it's basically not noticeable I mean yes technically there can be a slight potential hit there but for games where that are demanding anyways uh I feel like it just feels better with the higher perceptual frame rate frame rate versus you know no frame gen and a lower frame rate right yeah so I it's always worth using with vsync too that's what I do there's also the idea of like consistency and it's one thing we didn't really talk about like if you have like a like it'll since it's going to be taxing the CPU less and you're going to have less variable if it's a CPU heavy game you're going to have like less variability In The Raw input FR frame time and you could actually get like a more consistent experience with frame gen on than with it off uh even though the frame rate internally is lower that's one thing that's why we always talk about capping frame rates in games why we like it Y and why we advertise and say everyone should do it and not everyone has to like that of course but that's one thing I think that is nice about frame gen as you get that like if you're like cruising at 116 FPS with frame gen on the entire time it's great yeah so right I think it's quite ironic that we're advocating fway caps which will also increase latency yes yeah but you know consistency nobody really says anything about I get exactly what you're saying yeah yeah I think it's a balance and I think just going for Pure latency reduction alone at expense of everything else maybe in select circumstances I think that's that's going to be up to the user but for me it's just not really worth it right you want to get the latency to a certain level and then everything else you know you got to bring it up get that it's about consistency yeah I mean this might be a heresy to the PC audience but the other thing is that the um uh input lag differential generally High frame rates with frame generation is even less noticeable with a game pad if you're using a game pad as an input device mhm yeah true true okay um with that let's move on to our next next news story well it's not really a news story but John you really want to talk about this right because um well you know let's be honest back in the in the day you weren't a big fan of the Oculus Quest and all it stood for but you've been spending a lot more time well you know let's you know let's talk about that because you know you were talking about how a mobile chipset was holding back VR Gaming and I guess that's still the case to a c still the case but they so there's a couple things first of all uh uh things I didn't like about the quest originally was the the default strap was bad and it felt very front heavy and it just you know the things that changed it and made it more useful for me are one getting lens inserts two getting like a more uh comfortable head strap it's more similar to it's the type of like the ratchet knob in the back there you turn to tighten it that feels a lot better on the head and just and then three the thing the thing I finally tested this week since I haven't had a quest that long and I'm also testing uh I'm testing two headsets right now cuz I do plan to do a greater VR sort of expose thing eventually here there it's it's interesting to look at the state of VR and my my positions have kind of moved around a bit here but I also am testing uh a pico4 headset which is similar to the quest in terms of it's a has its own s so its own store um and it is more it's a higher end one so it's got pancake lenses like the quest 3 does uh but I've been using these both and the big thing I discovered this week which has been around for ages but I never really gave it a full shot it's wireless PC link basically connecting your headset to the PC and playing PC VR games that way MH so my experiences with streaming in general or have generally been very poor uh but in this case I completely blown away by how well it works within the house now you need a fast router you need to be near the router I have my PC unwired I'm standing in the same room as the router which is actually downstairs where I have more space to play VR and it's just it's a I tested both the Oculus airlink feature which is built in and it was pretty good uh but then I picked up virtual desktop which is uh even dramatically better wow that is really outstanding it just produces image quality that within both headsets it looks basically like native uh output you can't tell that you're you're seeing a stream video by and large with certain colors you can pick up some streaming artifacts but I think just due to the nature of how close your eyes are to the screen and the the way the the screens work in VR like that with the lenses it does kind of mitigate any of those issues and so it in the latency it feels outstanding in fact the thing that surprised me is like the latency and image quality seemed slightly better with virtual desktop wirelessly than plugging the Oculus quest to into your PC with a USB cable so it's actually a better experience now okay so yeah with this you can just jum jump into your PC I you know obviously using a powerful PC you can down sample from very high resolutions and you get this like unbelievably pristine image quality uh you can run it at up to 90 htz I think and I know the peaker is 90 I can't remember if I have the quest at that or not but mhm I think it is 90 yeah I think it's 90 as well but both of them even more on top of that with virtual desktop they even have uh 3D models of the correct controllers so when I'm using the quest you get the Quest 2 controllers when I'm using the Pico 4 you get the Pico controllers those appear within Steam VR games correctly uh so I guess you know developers are implementing these different controllers into it I mean for VR enthusiasts this is all old news but man for me it really changed my viewpoint on PC VR because removing that wire also for psvr2 really when when you remove that wire from the equation uh it adds so much you just have this level of Freedom you can walk around you you can spin in place without any issues it means you can like if you're playing a first- person game now uh you can essentially just rely on your own physical positioning to determine your direction right so when you turn Corners you you don't have to think about all this cord or spinning around too much now the cord's all jumbled up it just feels freaking great really really awesome what what about your network setup there can you describe it to us so we can get a sense of what it's like it's it's not very special I just have a um reasonably fast router downstairs connected directly to the where the internet pipeline comes in I run a I have a wired connection up to uh my office and that's where the the PC is connected to so the PC pipes that in there and I'm standing down in the living room which is where the router is located uh and as long as I'm near the router it's fantastic uh I'm doing it like 100 megabits per second video um stream I really want to test the quest 3 because the quest 3 also supports av1 if you have like a 40 series Nvidia card you can do a coding yeah and it's actually supposedly even higher quality which sounds amazing that that'd be awesome I don't actually I've never done any av1 really with I don't know what performance impact that has I haven't I haven't the only av1 I ever did was when I did that RTX 390 at 8K and control video and a couple other games and that had so many issues back then because it was just like the start of av1 on the GPU it should it should be okay it sounds like it's actually a better exp it's pretty good on uh on 40 series that's for sure I just wanted to clap I hear refresh rates the uh Quest 2 does uh 72 80 HZ and 90 Herz okay yeah yeah and the quest three is 120 but I think the virtual desktop is going to be limited to 90 I might be wrong there I so I was reading about the quest somebody was saying doing 120 in the quest 3 causes it to heat up pretty pretty bad it also drains the battery weird drains the battery pretty hard so I'll be I I want to I want to test that actually I I would like to test the quest 3 as well and all of this this because I think um these wireless headsets are extremely compelling right now abely but also like the internal stuff is good too I've been messing around uh I didn't actually realize that this got a standalone release but a medieval showed up on these things right which is an awesome one of my favorite PC games in the last few years but there and they did a great VR version right like real integration of the weapons and feel it's not just like a playing that game in first person or in VR but like it actually works like super well on these headsets not connected to your PC and the Stalone experience that all the levels are there I mean obviously they cut the visuals back and where they needed to but it's convincing so you know I I've definitely had a change of heart you know I I wired VR still has a benefit I think especially for maybe if you're playing like cockpit games um driving games things like that a wired VR headset would still probably make the most sense just in terms of being ready to go there's no battery to worry about uh and there are still ways to push the image quality higher on some of those headsets but um yeah what I'm seeing right now I think when I play PC VR and it's got me back into it I'm just going to be going for these wireless headsets primarily nice Fant John I have to talk about the elephant in the room and why are you so inconsistent with your opinions why why do you keep changing your opinion what's that about it's almost like you've received new information that actually reass makes you reassess the well it's more like like technology improves yeah although to be fair the thing is is like every other streaming service I've tested okay I guess okay that's the thing to consider with the wireless here is that this is uh this is within the same house you're basically piping like a direct wired connection and beaming the wireless directly from the router to the headset that works going over the Internet would be a very different beast and in fact if I tried to walk to any other room in the house besides the room with the router in it uh the connection absolutely dies and the experience becomes unusable like instantly it's actually pretty funny how like you just walk up the steps walk to the kitchen and it's like o it doesn't work it just doesn't work it's very sensitive to being you need to have very good Wi-Fi for this to work effectively is what I'm saying close enough or be close or be very close to the source for it to work when you're there it's perfect otherwise not so much and I also think again when you're inside a VR headset due to the way those screens and lenses work uh streaming artifacts become less noticeable mhm versus say I remember we did the fortnite test at Gamescom and they were like you tell the difference they had two PCS there they had a fake one in in there and they were like they were expecting us to have to like look at like a microscope and like I literally sat down I was like this is streaming and they had this like disappointed like yeah okay you're right yeah don't look don't look closer then like I remember when I just like leaned in a little he's like don't look any closer don't look any closer that's okay so you on a direct monitor yeah it's still pretty obvious and honestly this those are fac with other challenges as well but for VR I think the benefits of going Wireless are so high that it makes sense especially because just the cable itself is actually a nuisance I think when you're doing any sort of full body motion gaming yeah I get what you're saying okay fair enough um okay well that's the end of our news discussion to topics for this week so let's uh move on to supporter Q&A so every week we post on our page on a call for questions and supporters could basically ask anything that they want you know we give them an idea of what we're going to be talking about but you know any question it's all fair game we're going to kick off with this one from leftist hinid I recently heard that EGS is bleeding money epic game store that is my understanding uh is that it was it was not a cromulent launcher and thus I have never even bothered making an account on it if EGS were cromulent do you think it could be profitable now you might be wondering what the word cromulent means so ACC according to dictionary.com oh it's from The Simpsons yeah well maybe it is well it's in it's on the dictionary Alex Oh that must mean it's real yeah it's uh it means acceptable or adequate and the Give an example is the continental breakfast was perfectly cromulent but apparently according to left isomed the epic game store isn't so yeah I mean this was a dis disclosure this week that they still haven't you know epic still is not making money on the epic game store and therefore it's probably losing money the extent to which it is losing money and whether it could be assumed that it's uh quote unquote bleeding money remains to be seen um but we were five into five years into the epic game store as a thing I think it is yeah um and what do you make of it because you know apparently it's not it's not cromulent no it's not cromulent I've been video yeah you did a it's a real video by the way it is not it's a joke I made a joke it's a joke out of it but it was real so don't think I was like faking that that was all real stuff but actually you had you had Alan Wake too uh you you were trying to use the the quote quick launcher in the epic game store and then you actually had imported the game as a non- steam app into the steam launcher and the steam launcher loaded it quicker yeah yeah and the the reason for that is first of all EGS for me and I think everyone can attest this don't say you don't do this is that it's very variable I showed it launching one of the times where it had a variable startup time sometimes it goes really quickly sometimes it doesn't but there's no transparency as to why so I can't tell you why it's fine on my system it's fine on your system that's cool bro just kidding just kidding but like so like like seriously like so like I showed a variable launch time there and it was just like not good that time I launched it up but whatever that was the time I had the recording so that's why it's funny uh but the bigger thing is actually if after you start up EGS its interface is a lot less responsive I think than after like a couple seconds like that's one thing I think Universal to everyone who uses look I have the EGS store loaded right now I double clicked on it and it shows a little splash screen still it opens up the whole window do epic game store in the middle for about like three or four seconds steam doesn't do that no it's it's there's a different level of responsiveness for it all but it's not just that it's it's not cromulent it is uncom Lent in a couple other areas like I for doing the alen Wake 2 video I was like oh man Allen wake 2 installed on my C drive I want to make sure it's launching from a different drive you can Google how to launch things and install them to different drives in EGS it is it is some Linux level crap there like it is dumb it is I can't believe that Xbox does it better the Xbox app Does It Better probably EA's origin did it better when EA Origin came out I'd imagine Ubisoft launcher I haven't used it in a while but I imagine it does it better you can't actually manually choose where you install games in EGS what you sure yeah you cannot it it just installs to wherever EGS is installed to it's so bad yeah do I'm pretty sure you can no no no give it a Google it's hilarious it's still this way it's so bad I had to you have to manually copy files over to have it installed to other locations okay um that's all I have to say about that no but seriously it's not just that it's also lacking all the features of steam uh uh like the community features the nice forums yes they're they're they're Sesso at times but you can find some information there like the the entire highlighting that steam has for smaller games that is usable the wish listing I don't think is even in EGS EGS wish list I got to Google this because I've never oh it just it was added never mind I'm sorry it was added so bad but either way there's a lot of things where I think the reason they're if you're saying this if they are bleeding money it's probably because they're spending a lot of money on buying exclusives or timed exclusives uh and those give them the headlines and that's why people talk about EGS all the time but otherwise if they didn't do that I don't think they would get the the Mind share from their otherwise feature set speed performance Etc like it's just not there with steam and that's why I think even if regardless of everything else talk about this politically because you're worried like steam has this Monopoly it's like but steam is also doing a lot of things better too don't forget that like don't please don't forget that there's a epic game store VR oh no it is a ue4 app by the way the EGS app is a it also runs at 38 it also only updates at 30 Hertz uh is another thing uh so it doesn't have as good performances well it's clearly not cromulent then it's not cromulent it's not cromulent uh but to our leftist omid's point I think even well I don't think the the quality of the launcher is really the defining factor of whether it's commercially successful or not um it's you know the reason it's not successful is because they're spending a huge amount of money on free games and exclusives right you know yeah that's the bottom line but if they didn't do that would they get anybody using it in that's that's a good question but you know I think Tim Sweeney was pretty open about the fact that they' need to spend Untold Millions to actually uh compete against steam um I just wish that the actual level of competition was not just about game availability but also about how good the actual feature set of the launcher is and you know the surrounding ecosystem you can you can B definitely make the point that steam is a proper ecosystem whereas egx EGS rather is just a launcher you know there's not not much more to it um let's move on to the next question this one from Mr coders hi team some people are calling the new PlayStation 5 a quote unquote slim model but it is simply a dropin replacement for the current models do you think we can expect a true slim model in the future thanks keep up the good work uh I'll tackle this one quickly I think um unless you guys got something to add but um I mean it is smaller but the defining work that allowed it to be smaller was the six anomer processor which we got last year um in terms of actually making a proper slim model um you're going to need another shrink right and for commercial reasons even though four or five nanometer is available um none of the console manufacturers have gone for it which is quite interesting it's only AMD with uh uh the 78 40u and the zed1 extreme And Rog Ally that kind of thing that are actually using those process nodes at the moment by which we could assume that they're not economically viable for a console um and we still face ing the situation where price drops on consoles um are kind of not happening in fact prices are going up we had this amazing summer sale of PlayStation but it looks like the new slim model which is a cheaper rendition of the same console is back up to um uh the previous prices and there have been actual price increases on the Digital model in the US which is quite interesting so I think it's basically you know if you want a slim console in the future it's going to be when those new um process nodes are actually good value for the console manufacturers so yeah we're at the point now where you know it's been announced now with the Microsoft leak well announced revealed via the Microsoft leak that the revisions for series X and series s coming 2024 late 24 are going to be 6 nanometer not five or 4 nanometer and um those that is the next big um uh process shrink and uh 6 nanometer from Seven is more of an iterative step but for whatever reason that you know the console manufacturers are not seeing value there um do you think we're going to see a slim model in future John in any form this is the this is the slim model yeah maybe we'll see a super slim oh no that didn't work out so well last time no the only so super slim there's nothing super about it whatsoever obviously there's still the PS4 PS5 Pro to think about which we expect is likely to happen um the question there is do they continue with this same with the Chad Warden popped collar look or do they actually go for something new if they go for something new that opens the door for an actual revised regular PS5 right because they I guess technically they don't call do they call this new one the PS5 slim or exactly so it's just the PlayStation 5 it's just the new PlayStation 5 the new PlayStation 5 so I could see them maybe doing that but they've also put a lot of R&D obviously into this whole replaceable Drive thing and it's really tough to say what they're going to do there but uh I I don't feel that confident that we'll see another redesign of the original PS5 anytime soon necessarily it's going to take a bit yeah yeah I mean I think it's all going to come down to what form the PlayStation 5 Pro is going to take and what process I mean if they're using five sl4 nanometer in PS5 Pro which I kind of think they really should be yeah um then at that point you would think that 5 nanometer 4 nanometer is actually economically viable for a produced console exactly yeah it's just interesting that we aren't seeing those nodes that actually being used right now when you know graphics card makers are using it it's used for um you know CPU some AMD obviously it's been used in smartphones for a long time they're down to 3 NM now which is kind of baffling but yeah I mean I think we're going to be waiting for some time there could be a super slim but let's just hope it's better than the PS3 super slim which was generally genuinely an awful console no no it's not that bad it is that sliding tray is horrible uh yeah but okay it is yeah quick quick quick Flash update uh I said something I would spoke earlier this future Alex this is future Alex fics fedics um you can install the different drives on EGS what I was talking about and I used the wrong phraseology is you cannot move them to a different drive after you install them that's what I that's what I was trying what I thought you were talking about well I I think I said I installed it to the ride Drive I was using the word install but you cannot move them to a different drive without doing Shenanigans once again Shenanigans um so feature Alex coming at you so do you think do you think there's a certain level of extra uh cromulence no they their cabulance level has improved by Three Shades okay that's a scientific term let's move on to the next question this one from uh Dennis Lofgren hi DF crew exclamation point I recently realized I don't actually know the difference between raid tracing and path tracing I always assumed based on how path tracing has been presented by DF that it is just a better more complete version of raid racing however when looking it up I only became more confused pth tracing seems to actually be less accurate could the DF Crew Please provide an explainer on this difference and why you usually present it as the more desired option have you talked about this recently have I missed the explainer thank you and keep up the good work well what do you say about that Alex because have you been gaslighting us I've been gas all of you no this what they're saying is actually true in the aspect of so path tracing just simp if you shoot a ray to hit something and then you test it and just say like did I hit that that's Ray tracing whatever you do after the fact doesn't really matter path tracing is where you shoot a ray and after it hit something you say well actually how do I inform what anything about the information that I want to gather about this thing that I just hit well then you shoot another R to gather more information about it and if you do that iteratively you know like in a random manner Monte Carlo path tracing it gets really you get a really detailed image about all of the lighting that from that one pixel's perspective uh the reason why uh Dennis that you come to the idea that it looks like a less complete image it looks worse is because to for to be so random and for it to be completely perfect and to get the best image possible it's like really random and it requires a lot of race do it so like the the if you're looking at a path race a path Trac image takes a lot longer to convert to a good-look image uh and it takes a lot more processing power and whatnot so that's what you're saying is true but for in the context of real time it means more visual you know goodness because one denoisers are a lot better you have real-time denoisers that are cleaning these things up we just talked about Ray reconstruction recently um but the thing is like when you just do like a normal Ray trace and you don't you can use like how you inform to shading of of that pixels that you just Ray traced sometimes you like do another ray Trace where you say like okay is this thing in Shadow or not a lot of games do that if they do if they do rate tracing so they're doing a slight little bit of path tracing there they're seeing if like the thing's in Shadow after they rate trace it but usually that's about it and the rest of the shading is ridiculously simple pth racing is saying actually I'm going to inform the shading of things that are R traced by Ray tracing again and so that's why that's why it's so expensive and that's why it's so expensive you're like R tracing again and um that's why in Allen wake 2 when you look at a reflection on an opaque surface you can see the reflections of something else in that opaque surface like it's really really cool to see inter Reflections which is something that video games don't just don't have it's really expensive um and that's why alamic 2 is really expensive to render with that option turned on uh but we are not gaslighting you it should usually be better it won't always be the most stable image in comparison to some other technique uh because R tracing is just sparse and problematic in general but it'll produce a more accurate image usually okay I think that clears that up there we go um yeah let's move on to the next question this one from axma hi DF Carl job's latest video I hope I got the pronunciation right that was good yob okay hi DF Carl yobst latest video on the Retro Gaming market crash gives me some faith in humanity oh however I'm still hesitant to consider it a victory for gaming collectors and go to a CX store and buy a PS1 or a Sega a Sega Mega Drive game more frequently at the cost of an arm or a leg most of the time incomplete and SL or without a box can you speculate how long it will take for the market to settle down and introduce affordable prices for the regular consumer thanks and good work with the coverage as of late so John has there been a crash in retro uh gaming prices I was not familiar with that specific video uh but I have definitely noticed prices coming somewhat down or at least sort of stabilizing somewhat um it is an interesting time right now for that actually the thing is though is like the actual the actual really rare stuff isn't going to get cheap but what's ha what does seem to be happening is that the normal stuff is becoming uh more affordable again thankfully so it's like there was a time where it's like oh I want to get this really common game like Super Mario Brothers 3 or something that sold millions of copies and people were charging an unreasonable amount for it but I've started to see games like that in that ilk uh selling for cheaper lately basically is what that's going on so I think uh man I I don't I don't know how to speculate on this because the Retro Market is weird and how it works and it just sort of a lot of it seems to go with certain people getting into a bubble and it's like it's almost like a coming of age thing right where like a certain group of people reach a certain age and like oh I want to go back and collect a system I was uh a big fan of back then and that's constantly shifting upwards right and then the consoles older than that that already had the collectors you know come in there and sweep everything up some of that the common stuff starts to drop down again and become more affordable where the big Heavy Hitters they're not they're not going to get any cheaper in fact I I have not seen any evidence of the big games actually coming down in price which is a shame because uh there's a few Heavy Hitters I would like to add to my collection but I've I have come to the conclusion I will never get a copy of say gimmick for famcom or uh some of the others as well like a proper battle Mania D Joo as well for the Mega Drive the prices are just too high what about when you're in Japan uh did you well was that a different situation prices there are interesting cuz my frame of reference is versus when I lived there for a year 2005 versus now obviously they got way more expensive compared to back then everybody knows that though retro games in general did the prices though for me when you take into account the exchange rate were very good I would say they were low much lower than what you could get over here if you're trying to buy Japanese games right so it was it it that definitely helped make things a lot more affordable so I was able to get a few Heavy Hitters over there uh because they were significantly cheaper than I would normally be able to get them for here but that's just an exchange rate thing not so much like right the whole Market hasn't come down on that uh in Japan though like even even then even if you ignore the exchange rate like the common games have always kind of remained relatively affordable like they used to be dirt dirt dirt cheap like you know 50 cents or less for some of this stuff uh now it's going up a bit but it's not like expensive I would say it's very affordable for a lot of that okay us stuff tends to be pretty some us stuff does tend to be fairly expensive on many systems I would say pal stuff is usually pretty easy to get I find since he mentioned C I mean I have seen the prices go up there as well but like why would you ever want to to buy a playst one pal game Mega Drive sure because a lot of those are actually not act not local or they're not converted to run in pal mode so if you play them on a 60 HZ system they just work better so like it's totally fine to get a PO version but PS1 games doesn't work like that and they mostly suck absolutely yeah wow you know you know so John I actually have a question the game you mentioned gck um would you be cool it's too rare obviously to get too expensive to get the original car cartridge but what about like a community reprint of the cartridge so there's two things about that I am actually okay enough with reprints of certain games if it's rare enough like that um but there's first of all a lot of those reprints I want to add this in here uh use Flash ROM chips which maybe don't have the same lifetime expectancy as a mask ROM chip which is something to think about and depending on how it's manufactured there can be issues with like the way the the cartridge uh the the slot is beveled it's the uh the The Edge connector on the board itself it's not beveled properly you can actually damage your card slot things like that but with gimmick the bigger problem is that it uses a special sound chip from sunsoft which is Amazing by the way it sounds really really good uh but if you try to use that cartridge whether it's you know first of all you have to replicate the sound chip and once you do that if you try to use it on a non-japanese famcom or a famcom compatible slot the actual pin within the cartridge slot for that sound channel is not attached right so you actually don't get correct sound at all so man as a result uh like you see there there was a re-release of gimmick on Modern platforms and it was okay enough but it's just like basic emulation right I also had hoped for a cartridge re-release but I don't think that they're going to do it because of this because they can't just make a single board for all regions uh you know they could release the Scandinavian version of gimmick but that has a it only came out in Scandinavian countries besides Japan but they cut they they don't they didn't include the audio chip for that version so it actually sounds much worse um and it was pal only as well so whatever so yeah there's a lot of like hurdles to jump through with regards to re-releasing games I found like that depending on what's in the cartridge it's less so for 16-bit systems though I think that usually works better cuz there's not as much special hardware needed and the cartridge ports are the same across all regions yeah I actually just got uh a famcom game right here in the mail just now shall we see what's in the box go on then let's do it go on then go ons especially compelling viewing for those listening to the uh podcast yes exactly describe excruciating detail I saw this for a rather surprisingly low price actually so I I picked it up it is maybe the Retro Market is crashing famcom version of uh it says pajama hero Nemo it's a that classic it's the no it's the Little Nemo the dream master for NES the famcom one it's a really cool little Capcom game and uh yeah I've added it to the collection so okay there you go and yeah maybe you're right the market is crashing and it was much cheaper than usual that might be the reason okay let's move on to the next question this one from Victor uh but the I and the O are one and zero just point that out uh hello digital f-h fellas exclamation point now that Rockstar is on the radar again have you wondered about the lack of a simple update for Red Dead Redemption 2 for PlayStation 5 and series X to run at 60 FPS along with quote unquote increased settings it was ported from consoles that finally were basically like PCS to newer consoles that are even closer to them so no excuse some people think they are just too busy and won't have uh won't put the unjustified resources but they already did most of the job for PC so wouldn't it just be an easy patch for a game that doesn't need any remaster from a company so big and resourceful at least as a basic quality of life service for the legions of fans that have made them billionaires uh Alex I mean you looked at it you looked at uh Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC back in the day which you would think would be the basis for any work for PlayStation 5 and series X version I mean it's it's doable isn't it I mean the concept of moving a PC version onto a console isn't that uh easy though is it I mean fundamentally especially PlayStation on Playstation it wouldn't be as simple and you know like I when I went back then like it was RTX 208 TI was like roughly console settings at 60fps but it wasn't necessarily so perfect it was kind of borderline um at 4K 60 and it doesn't like I've seen a lot of people obviously the image quality on PS4 Pro that is inherited on PS5 is also an issue for a lot of people that I always see people talk about that but going up to like a straight 4K and then a straight 60 after that is not necessarily guaranteed I would say uh just because the game is pretty it's still pretty heavy if you run it at 4K it's still pretty heavy um but I think they could manage something and it should be way better than what they currently did regardless of anything I said about the feasibility of just porting over the PC version they have enough money to do this people like this game it's people like this game that's all I to say like I'm surprised they haven't done it and just resold it like I really I'm surprised they haven't resold it it would be cool if it were a patch but that isn't the way they roll usually I think it's It's tricky because I think um in terms of your comput I mean well let's look at the last gen versions right see uh 1X Xbox One X 4K 30 we've seen via back compat that some titles don't achieve double the performance uh under series X back compat it's going to require a fair bit of engineering effort to get 4k 60 working and maybe the solution would be some sort of quality and performance mode using the various feature sets available on the PC version of the game like Avatar possibly yeah yeah that would kind of make sense right there's certainly definitely uh what they could do with the PlayStation 5 version because uh the 4 pro version just had that really quite horrible Checker boarding which didn't work great in terms of why they don't do it I suspect probably their focus is on Grand Theft Auto 6 at the moment you know I guess they could Farm it out but that isn't typically Rockstar style I agree though you know um that there's definitely money on the table being left here but at the same time you know we didn't get an upgrade for GTA 5 on PC you know the the RT stuff never made it on there it just seems you know Rockstar have different priorities don't know if you've got anything to add to that John not really I mean it's just it's a shame but that seems to be how it is they're not they're not interested in that for whatever reason even though it would technically be easy money yeah which is actually surprising because that's usually the way things go it's like having a lot of money is is not okay you need all the money and they could have all the money even though they already seem to have all the money they could have even more so absolutely it does seem like a no-brainer you'd expect something to happen at some point right exactly I agree but whatever we'll see okay let's move on to our final question and it's from The Collector a question for Richard why do you think DF is the only in bracket's last uh best gaming technology newsreviews Channel I recall back to an Era long forgotten where PC gaming magazines would be full of gaming Tech articles covering anti-aliasing methods and interviews with developers and creative producers Etc but other than DF none of that made it into the social media SLV video age what happened um good question how do you answer this one I think basically the nature of media has changed where um there's a pressure to get new content out on mass as soon as possible right and that's just not how you do digital Foundry work yeah and it's it you know it took us three four years to actually Break Even to actually make this a financially viable Enterprise it's not not not easy by any stretch of the imagination um but you know there have been some interesting articles recently I noticed PC Gamer did um quite a big explainer on mesh shaders and why they're what they are and why they're needed for Alan Wake too but yeah I kind of get what they're saying there um John thoughts uh I mean I don't think we're not the only ones doing it I guess but it's not it's not I guess it's not that common because uh it does demand like such a serious time commitment to do this stuff well I think and like I think with the way sites are generally run that's difficult to allow right justify to justify uh financially and just in terms of time commitment I mean it's usually about getting news out as fast as possible and having an entire team dedicated to doing these types of thing where it's like each singular project is going to take at least a week usually uh that's a tough one I think and you need some you need somebody at the top that's really Ed and they really want to do this and make it great and you know we obviously have that here with the man himself there well and back in the day rert lman obviously oh yeah r rert as well very that's exactly right we wouldn't be here if not for rert actually supporting that whole idea right like he made it possible to actually turn this into something that's viable yeah it's it's a it's a ficky one that's all I can really say about this but you've basically got to back quality and and you've got to um uh have confidence that that quality will actually result in an audience and you know if it took us three four years to actually make this whole thing viable then that's the challenge facing anybody that's going to come into this Market into this area of the market this very specific niche of the market I think on the plus side um although it's you know I'd say that the tech press for for PC is in a pretty good State at the moment um and there's a lot of really successful Outlets out there which have you know but they too have done the hard work right you know Gamers NEX is a is a is a great example of a channel that took years to develop into what it is today and um yeah I mean for whatever reason the the mainstream press doesn't really seem that interested in uh the sort of stuff that that we cover that much these days they may not know anything about it either that's the thing that's yeah yeah I mean that's the other thing of course yeah it's really difficult to find out people who can do the job do you have anything to add to this Alex from a PC perspective I also think news Cycles are pretty important part of it obviously it's uh so if you started one project and you've got a lot of ways in it but then something comes out and you really need to report on it you can interrupt it regardless of whatever your initial intention was because you need to make sure you're covering something because the audience wants to see it and it will definitely help the bottom line so it's not it's not always just um it's like sometimes you do need to keep up with what everyone else is doing just to even stay afloat so Like We Do videos at times where it's like we know we're covering it not because of our personal interest like sometimes I'd rather be covering something else but because I know the audience wants to see this so it's it's a pull it's a tug and pull it's hard it's not just one source of why the way things the way they are I think it's just that this works is really hard and games have got a lot more complex and you have to be on top of a lot of the new stuff that's happening and it's a lot of it's really difficult to follow right and that's what we try and do here I mean obviously um you know we try and act as um you know basically trying to explain it to a a wider audience a lot of this stuff that's happening um but it's it's it's really difficult you know yeah that's just I mean that's the thing with these projects there's the figuring it all out kind of thing there's actually playing the game and there's the capturing it you know figuring out what you want to say what you want to write you know getting all the hard leg work done there and then there's editing the thing the production stuff the filming stuff you know we don't have a team of people doing that like we each do our own thing right and that's which is rewarding but it does take time and will say necessary I mean the concept of doing a written piece of work for a website is uh far far easier than doing a video yes oh gosh yes yes I mean it's it's just you know screenshots and and text really which is basically you know the very very beginnings of a video project uh yep assets yeah wow I didn't really think about that but that is certainly true it's uh it's video is just a completely different Enterprise um I don't really know what more we can really add to that one except to say that um um you know I'd love to see other people do this stuff as well the issue is that you know coming into this and doing it straight off the bat it's just not easy uh it's a lot of growing pains um and yeah because there we can't cover everything that's the thing there's stuff that I want to know that I'm curious about that we don't have time to even look at and it's yeah this happens all the time like all that PC myth busting we talk about it like there's just not enough time in the world yeah there's always more ideas than there are videos that's the bottom line just because it takes so long to make each piece of content actually if there's one thing I would like AI to do and there is nothing this is like it's not about taking my job away from me but if it could somehow make my editing process easier not editing the video for me but like you know like obviously the creative thing is that's all me but like the manually moving my hand across the screen to like cut up videos Etc that's all stuff that you know that could be aided by AI in any sense of the word really maybe maybe how would it know what to cut AI Bros you do your work your magic how about this it's like you're capturing the game live and you just you say oh Premiere put the shot in there and it just like captur it and sticks it on the timeline for you I think we're in the Realms of Science Fiction here yeah we are the AI is a cural no no no no definitely not no okay well that's just uh the best answer you're going to get to that particular question and therefore it is the end of the show so if you did enjoy it please do whatever like subscribe share ring the bell for instantly uh instant notifications um and yeah please do consider the DF supporter program if we're talking about financial viability that's made all of the difference for us um but yeah that's all from us for this week and I guess we'll see you next week for DF direct weekly 138 but in the meantime yeah thanks for watching and supporting digital F Fe
