DF Direct Weekly #159: PS5 Pro Ultra Boost Mode, Ghost of Tsushima PC Specs, Kingdom Come 2

well hello there and welcome to this the 159th episode of DF direct weekly uh which is our show which discusses the latest gaming and technology news always has done always will um plenty to talk about this week and we're going to kick off once again with some ruthless advertising for the Digital Boundary store uh the warehouse sale is still happening there's still gigantic discounts to quote unquote enjoy there and we've got new products coming online as they say uh the bespoke t-shirt which I am modeling here there's a gigantic bespoke logo on the back by the way which I can't show you um yes that's coming online now as is this the bespoke pin and I believe there's a sticker pack as well I wasn't sent one of those I don't think even so lots of stuff happening on our uh store so if you want to walk around like a walking advert for all things digital Foundry well that's great for our perspective um but that's it that's all we've got to say about pimping the digital Foundry store for this week let's get on with the introductions Hello Alex Batalia yeah good use of the word pimping Rich definitely got to get past the YouTube sensor um yeah I'm also quote unquote Shilling DF today and uh yeah excited to talk about all those topics on DF direct when I say like Oliver said earlier this is definitely not the second time we recorded this 159 episodes how do we do it how do we do it unfathomable plus specials um I do enjoy the uh the special jumper you've got there wish this is this is for the DF audience in particular I I should have also worn a like a we need a Super V like a super v-neck on the store that just goes straight down to the crotch I think don't need that but maybe a card Varian maybe C yes uh sorry about that Oliver hello Oliver McKenzie yes a lot of these certainly we've done and I've got my TF beanie here or t as we call it in Canada which is a very nice material very nicely made right okay that's introductions out the way uh plenty to talk about news wise so I guess let's crack on first news story of the week a reportage from Tom Warren at The Verge where uh it seems that PlayStation 5 Pro will indeed launch with a boost mode to enhance existing games in actual facts that call get a quote quote Ultra boost mode uh uh which seems to go maybe One Step Beyond what we saw previously um Alex not a huge amount of details there but thoughts uh not a huge amount of details but I think this is just continuing the the PlayStation 4 Pro tradition uh were there there was an access to a certain amount of the GPU and CPU resources never fully clarified exactly what it was on the GPU side but uh boosting up the CPU clocks there here it'll be presumably more mild given the power situation on the PlayStation 5 Pro I I don't know uh like you said scan details on the ground but the whole idea is to just give backwards compatibil backwards compatibility titles from PS5 going up to PS5 Pro those that do not receive direct patches to either unlock uh great stuff like um pssr support or uh bespoke modes specifically made for PS5 Pro that either enhance uh resolution frame rate or graphical uh options that these titles still regardless of that fact get some sort of boost I'm actually based upon uh what we're seeing though here I am very curious what it means on the GPU side of things and maybe Oliver has something to say here but I but I think originally reporting around this the PS5 Pro uh did point out to the fact that maybe the GPU clock per default of the PS5 Pro was slightly lower than the original PS5 so like what does this mean exactly this Ultra boost mode well do you have any insights though Oliver I don't have any insights beyond the name which Ultra boost mode that certainly sounds a good deal better than just a boost mode obviously if you look back to the PS4 Pro um it was from as far as we know it was a pretty mild increase you got like a 30% bump on uh CPU clocks and a pretty mild bump from 800 MHz I think to 911 MHz in the GPU which is not that big of Improvement now in some titles like Battlefield 4 you did see a big Improvement because that was the title was primarily CPU limited but in a lot of games obviously you're GPU limited and in those instances it didn't help you out very much and we suspected it was only using half of the butterfly GPU configuration so 18 cus instead of 36C use which is obviously not giving you the full PS4 Pro Power obviously here it could be I think one of two routes right because like Alex said the PS5 Pro is rumored to use a lower GP clock I think around 2,100 MHz or somewhere in that range relative to PS4 or PS5 so one possibility would be bumping that clock rate in backwards compatible titles using a smaller GPU configuration and the other possibility um that is potentially more tantalizing is actually using the full 60 cuu configuration on PS5 Pro and actually getting more out of that system by using the full GPU configuration which is more similar to what Microsoft does on Xbox series X going from 40 cus to 52 cus they use the whole GPU there that's their backwards compatibility approach and perhaps we're seeing something similar from Sony or perhaps we're just seeing uh GPU boost than it is more similar to that PS4 Pro situation yeah uh yeah some thoughts on this I mean Ultra boost mode obviously sounds better than boost mode as you pointed out Oliver and uh you would you would expect that the full GPU is being used um because if it is just a clock speed boost alone it's not going to be that significant similar to p PS4 Pro uh I guess what's missing from this discussion is whether there'll be any change to CPU clock speed whether they'll they'll force on the enhanced uh CPU mode for higher clocks I kind of hope they do but wouldn't be surprised if they don't for compatiability purposes um and yes I mean yeah the original PS4 Pro you had that um ability to basically switch off half the GPU right there was an interesting change on Xbox 1X where you got the equivalent of three Tera flops of of of performance for um existing games they kind of split vertex and pixel shaders over one half of each uh sorry over half of each GP GPU so yeah basically 20 cus were for Pixel shaders 20 for vertex uh maybe that's what boost mode was doing on PS4 Pro we just never found out the the single clock speed boost just makes a bit more sense I guess for compatibility reasons but the the point is with this it does look as though you're getting the full um CPU power being diverted to older titles which means of course um anything that runs with Dynamic resolution you'd expect it to run at Full Resolution just full stop um hopefully yeah so that would Aid a great many titles because DRS has been so prevalent throughout the generation um yeah but beyond that I'm not seeing um too much potential for obviously Fame rates if there are Fame rate performance issues there'll be iron out you'd expect as well and we've seen quite a few of that but I guess in that respect we'd also see games that are very definitely CPU limited of which there are many so yeah it's quite interesting to see how this one may pan out but it's great to see that apparently it's going to be in there at launch if they're talking about it now um they're briefing developers about it and um yes I suspect developers are being asked to weigh up whether they want to do a full patch or whether they want to rely on Ultra boost mode to uh uh to get the job done um we did previously disclose from the same materials that Tom Warren has got here that um developers can actually go back to older games in their PlayStation libraries and um uh add in pssr upscaling but it still requires some development effort this is like a fully hands-off where the developer have zero input I guess and um you should just be able to reap the benefit um Oliver can you think of any particular games that would benefit tremendously from this I guess one that Springs to mind would be um uh IM moral of Aven which was like oh my oh limited on on on resolution a good and then they increased the resolution and it the performance decreased um so yeah that might be quite interesting and also how that that would apply to um the FSR frame gen Solution that's going to be added yeah any other spring to mind so I can think of a few uh there are kind of three tranches of games I'd think there's games with Dynamic res games that are just GPU limited and maybe have not too much variance the dynamic res or no Dynamic res and then games with explicit vrr modes so like for games with Dynamic res you'd have titles like um like Jedi Survivor that'd be a good one or Avatar Frontiers with Pandora those titles both use FSR 2 and are pretty aggressive about it so hopefully those titles do get proper pssr enhanced patches but if they don't you know Ultra boost mode could help also some weird ones like Final Fantasy 7 rebirth Final Fantasy 16 don't look too good again that could be improved a lot um and then games that are GP limited on PS5 with unstable performance you have like Elden ring uh ghostwire Tokyo The aformentioned Mortals of AVM those titles all have I think fixed resolutions or you know close to fixed resolutions have some performance and stability there and then games with discret VR modes those are all the Sony ones right we know God of War Ragnarok lost of us part one part two remastered basically all the insomnia games um yeah I think this could help a lot of catalog titles a lot of older titles maybe and a lot of titles that might not get a pssr patch immediately or PS4 Pro PS5 Pro patch immediately that still needs some enhancement relative to their PS5 counterparts which might not be in the best shape right yeah I thinking also RoboCop Rogue City have issues in performance mode uh yeah interesting um I guess it's going to be the proof of the pudding into tasting really so um not really too much more we can add to this but I think it is great to see that it is actually going to be in there presumably on day one but you know as Tom Warren points out in his in his report there will be games that just don't benefit at all a game that already runs at it's 30 FPS or 60 FPS Cap won't gain anything in terms of performance it's already where it is and similarly games with fixed rendering resolutions they're not going to suddenly increase resolution without the developer going back in and actually producing a uh a PS5 pro version of the game so they're very definite limitations but they nothing that we haven't really seen before and I am intrigued to see you know the extent to which um the new level of GPU power is employed because you know certainly you're talking about a notional 45% increase in performance which would basically be enough to potentially clear up all of those games that have got GPU limited scenarios in them right now so I think you know this could be really really good be great to go back and visit some of the more problematic titles uh particularly the ones that really do savagely use Dynamic resolution scaling and there are quite a few at this point particularly in performance modes so yeah good stuff and we shall report more on that as more emerges but um something which we've got to quickly cover which is that the OG uh leak video from mors law is dead that basically was the first uh Outlet out there to um to discuss the disclosures that Sony made to developers that has been now subject to a copyright strike uh this supporter question daaro another thing happened this week soy took down the moror is dead PS5 Pro specs leak video from YouTube in a quote unquote copyright strike surely Sony knows that the takedown itself will simply get more coverage of the specs while legitimizing their accuracy is this simply an act of pre-release marketing what else would they stand to gain from taking an individual video down rather than going after the source of the leak um as far as I can tell that video contained actual screenshots of actual Sony documentation uh which does mean that is um subject to copyright and you know maybe even potentially proof of handling stolen goods so it you know I think cly would have had grounds to take it down but you're right it does kind of legitimize the the leak but then again everybody has legitimized the leak with their own um reporting at this point so I think it's basically Sony sending out a statement from their legal teams I don't know if you got anything to add to that Oliver uh yeah I mean I add it to a gigantic pile of evidence that the PS5 Pro leak is genuine but again we've seen that from every Outlet Under the Sun every credential reporter every experienced leaker uh us obviously um but I think there is some sense in not showing these documents but I also think that uh perhaps um in this individual case it helped establish The credibility of his reporting and maybe if we're talking about a a bigger or more established Outlet maybe that wouldn't have been as uh as important but I think in this case that really did catch the eye that those documents were being shown um as to whether it was correct or wise or not I'm not too sure but obviously in this case uh that really did catch the eye immediately as soon as I I saw that information so yeah I mean it kind of a rock in a hard place but but um I understand why it was taken down MH yeah what do you think Alex yeah I almost feel like it's uh how do you say it like punishment I mean legal team just saying like Okay everyone talked about it after the fact that was the first place where it was discussed um but uh I don't think they would I mean I don't think we would show direct documentation of something like that um but I I think they they them punishing like a smaller Outlet uh is just kind of like a very corporate thing to do I don't necessarily agree with it um but yeah yeah I mean ultimately I don't know whether there's monetization implications for that you know maybe they lose their advertising revenue or whatnot but even so I mean you know it does kind of legitimize the leak but we kind of knew it was real anyway uh in terms of actually showing documents I kind of see what you mean there Oliver but at the same time you know how do you know they're authentic that's true I guess there was the visualization of the pssr comparisons which I believe were in that uh disclosure yes indeed they were yeah but even so um you know there's just so much fakery uh going around at the moment it's you know it's really difficult to say what is a fake document and and what isn't it's down to the reputation of the outlet basically at the end of the day um but yeah that was certainly an interesting development to the whole story um but with that let's move on to our next news topic okay so this week we had reconfirmation that ghost of tsima is coming to um PC there's going to be a PC port nius is handling it which is great news um but we did get some extra disclosures um we'll talk about a couple of them the first one being the recommended specifications and I'm curious what you make of this one uh Alex uh they're more or less the same as all the other Nixie ones I me I hope you notice that too uh like I've seen these specs before uh and based upon the wording it seems like those High settings will be PS5 settings again this seems to be their motto uh their MO uh and uh the very high settings will be um yeah something slightly higher than whatever the PlayStation 5 version of the game is doing it's that kind of uh precise technical Insight that sets different and well I think I think the whole idea is that the we have an idea of what the specs are of the PlayStation 5 and we see the amount of time effort Etc all these things that they can put into to version that Nix is making and it's the same developer porting these game engines to PC and they're taking a lot of the work here and they're making it very you know it's the portable version on PC that they make it's not the same version of the game that was just shipped on Console so we're seeing similar levels of like I would describe it as optimization for the PC Port uh so the fact that it looks similar to even some widely different game engine like Horizon forbidden West or uh Ratchet and Clank well that just shows the work that Nixie does and I think here at least there I guess for that um that high setting uh it is a little curious that basically for all of the Nixie ports like something like an RTX 3070 is more in line with the ps5s like output in terms of raw shading power at times than for example um in other you know multiplatform games we see so I think that that's just kind of follows the trend there uh the one thing that I'm a little bit curious about here though is the textures uh once again I'm always curious about like what the textures are in these games they do put the RTX 370 there right next to a GPU that has much more vram than it uh from the AMD side uh Nixie ports are interesting where they and I'm going to talk about this later when we get to Avatar GDC presentations that where they explicitly use the heterogeneous memory configuration on PC for graphical tasks there are like low priority things in system memory that are being used if you have an 8 gigabyte GPU for example and you're at like a moderately high resolution with a moderately High texture setting it'll be using those all the time uh doing stuff over the PCI E bus in a way that is supposed to protect performance but it doesn't always do that depending upon user settings and uh like for example people turn the textures to very high or and something like ratch and Clank they turn the rate tracing up and that is a competition for resources in video memory the one thing I'm curious here is whether or not this port will I and yeah suffer the same uh kind of like vram consequences as a result of that system like where I kind of found that for example in Horizon forbidden West that if you were using the high resolution textures uh at a resolution that was above 1440p your GPU could could totally be capable of rendering that like actually really well in the case with the 3070 but as soon as anything more important like some event occurred where there was greater strain on the pcie bus uh it would just performance would completely fall apart and I think that leads to actually a bad user experience uh because it's not so transparent to the user what exactly the issue is um so I I'm just curious to see what that is like here I mean this is originally a PS4 game I was about to say yeah so I'm hoping unlike those PS5 targeted games that is a little bit lower on the vram requirement uh to make those users just have a better time in general but I guess we'll see um there's other stuff to talk about though of course yeah I mean it does look like a cut and paste of the Horizon West that's why I said that yeah and and I'm a bit mystified by this because it is a PS4 game at its heart and the enhancements to the PlayStation 5 version weren't exactly you know gamechanging I don't think so I am curious to see whether it will actually run on you know much more sort of um uh attainable configurations you know RTX 2060 should be wiping the floor with a PS4 level game particularly with dlss and you know I'm not sure they actually crafted higher resolution assets I'd have to go back and look at the coverage um thoughts on this one Oliver yeah I think the specs are interesting in so far as there is a little bit of Hope perhaps for lowend devices because there are a couple differences from Horizon forbidden West one of those is listing only 8 gabes of GP of uh RAM as a requirement system Ram as a requirement and they also support hdds explicitly in the lowest end mode or in that minimum specification which wasn't true for Horizon so I think those plus the fact that the game is really a 4-year-old PS4 title at heart like the PS5 enhancements mostly boil down to resolution frame rate I I think those factors would suggest a game that could scale potentially to lower end devices um but at the same time the GPU end of things you know they're quoting a 960 or a 5500 XT which is a little bit curious because the 960 I think is a lot slower than a 5500 XD that's a yeah we had that we had that question from Philipe hey there DF exloration Point what do you think about the apparent discrepancy in uh ghost of tsushima's Hardware requirements on the lowest settings they've mentioned GTX 964 GB and 5500 XT to be both capable of running the game at 720 P30 while being two different in completely different class of Hardware the relative performance differentials around 70% in favor of 5500 XT are you going to test this claim what do you think about the requirements in general thanks for your work and have a great day exclamation point um I think the the main issue whenever you put together a recommended specs requirement uh pay AG is that um you kind of have got to address Hardware that people have or more likely to have and you want to have both the AMD and uh Nvidia uh Alternatives 5500 XT if you look at there you know it's basically all of the AMD gpus are gpus that are kind of like fairly recent whereas with the Nvidia side they've you know they've gone for a wider range of Hardware but arguably more popular Hardware I mean a ton of 960s were sold barely any 4 gigb variants mind you 960 was primarily a 2 gigabyte card so I'm a bit curious about that the um alternative to the 960 would have been uh check notes the r280 which I had to look at that which barely barely anybody ever bought which was a real shame cuz it was actually faster than the 960 back in the day um so yeah I think it is just basically um trying to find a point of reference for people to you know to understand I I there's that there's also driver support I guess on a purely technical level the those gpus still get support uh from Nvidia uh I believe the rx580 Vega Polaris gpus and such even older just old gcn definitely doesn't get driver updates anymore to the same well they the older GCM doesn't at all but I think RX 580 maybe get security updates but it doesn't actually get like the the features and the performance optimizations anymore so I think it maybe like runs with modern windows and doesn't have an issue there but it's so it could be that it could be that too or there could be some there could be some weird thing I have no idea what it could be it could be some dx12 specific thing that the game requires an RX 5000 series GPU that also has driver support at that point like we saw in the I know I'm I'm just you're sping I'm spitballing here but uh I think in the past we saw with um death stranding there was like yes a usage of a dx12 feature that was not supported locked out all all the older supposedly dx12 compatible gpus yeah they were not dx12 compa the driver situation does sound like the most plausible explanation right because um driver support for V is now over and that immediately precedes rdna 1 right which is what an RX 5500 XT is so I think that is the most plausible explanation for that um but moving on we actually had another story that came out of this uh particular Playstation blog which is that um trophies are coming to the PC versions of the game and there's also going to be uh what is described as a PlayStation overlay um but in theory this is actually a pretty good idea right Oliver yeah I think it's very interesting very interesting it certainly I think it suggests that Sony is creating PC more like a first class platform by essentially bringing the same features that Microsoft has on the PC over to the PlayStation platform Compu PlayStation platform um the overlay looks interesting as well if I was to speculate maybe Sony might consider doing more day and dat PC releases in the future because they are building some functionality into the platform that would be very helpful for a lot of crossplatform communication and friends list and things like this um that would actually be very interesting a future in which Sony is bringing games more towards a simultaneous or near near simultaneous release on PC because I do think that the console and PC audiences are separate and I think that what Sony has in front of it is a problem where even though the PS5 was sold almost as well as the PS4 I think when you're looking back at the PS4 that the sales trajectory of the two consoles is almost exactly identical I think they hit like 50 million sales within a week of each other relative to their uh timeline in the console life cycle but obviously there are some recent games that have not sold super well I've seen some claims that perhaps final finan 7 rebirth sold as little as around 2 to 3 million copies based off the tracking data and you have to wonder if maybe that title was shipping on PC as well maybe they shift an extra 500,000 or even 1 million units or some high number of units presumably in the hundreds of thousands and maybe that does move the needle a little bit for some of these titles that might otherwise have a little bit of trouble achieving uh Market penetration on a console that's you know only partway through its life cycle only sold 55 million units or however many they've sold it's not a it's not a tremendous base of users to ship a game on right just it's just not huge right yeah any thoughts on this overl Alex I mean the thing that confuses me is you're getting parity on trophies but can you actually move your save games across between PS5 and PC there's there's no mention of that there's mention of crossplay which I'd assume would be for something like hell divers yeah that's that's an interesting part and I imagine if they did do that and I really think they should uh that it might be one of those rare instances where you require actually um oh my gosh excuse me I always forget the name of their not Xbox Live PlayStation PS plus yeah the ps+ you may need a ps+ account uh in that case to actually unlock it which I mean that's fair enough at that point that's their ecosystem uh that's the last like little Bastion thing that I want to see because I think it's been really great in the games I've seen it in we use it all the time on the channel in those games that have it like we've used it in cyberpunk we definitely used it in balers gate uh all those Xbox Microsoft games tend to support it in a really good way uh so I would like to see that and I think this just mainly bringing a little bit of that ecosystem and honestly like Prestige status of Sony stuff to PC um like is can you really be saying like you're supporting the platform if you're not giving them like similar like Outlets to show how PlayStation loyal they are show how you know like PS focused it is it's not just like a PC game it's a PS game Sorry I'm sling it's a PS game on PC so they this is like another way to like brand it in a in a like a more hardcore way one thing that I hope that they don't do is that this is some sort of um troan horse way to unleash their own launcher or something like that uh please don't have a separate launcher you can maybe have a store I I don't care but but don't you know don't have a separate launcher store needs a launcher short ad just buy it from their website it hands you a steam key or I don't know you know something silly I just don't want to I've got like seven the point of making a store would be to bypass the steam fees so you can't use the store to get a steam key I don't think I have no idea then Rich I'm I'm I'm out of my element here uh I just don't want another launcher on PC at this point yeah I agree I mean it would be too much but I do think there needs to be tighter integration between PC and Playstation you know let's say for example example you want to play uh sushima on Steam deck and your p and your PlayStation 5 I suppose Sony would be saying well buy a PlayStation portal but it's not the same uh by any stretch of the imagination and I think that sort of level of integration between PC and um PlayStation needs to be there really not just the trophies and the friends lists and whatnot you need to be able to start a game and finish a game on whichever of the platforms you've paid for just kind of makes sense to me um but yeah I mean obviously this is going to be really interesting because I don't think we've seen nix's tackle um a sucker punch game before so um yeah I'm I'm expecting it's going to be a decent Port very curious about these specifications for what is basically a PlayStation 4 game really um so maybe it's actually somewhat on the conservative side which is maybe for the best because you know um you've got a sort of uh under promise overd deliver right yeah okay that's that let's move on to our next news topic okay then so this one's come out of the blue slightly just before we started filming this direct but um it looks as though warhorse Studios has uh announced Kingdom Come Deliverance too and it has quote unquote dropped a new trailer which is looking quite impressive um Alex going to come to you first of all looks like cry engine is is in the house yes which is an interesting decision bearing in mind uh basically how everybody has moved to Unreal Engine at this point but uh initial impressions of the trailer um initial impressions of the trailer is that it does look very good it does look like a continuation of a lot of what we saw in the original game uh less of it in the trailer in like the mo because it's more mostly showing off like cinematic moments having to do with the story but a really big part of the first game was its rendering of naturalistic environments being really top tier and you get a sense of that at a couple moments uh like the either like the one like there's the one shot where he's like petting the dog I believe you get a sense that like oh you get this like great Lush Countryside there um that's stuff I'm really uh keen on in this game I want to see how they've advanced IT graphically over the first game when we get to those areas of the game another thing that I saw is that the sky rendering looked to be different uh I think at least uh the or cry engine stuff that they would have been using did not have like a volume atric cloud system and that was added at one point I mean cren 5 or whatever has had a long and protracted development cycle and it's had some strangeness with it because it's like attached to hunt it's attached to the the the crisis remastered games to a certain degree but it never we didn't never really get to see much of it because we obviously are not lenses of the G game engine and it looks like they're using that volumetric cloud system at one one point here in the trailer when they show like a wide Scot wide shot of the sky um but other than that uh I to me it looks like a continuation of the great graphical presentation we've seen in the first game you have anything on this Oliver yeah I thought it looks very good it does sort of have a maybe this is my bias from knowing what the game is but it does have sort of a bit of a crying and look to it I think in the environments and the characters it has great looking GI I kind of wonder what they're doing there the environmental rendering look fantastic like you said like those Rolling Green Hills and the sky and just the way the materials look on the stonework and it it just looks really refined like really nice stuff kind of reminds me a little bit actually of Dragon Dogma 2 in that respect it just looks really right nice and clean and just very mature and goodlooking I guess I'd say uh the first person animation also looks great I'd say you know just poking around here maybe the character rendering isn't quite up to the same standard um and there's some interesting stuff with Reflections like characters that have semi gloss armor right that's very common in in these kinds of games and and you see some interesting like interreflection in the characters that make it look like maybe it's RT certainly I'm not seeing any screen space artifacts there and I'm seeing a level of detailing consistency that I wouldn't expect to see with like just you know Cube Maps say so that's interesting and I wonder if they are doing something with rt there I kind of almost would expect it just based on how good this game looks that they're doing something with r cuz obviously they're very technically competent and um I imagine they are pushing into some of those areas but yeah just some early thoughts I'd love to see more from this game I'd love to see some extended stuff this is just preliminary but it looks really good so far I think MH absolutely I mean uh from my perspective I just think it it it looks fantastic right and I quite like the way they've gone through cry engine because it does have an original and distinct look to it you know it definitely doesn't look like an Unreal Engine five game and yet you're not being short changed in terms of detail doesn't seem to be any popping of note in this video so you know questions about whether it's quote unquote in engine or not or whatever but it but it definitely looks looks the part right it looks like the complete finished article and uh lighting um very naturalistic just looks phenomenal so yeah I mean just early invests based on this singular 235 cinematic just looks looks great there do seem to be bits of gameplay there lots of characters in there as well which is yeah it's going to take place in an area now like the first game had like it was a bit more rural had like some largish settlements but this one actually going to take place uh in like one of the largest uh cities actually in that time period in this area of the world and they said they're going to have something like hundreds of NPCs out at any one moment so this could I mean the first game was a CPU Destroyer us it in the especially if you use the uh like the settings in the game that allow you to push it up Way Beyond like the game one thing that the game did really well at launch was have a setting that even like when you clicked on it it said this is not meant for your Hardware it's meant for Hardware of the future that was really good to see and I hope I see something like that this time around it was a very PC Centric game and the console versions were like okayish uh I think for for what the consoles could do given the the original Target specs there uh but I'm curious to see how Xbox series X and PS5 handled this like honestly I wouldn't expect 60 here uh given this what the studios done in the past on consoles and how just how hard it was to run their last game at 60 on PC um I'm also curious uh a little bit about the r tracing like Oliver said last time we talked with krych we talked with Vlad there and he said basically the system that he designed for fogy and the way to inject like triangle meshes into that like rate tracing architecture was the way they wanted to go forward and like the engine already supported triangle Ray tracing even for things like rtgi it's just like it wasn't shipping for a game it wasn't shippable yet so maybe they've moved Beyond soogi to our TGI based on triangles maybe it's a mixed system uh I don't know but uh this will be the first time we've seen a cryinge game in a long time so that's awesome and we're going going to get it this year apparently too yeah I do remember uh when this game came out it was the era cuz there's a lot of sort of what you might call internet wisdom and that particular era was the time where you know everybody thought that you know there the 60 FPS on the CPU side was basically solved and uh you know any decent CPU could produce well over 60 FPS in any given game and um one of the reviews I was doing back in the day was I think the 8700k um and yeah basically this trashed it on the higher settings of course and yes they did actually put in those disclaimers which is like well maybe you shouldn't be using this setting on the hardware today which I thought was fantastic um it's kind of like a more overt anop tanium setting right that's great I like it though I think this trailer looks great I get what you're saying about character rendering but um certainly environments and lighting just look first class so I'm I'm really looking forward to seeing more I'm not sure they've announced a release date for it it is coming this year though I believe so yeah looking forward to it um and with that let's move on to our next news topic okay next news topic isn't really a news topic but um basically some of the GDC presentations from this year's GDC are now available on what they call the Vault where you can actually access the historical database of all of the GDC talk the new ones have been added and Alex you've been pouring all over them and um I think this week you want to talk about Avatar frontiers of Pandora because there were what three presentations about the technology there and we get an even greater insight into how what makes that game tick because obviously we had our interview with the developers at launch but this goes into way more depth yeah and I think in total there might have been five presentations uh I I looked I didn't look well didn't watch The Sound one but I read through it too but I'm going to be talking today mainly about the ones specifically regarding rate tracing and then a little thing about dx12 memory management on PC cuz I found them all really fascinating now at launch we got a sense that they were doing a lot to get this game to run well um if you just look at it it's like a super dense world with a lot of like prestigiously placed everything in the like you can barely see the ground like on the Mac settings cuz it's just so full of vegetation and Scattered debris and all this stuff it's amazing looking obviously getting that to run performant with rate tracing is a huge Challenge and getting that to run at 60fps on consoles is a huge Challenge and they kind of that's what the things in the presentation that really excited me um the first one that I want to talk a little bit is the the presentation by Alexander koslo which was about scene representation and custom BBH in their interview with us uh they mentioned how they are using so on cons like on PC you have a dxr spec and all the bvh um building rebuilding refitting is all done through proprietary means in the driver uh and typically on the GPU from your respective Hardware maker AMD Intel and Nvidia are going to do this in different ways potentially and that's kind of like the room for Innovation that dxr kind of wants to try and provide but at the same time you don't get that low-level access like you have on console so and on console and on PC if you don't have a dxr GPU they use a custom bvh as they call it so the geometry is more or less going to be pretty much the same between the dxr version and what uh you see there on the console version but the way it's organized and uh kind of split up into these bound bounding volumes is going to be different and they went through the decision-making process and why they did and what they did there the actual details are fantastically cool like one of the really interesting things that I thought is like on PC and in dxr and in the equivalent of dxr on PlayStation 5 for example that bvh rebuilding refitting Etc uh bottom level and top level can be done pretty much only on the GPU or on the consoles you have the ability to read an offline bvh from disk uh for the bottom level there but here they do that reading from disk to save performance but but what they do is they do not use the GPU to um generate top level BBH or for things that are missing bottom level they actually run that on the CPU which is completely different than we've seen in basically every other game out there and they're kind of doing that to save most likely GPU time but an interesting aspect of that presentation by Alexander was actually at the end of it in the question section when someone asked like okay why are you doing this which is a great question and he said it wasn't actually about per performance um in the beginning when they started prototyping these systems cuz they wanted to get a rtgi system up in running on consoles they had prototypes but the question of like performance and how it's actually done are just completely different they prototypes were most likely on PC Hardware at that point in time and at that point in time and we actually heard it back then from developers is that like the DX the rate tracing apis on PS5 and series consoles were just very um early days performance features and reliability were not there so they started to roll their own thing and then would hook it up to the system later on and that's what they ended up doing and shipping with the game so them running this like super custom Loop of how to do rate tracing on consoles it probably in the end will save them performance versus dxr on Console or whatever the Playstation system is on console that is like dxr but that wasn't the original reason behind them doing it and I thought that was really fantastic to hear um so as part of the optimization for the game I talked about it in my review there's like a low kind of like quality to the geometry and materials in that bvh and there's certain things that are excluded like small grass and small plants and a lot of skinned objects are missing uh so like most character models would be not in there and the reason why they do that is because they kind of wanted to save on memory footprint cuz more things that more geometry is in there that's more memory that the game has to use and if you're targeting things like 88 GB gbus or limited space on consoles you can't just throw everything in there um and another reason why they said that is due to tracing time so the more triangles that are in that bvh and all like little nodes uh the more time that the GPU has to spend testing against them potentially and the denser the objects the more it's time doing this spending a lot more time doing the tracing itself it's saving on memory and saving on Trace time and we've seen this in other games before like Spider-Man for example is like one of the best I think examples of this on Console where you can see it really easily because there's so many mirrors in the game in a game like Avatar there's not too many mirror surfaces other than water but it's usually like kind of displaced looking so you don't see it too often in the rare moments when you do you can really see how much lower res it is um and I thought that was just cool to see if the reason behind doing it cuz in the interview we kind of got a sense of why they would want to do it but they explicitly say it there in that talk by Alexander all right so second talk that I thought was really Co who for us to understand why they didn't just ship the console um solution everywhere why did they do dxr as well if they already had the job done essentially well so dxr 1.1 is going to give them other advantages on PC one they're going to get rate tracing acceleration on Console they run the custom thing because there is a a specific call in rdna 2 to allow them to still use the ray triangle intersection units there the repurpose tmus to at least do the triangle intersection part but the traversal of the bvh and the existence of the bvh and how it is made and split up is all done custom on PC uh if you do you can't run you can't get EX any of the benefits of Hardware acceleration if you do Your Own Thing essentially and on PC they want you to be able to do your own they want to ship dxr to get that immense you know performance uplift you'd get on something like touring and pure um technically Intel hardware and all these other things um but as I said they do ship this on PC if you don't have uh a dxr capable GPU or if you turn off dxr like I showed off in my video so you can actually experience that console level look because it'll have slight visual differences as a result to the way it's done you can actually experience that on PC just without Hardware acceleration which is kind of cool okay yeah yeah sorry to get ahead of myself there you're right okay second talk that I thought was really cool was uh an optimized rate tracing pipeline for consoles from Quenton quinland now this was cool because it showed off uh some images that Oliver is going to get here and I'm G send them to him and it kind of shows off how they do their R tracing and it's how other games have done it too like they specifically site Metro Exodus as a a big Inspiration Point but originally they do a screen space Trace so it' be like ssgi at that point but then if there's a Miss there which is there's high potential for that obviously because screen space tracing can only see so much and do so much then it goes into a world space Trace where it'll hit it'll hit that lower resolution geometry and materials of that in that bvh structure um but then if there's also a Miss there or potential discontinuities it'll fall back to a rtgi probe system which is like you know DGI or RTX gii at that point it's an Nvidia developed technology that we saw shipped in uh I saw it in uh dark tide as well as in the recent um remaster for uh The Witcher 3 on consoles and the these images that they show of like the way the game looks if you only use like one or two of the systems instead of all of them together is kind of cool like they start off with this image right here where sorry you guys can't see this but the audience will to start off with this image here of them combining screen space traces with um just like the probe cach Chase traces and you can see there's like a lot of issues with it and like some of the smaller things like all the ssgi creates like overlap issues and like there's like extra occlusion that shouldn't be there but when they switch over to World space traces with screens with probes excuse me you can see that that gets more accurate large scale detail but it's missing all the small scale detail there's none of the like extra occlusion on the ground for example from all the um grass in the game because that was just handled by screen space traces and it goes to show you that even like if you're trying to get performance like real Hardware rate tracing you're going to have to make compromises and you have a holistic like grouping of techniques to cover a variety of ranges and different optimizations for each one of those to get it running better and that's like another part of the um the talk that I really liked was the discussion like right at the end of it showing off like some real performance figures between the various uh systems here's a a little chart in there that shows Xbox series X performance Xbox series s performance and then an RTX 480s performance at the same settings in the same scene while doing the probe update which is like a more agnostic system that's not screen resolution dependent for example and you can see huge differences between them all um the RTX 480 for example completes the probe Trace in one fifth the time of the Xbox series X so that gives you a sense of how much faster this Hardware is and RTX 480 is regarding like what I would describe as simple Ray tracing it's like kind of diffus but it doesn't do a lot of other things that crazy patch racing does um so that's one faster but if you look at the light liting time on that chart of Xbox series X versus the RTX 4080 just like lighting the probes uh it's only it's like less than half the time there on the RTX 480 so it shows that yes Hardware rate tracing can give you benefits for like one part of a frames aspect but it doesn't necessarily help you as much as generic Hardware does for another aspect of the frame so the rx480 might be for this specific thing in this game like five times greater than five times faster than the series X but it's less than less than two times the speed for like the lighting of the probes and this brings me to kind of like the idea of like when we talk about the PS5 Pro that there may be mentions in those documents of aspects of the rate tracing they say RT's like two 2 4X faster which is a a huge range uh to actually say but it may be describing one specific aspect of the ray tracing pipeline like here it's describing the entire Trace Loop so you know traversal Ray triangle intersection return um and obviously shooting the ray but like for them for PS5 Pro it actually may be describing an even smaller step or the entire step it's hard to know so that's why you got to be careful when you describe things as being two to four times faster um I thought that was fascinating and the last slide that I want to talk about from this presentation was actually about how they optimized it uh they show a kind of this graph here shows um the Xbox series X running at 1440p and quarter resolution rate tracing which is what how it's done on console and it's just like quarter res everything no other optimizations in and it's running there already at Cordes 1440p it's running at 15.2 milliseconds which is just for the ray tracing like you're not getting that game to 60 FPS at that point so how do you get it to 60fps well they bring in all these other things like the screen space traces the variable rate Ray tracing for this uh screen space Reflections separate bvh and Trace for the the lighting structure and then that brings them down from from originally 15.2 milliseconds for just the rate tracing alt together down to 7.1 milliseconds for the ray tracing alog together at 1440p on Xbox series X and the whole idea is that it should be leading to minimal quality loss A lot of the things they're doing and that just shows you just like the power of optimization yes there is some quality loss in there when they're doing it but they're trying to do it in a way so that it's less obvious to the user and also getting quality wins for some other things like the screen space traces are going to add to the Quality quite a bit uh so I thought that was fascinating uh and something you don't usually get breakdowns of frame time on Console in a lot of presentations they're kind of afraid to talk about those things so seeing it like directly in front of us was amazing uh and then the last presentation which a little bit shorter to talk about here was dx12 memory management and Snowdrop PC by gaer VI I don't know how to pronounce French names I'm so sorry um either way really cool presentation uh and the reason why I wanted to highlight this is because it's the opposite system of what we see in Nixie ports for them for like nixes as I talked about earlier they're comfortable with things going over the PCI EBS and they're actually grabbing things in system memory that the G GPU can use and they're using that extra space to for example get like higher quality textures overall in the game but it can lead to issues as I talked about like with the game's performance being thrashed for snow drop they do not want to do that according to them they essentially do not want to at all have a situation where performance can be possibly thrashed by going over the pcie bus so they spend a lot of time looking at memory memory management in Windows to prevent that from occurring which is kind of like opposite of what nixes does where they want to explicitly allow that to occur and the the way they they have it is that they in game and I it's part of the optimized settings video is that there's no texture quality setting in game and that could be a bit irksome but if they're doing it right is not necessarily the case and here what they do is if you don't have enough vram they demote textures like on a MIP basis uh like MIP perip basis that are like all collated together so you'll get less quality loss for example in a game than when you have to like for example in a nix's game where you have to turn down the textures to all of them the medium for it to work but in this G in a game like Snowdrop engine games it would only affect like a couple of the textures in any given scene and we saw that actually back when I was doing my optimized settings video um one thing that I thought that was really cool there about how they do it is they actually use the tied resources tier 2 implementation that was brought about by like dx12 and dx11 um and you don't see it too often on in games on PC because I think it's not too great for a lot of developers they don't like the CPU cost it incurs uh we've seen in titles like it might actually be in death stranding that I talked about earlier but it was definitely in like the Gears of War five and four on PC for example um but one thing that they that I thought that was really cool about them using this tier 2 um version of tiled resources a way to page in Textures in a more fine grain way is at the end of the presentation they mentioned that they want to improve on that system even more for their next titles but also look at investigating samp feedback which is essentially a further extension of tiled resources as it was found in dx11 and dx12 and sampler feedback as we all know man that was like the hype of the Xbox series s before this generation started how are they going to ship these games on Series S and everyone was pointing out sampler feedback and we've seen no examples or Publications about its use at all in any shipping game we've seen like demos there's like there's like a 3D Mark Benchmark that uses it like but but no games and um once again people cite the CPU impact that that might have well we'll see what that could be in a future snow drop title so lot to talk about there but I think it's just fascinating to see behind the doors of one of the best looking games of last year for them to break down the technology into such fine grain detail give it to other developers to potentially use in their games too because they're building on the shoulders of giants you know they reference the Metro Exodus presentation quite often while doing theirs and looking at the future this sampler feedback thing I would actually like to see it in a game to see what the heck it does if it does anything at all yeah in theory it should be a game changer um but I guess the fact it's not present in all Hardware Modern Hardware does cause issues in terms of effort versus reward yeah I mean by the time their next title shifts which is going to be Outlaws I don't know how far along they'll be till then but I imagine they're going to be doing this on a it could also be maybe in gosh the division Heartland is that game still exist I think it's been do you guys remember that Tom Henderson reported that it's been retooled I think a couple days ago so okay well if that game exists it could be one of the first times we see that and by that point in time you only have explicit rdna2 support on PC from AMD you only have Intel Arc and let's hope no they're not going to do it but like stuff like GTX 1080 and 1080ti hopefully are just not at all found in a lot of systems anymore 1060 Etc so they could actually potentially ship it in a title at that point in time in the future console though obviously you just don't you have it for the series consoles you would probably maybe have it in PS5 Pro but you wouldn't have it in PS5 so it's hard to know what they would ship there yeah that's an interesting point is an updated GPU in the Pro and they do seem to have the 4 DNA uh feature set full dx12 feature set dx12 ultimate that is and uh I think we've seen from the documentation that hardware vrs for what it's worth is in there uh it would stand a reason that um sampler of feedback streaming is in there as well right I hope so if it's there in rdna to the real you know the full one yeah I think what these presentations highlight to me is that this is just like the magic of GDC I'm trying to think of another industry where professionals come together to basically share Trade Secrets yeah and um it's a net win for everybody in the the in the end when you have this sharing of material and it's not you know they're not sharing code or anything it's just general uh procedures and techniques and um it it can be a game changer I mean you know basically Avatar deriving a lot of its work from Metro Exodus kind of makes sense right but there's going to be a lot of people looking at those a presentations and games will get better as a result this is the magic of GDC for me absolutely fascinating stuff ton of like little tidbits in there where they say like this is like a this is like a dead end don't go that way or that we had trouble with this we did it this way but there was actually another way they presented like two alternative paths they could have gone and they say maybe this works for your game it's really cool yeah I watched um a few of these presentations or skim through them and yeah the rate tracing presentations I thought were the most interesting spe specifically on uh their console RT because like you see how heavily they depend on screen space tracing and how like expensive the denoising is and they even showed one point the pre- noising and post denoising RT results which I thought were fascinating like you see again just how low res that underlying RT is they're getting such a good result out of it when they combine uh the probes the screen space tracing the RT all together they're actually getting a really good result with optimizations like yeah like you said the variable resolution of the RT Reflections um and all the stuff they're doing in screen space and it just it's just really impressive to see the final result come together after all those tweaks and all those optimizations to actually achieve a good looking and performant result on a console it's just yeah it's just super super impressive good stuff okay uh with that let's move on okay next news story uh this week in the UK Nvidia held a press event where we got to see basically the gamut of demos that were showed at GDC a while back and um one demonstration caught my eye I mean obviously there's some great stuff like the covert protocol AI demo that John detailed in a previous DF weekly um but the demo that caught my eye was actually GeForce now the 4080 tier um it's actually been there for a while but it now has vrr support so just to give you an outline of why the gForce now for the 0 tier in particular is so awesome is because well you know basically you get a level of GPU horsepower which is Way Beyond the consoles it has dss3 it has R uh reconstruction has that advanced RT Hardware it has that raw performance and um the streaming is of excellent quality av1 codec if it's supported on your client and um 4K 120 with HDR I mean what more could you possibly want I'll tell you what you could possibly want vrr support because prior to that presentation basically looks like vsync on all the time and that came with micro stutter so they gave a demonstration um at the event where it was basically uh g-sync on versus gsync on off rather and it was just literally panning left and right in cyberpunk and you could see the micro stutter that You' associate with vsync on the g-sync off version g-sync on looked rather smooth so I thought I'd give it a go at home on my own setup uh which is uh LG CX 48 in um HDR vrr active connected up via PC there and I did some offscreen footage I'm not going to say it's as good as uh at home on the desktop in terms of fluidity but a lot of the vrr sorry the vsync Jada effect is gone it's much much smoother and if you look at the footage here I was actually quite impressed by how well it came out overall bearing in mind it is literally pointing a camera at a screen um but first of all the um the the little uh sort of diagnosis table on the top right there the status uh you bring that up with contrl n within the client there's a couple of versions of it a sort of verose version which you're seeing here and a non verose option which is just a top bit the interesting thing here is that usually the stream FPS and the game FPS are different the stream FPS will be 60 or 120 depending on you know what you've set the stream to but with vrr the stream uh FPS is basically a match for the game FPS which is kind of what you would expect from um from vrr um and it works it works pretty well as I said there is still some minor sort of hitching and splutters here and there it's not just like normal vrr it's not going to you know um solve things like actual in-game stutter checkpoint stutter that sort of thing but it looks really good I'm really impressed this is kind of like you know how much better can GeForce now get latency um it's playable with mouse and keyboard certainly you certainly notice it there but owing to the latency sponge that is the that is the joyad play it play it with the joyad and it really does feel like a local experience and now we've got vrr this is like the the icing on the cakes I don't know if you guys have got any reactions but it's it's basically almost the finished article now yeah this is kind of like the last up last time when we talked to them at Gamescom I was we did the local test that we've talked about before of can you tell real can you tell the local versus the yes non-local that we did um but during that we mentioned vrr to them and they said oh we're doing it they didn't say anything afterward they just said we're doing it and I was like like okay well what are you doing for it um uh I'm just so curious about how they're doing it cuz I want this I want this technology for for our videos um I would like to be able to present vrr in a vrr format um because right now pointing a camera at the screen which Oliver does a lot probably is annoying uh I would just like to be able to record it uh I would like to be able to record it we need recording devices for vrr and we also need yeah play back yep Oliver any any extra feedback yeah I think this is just a really great step to make cloud gaming better because if gsync is working properly like I don't know it could become really hard to distinguish this from local play like you said Rich it just you get to this level where image quality is solved performance uh stutters micro stutters that's basically solved you know on a joyad in particular this could be a really really really tough class experience um and when I tried gfor Force now a few months ago that was like the biggest giveaway to me was those little stutters that it was not a near PC experience and is just so hard far ahead of everyone else that it's sort of like comical where Nvidia is a company that does not seem to have an enormous emphasis on game streaming but they just kind of do it incidentally whereas like Sony is pitching it as a big part of their uh e efforts certainly Microsoft is and and their game streaming is just much much worse you know than than what it is absolutely yeah I mean one criticism you could raise I mean the thing about that footage is well you get an exhaustive array of data to look at there and um you can see that uh bandwidth is kind of like in the 40 to 50 megabits per second range which I'd say for you know 4K up to 120 frames per second even with av1 that's that's kind of it sounds ridiculous to say it but low bandwidth I mean it looks good but it is still noticeably a streamed image um yeah the other thing that sort of looks a bit strange to me is that the vrr um sorry not the vrr the HDR side of things um it did look a little bit washed out I mean you were definitely getting HDR but where I expected to see blacks I wasn't seeing blacks and it's kind of borne out by the status panel there which she's black um to all intents and purposes so yeah cyber Punk yeah uh-huh so so one thing I thought about with cyberp Punk is I know uh according to people who test vrr and uh sorry HDR why are we saying this HDR and cyberp punk so often too many ODS uh is that the uh I think the initial ACR implementation I'm not sure as of 2.0 right I haven't followed up since then uh but it did have a slightly raised black floor okay I might explain so it could be that but the one one thing I've always actually wondered is how is HDR metadata uh compressed for stream like is it just the same macro block size as the real color compression or is it like like cuz you know if you think about it like those is it like the ex a perfect match up to the like compression or is it actually like sub pixel I have no idea how it works I I don't have any idea how it works yeah but it seems like it's like another layer to making that like it's like certain values and it's like it's got to make like it's much more bandwidth intensive I'd imagine as a result um so that's another aspect to put apart there all I can really say is that um it was gForce now 48 was the best streaming system um the only one I we can really recommend to the point where even John linman said that he was impressed and and could use it and bearing in mind that he just doesn't abide streaming in any form apart from VR oddly enough um yeah that was a recommendation enough but the point is now it's even better and it's you know there's been no price adjustments or anything it's still as it is so yeah I mean it's just the best just got better and I really could see this being a way to uh to actually replace a home experience difference being there's still that curation on the games that you're quote unquote allowed to play um but yeah I mean do check it out I think they're doing day passes now so you can actually experience uh what the the at actually does without committing to a subscription or anything but yeah just just super super impressive that's all I've really got to say about that I mean there were a bunch of other demos there but it was mostly stuff we've seen before like R Rec construction uh they did a a big thing on dlss there was the AI demo there was also an AI tools showcase like chat RTX they were showing that as well oh yeah and some of the stuff like um uh the production tools like the topaz a tools some of them have got tensor um support now some of the models there so they're actually quite accelerated they had a Mac versus um laptop 4090 uh head-to-head and it was just like an order of magnetude faster that's cool that they even dared to do that stable diffusion demo that was yeah yes there was lot yeah mhm but that's all I've really got to say about that but really really impressive stuff um so if you feel the need it's there do check it out and uh with that let's move on to our final news topic so I'm going to hand this one over to Oliver straight off the bat because we were going to be talking about this a week or a couple of weeks ago but we didn't get round to it because we thought there were specific limitations in play that would have stopped it being viable but it turns out it was no problem at all Oliver take it away yes so last week Apple announced that emulators would be allowed to ship in their app stores but it really wasn't clear what would be allowed and initially yeah I thought that the rules and many others thought the rules stipulated very strong restrictions on content downloaded outside of the apps so it seemed like it may be a good tool for official emulators uh they specifically mentioned things like content offered outside the app had to be offered using inapp purchases and things like this so it really didn't seem like you could just load like RS into them but apple is enforcing those roles differently from how they appear to be written in my opinion and third party emulators are allowed so first a few days ago an app called igba launched which was pulled from the store a few hours after it launched but not not before I grabbed it because uh another app developer claimed that it was using a misappropriated code from their front end um unfortunately and then uh an emulator launched from the same developer who who had that misappropriated code uh called Delta which has support for SES N64 Game Boy Game Boy Color Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS so that's that's pretty awesome and that's actually an emulator that's been available for a long time with uh side loing so if you have a developer account you can get it from like one of the so-called alt stores that offer games for people who can side load games into their iOS devices um but it's not been available for the general public until now but it is a very exciting development so I tried out a bunch of games um I decided to try a bunch of Mario Kart games because that's what I tend to gravitate towards with emulators so I started out with Mario Kart super Circuit for GBA one of my favorite GBA games it ran very well no visual issues 60 FPS gameplay looked good ran well perfect um it worked best with a slider style gam pad so what I have here like a slider style gam pad feels really comfortable but it also actually worked okay with the touch controls uh which actually had haptic feedback as well so when you tap the screen you get a bit of a vibration it actually feels oh cool a little bit better than you'd expect not great but okay um and the core there is called visual Boy Advance which is like a very old well-known GBA okay so that that was good at least but then I moved on to Mario Kart DS which uses melon DS as the core and it had some issues so that there are no options to increase the resolution of the rendering at all which is odd usually that's that's very common for Nintendo DS or options to display only the top or bottom scen SC or to reconfigure their size at all so you just get like top and bottom on the left and right uh which didn't look great but other than those caveats it worked pretty well the frame rate wasn't perfectly smooth though I think it had some maybe minor frame pacing issues or another performance problem not perfect and obviously with a with a system as weak as the DS you'd really hope to just have a really clean output there and that's not I was getting and then kind of worst of all I tried my cut 64 uh which did weirdly it ran it an increase resolution but there were no options to change resolution so you're kind of stuck with like a 2X scale it looked like maybe um okay and it had some very obvious performance problems which you might be able to see in the footage here it had a lot of very incorrectly paced frames when I Pann the camera back and forth it just did not look smooth at all and it had issues displaying the track display in Mario Kart 64 as well which I have some footage of here which I think in the N64 was based off copying information from the frame buffer frequent pain point for emulators and then so in addition to all those problems the buttons aren't remappable and on one of the controllers I tried cuz I'm a Nut Job who has like like 10 of these uh um the start button was mapped to the RT trigger which felt weird that's weird so overall basically my summary of this is that I think Delta is not a great emulation front end is my opinion the GBA is good the other cores I tried were not so good I presume some stuff like the snas snas those are probably good as well um but I think this is a great first step and I think we're going to see better emulators more find emulators on iPhone soon this is just the beginning and like for someone who has not really used Android devices all that much for the past 14 years that I've been using an iPhone this is a really really cool development I think this is really cool mhm okay uh my question Oliver is um a logistical one how do you actually cuz presumably these things aren't arriving with ROMs because that would be a massive copyright no no so what is the logistics of actually getting a ROM working on an iOS device how do you get the code onto it yeah it's it's pretty simple so you uh get the ROMs through whatever Source you get acquire your your your ROMs so dump it onto your system and yeah that's that's good you need to get the ROMs obviously once you have the ROMs you can very simply uh either get those directly download them on the device or load them on the the device or like airdrop them from a Mac that kind of thing just get them onto the device in the downloads which will be automatically the files that we placed in the downloads folder and then you just uh open the application up um just click load ROMs in the top right hand corner and then you it'll go to the download section you can just click on the on the file you don't need to unzip it or anything like that it will automatically unzip it if it's a zipped file or compressed file the device will handle that for you it's actually very very seamless very very seamless very easy to load games onto the device for sure okay because there was the fear that you know Apple wouldn't allow copyrighted material to be imported right but that doesn't seem to have been an issue no there's no issue at all like this is this is the real deal um and like for for me it's such a huge advancement because like I've had iPhones exclusively since 2010 and during that time the only thing I wanted really was emulators the only thing that that I felt like was lacking on the platform was the absence of emulators I even bought a couple of Android phones just for their emulation capabilities not to use as a phone but just to run emulators on emulate and now I can play those games on my platform of choice just like everyone else it seems and iOS is like really good for gaming in so many other respects and this is just another feather in the cap so I think that we're going to see a lot of emulators I've seen people talking about maybe you know PSP P PPSSPP maybe dolphin coming down the line dolphin would be sick dolphin would be fantastic um maybe maybe who knows maybe even Yuzu or sunu or whatever I I think Apple might get some ey for that one so maybe not but you know I'm I'm uh I'm really interested really excited to see uh this advance and yeah it is super super easy to use basically as brain dead simple as you could get it's just a very simple and uh I think well optimized emulation experience now the quality of the cores and how those are implemented maybe in this emulator not so good but in the future I can totally see that being overcome I don't think that's a fundamental issue I think it's just like this this uh relatively probably underdeveloped emulation front end cool so qualified hurrah then yeah and I'm sure yes hurrah I think in the future for sure if if more emulators come out or if and when they come out I think we could probably take a look at this in some more detail because I think there's probably a lot of uh very interesting uh especially with the the more advanced emulators to see how those actually run on on an iPhone that would be very interesting to see absolutely okay cool oh yeah well that was the last news story of the week uh and therefore we shall be moving on to supporter Q&A every week on our patreon there's a call to questions where I ask our supporters to ask Eddie and anything and anything about uh video games and game technology related to news stories or not um we choose the best of other the ones we're best equipped to answers answer but we also have a supporter only show DF indirect where we stack up uh other questions and we'll tackle those in due course I think we've got to do one of those in the next couple of weeks anyway this first question from supporter macki D hi there DF gang longterm longtime viewers SL listener first time question answer I'm very interested to see what Microsoft is planning Innovation is good and I'm very in favor of more open platforms but I also can't help but wonder whether partially Bridging the Gap between PC and console is achievable and desirable if you lose the affordability including subsidized hardware and predictability of console Hardware uh but lose the sheer versatility of PC Hardware are you in are you left in a No Man's Land more expensive Hardware than traditional console but without all the benefits of PC at least the steam deck has portability as a selling point and presumably the the much rumored Xbox handheld will too at certain at a certain point in price would you not just be better getting a PC so my question is what do you think a more pc- like console approach looks like and do you think it's likely to require a significant price hike to get there Alex wow okay so I think I'm going to off quote Jean and I'm going to say that I I think the the more PC like console approach is very similar to the steam deck approach uh in terms of just user front end at least that aspect of it has to be the solved thing it's something that Oliver talked about like last week about his like you know like you connect your stuff to your your your television your PC and you have like a variety of things to deal with that but like the Steam OS specifically is very good at that and I think Microsoft has the ability to to manage that in a Windows environment or whatever this OS would be in a theoretical console I think that is like the bridge and the approach there um the question about price and performance and like losing the abilities of One Versus the other I don't think they're going to I think that like I don't know this is this is actually a super hard question because I think there's like a limit to like the amount ount of people who can play console games just like there's like a limited amount of people who can play PC games like they have people have different expectations of user interface and ease of use so they're not going to get everyone with this but I think they're trying to achieve to get more than they could have gotten with a traditional model right for them and so in that case I think they can go a little bit more wild as a result and they can ex they can have like caveats as a part of this experience um I I don't really know what the end product will look like price performance though my goodness um it'll probably be I think we talked about this before maybe a little bit more expensive but maybe tiered models I don't know what do you think oliv what do you think yeah I think you need to compromise between those factors and I think yeah John's right on the money when you look at a device like the steam deck that is a really compelling compromise point and it does work very very well very appealing to a lot of people but I also think that out of the box it should offer an experience hopefully that is pretty similar to an Xbox right now where you can just set it up link your Microsoft account and be pretty much playing games within like you know 20 30 minutes easily um after you download all the updates it should have a bit of a plug-and-play experience to it I think that's very important now for the power user maybe there's more customizability maybe the games are you you can change the settings things like this uh you can change frame rate targets FPS caps whatever but um for the user who's just getting that device out of the box there should be a good default Graphics configuration and it should be fairly seamless that would be my hope and but I do think there could be some odd overlap between the PCS and consoles like the user like this this this questioner says um especially as Windows perhaps becomes more optimized for gaming and as Xbox becomes more of an open platform potentially but I also think that if Microsoft is in the position where they have a very popular set of uh games that are running across two major gaming platforms potentially three major gaming platforms with PlayStation and the mix um I don't really know how much they care about the relative composition of those platforms as long as they're getting money so that'd be my my thought with that interesting I can kind of see where the question is coming from here Mackie d um yeah where do we how do we begin to peel this one um yes I mean basically I think the concept as Alex has pointed out of of a console PC hybrid has been proven out with steam deck what's missing there which I think valve really wants to see but doesn't often happen is the concept that developers actually have optimized settings that are the defaults and um you know basically that is the tailored EXP experience that you would have on a standard console right uh which would be effectively optimize settings for that specific class of Hardware um but I do think that if you're going to go all in like you know I suspect Microsoft are doing maybe just have that advanced Graphics menu where you know hardcore users can just tap into the PC options they will be there anyway right and maybe it's down to the developer to sry to the to the end user to have some say in you know the way the game is going to play and you know they can always move back to the uh the developer approved setup if they want to um in terms of the cost of the hardware now this is really interesting right because Phil Phil Spencer's argument is basically well look we've thrown money at the problem we've subsidized Hardware we've made continually better boxes gen on gen but the issue is that it's not expanding the audience so you know what else can be done and maybe one potential solution there is to basically have a tiered system of you know certain components and um you know maybe a range of optimized settings that works to that particular spec and we have that in you know right now with Series S and X effectively where you know it is fundamentally the same code but with what are effectively different graphic settings maybe that is the route forward um one thing that I am kind of C curious about um I mean it might be the case that Microsoft produces an S so a console s so that goes out you know to people that want to produce their own Xboxes um but equally I mean we're really looking forward into the future here but we might well be ending up with a scenario where we go back to Dedicated CPU and gpus because you know the smaller chips may end up more sort of financially viable to make than larger monolithic chips and you know you're kind of seeing that with what AMD is doing in terms of their chiplet designs which are now in gpus it may well be the case that the console goes back to to a you know a chiplet design interesting stuff um I'm sure that Microsoft have modeled all of this out I do think there were probably be so designs for Gen 10 I'd love to see what that bigger machine is going to look like if going to be targeting the biggest technological leap ever in a console Generation Um presumably they know something that we don't um yeah the subsidized Hardware thing that's curious I just think that you know if you can tap into the PC space we're at the situ we're at the the scenario now where there are certain parts out there that are outperforming consoles like gpus for example definitely CPUs which are you know very cost efficient you know if you're looking at like a um you $100 core I3 you know it might only have four cores and eight threads but it is a more performant part than the eight cores within an Xbox series X um yeah so I think there is going to be sort of like you know the further you go into what may be a given generation the more or rather the least the less expensive PC parts become that offer equivalent performance so we've started to see now you know $500 PC builds being made that are you know on par with PS5 or potentially even better and so you know why not tap into the economics there of the PC space and build consoles from it you know it could be done there is a lot to be done though in terms of the quality of life experience but again I'd argue that steam deck has laid the foundation there you know drivers um system software updates that's all handled in a very cons like way and I don't see why it couldn't be done on PC um but yeah I mean I don't know if you guys have anything more to add to that significant price hike um I think that's coming anyway because of the nature of the you know the progress with Mo's law cost per transistor isn't what it was you're not getting those dramatic uh drops anymore I think it's a given it's going to be really interesting to see how Sony chooses to price PS5 Pro going forward that's all I've really got to say about that one um let's move on to the next question this one from selwin NS hi guys exclamation point with nvidia's next line of GPU approaching I can only wonder how will a theoretical 5090 TI egregious super improved today's gaming experience when CPUs are more often the bottleneck what do you think a 5090 5090 should offer to make it worthwhile interesting question right Alex yeah I mean I saw this being talked about like a week ago when more Blackwell information came out um the idea that we've seen it in a lot of titles just ones that we've covered on the channel like if you play anything like Dragon Dogma 2 uh bers gate even a lot of other titles when going for 1440p on a 490 you'll be CPU limited probably a lot uh especially yeah and especially with Ray Trac you're going to probably be CPU limited The Witcher remastered Edition for example that remake or whatever it's called um that thing isn't also CPU limited and in this case like with 4090 and to you know a degree FSR 3 of course there you've got frame gen helping you get around that I think another thing in the future is going to be I think thex is going to be getting some upgrades in the future I don't have any sources there there I'm just thinking that it's been a while since we've seen a DX update that was meaningful and um Blackwell could potentially RTX 590 TI egregious super could potentially be uh one of the first gbus to explicitly support things that current DX doesn't support one of the things that we saw recently was um workcraft supported on emper and above that's another way and rdna 2 and above or is it rdna 3 oh gosh I can't remember if workcraft is rdna 2 support right that in the comments um but the the idea there is this not is being able to launch things from the GPU from the GPU without having to Ping back to the CPU to do that and that's has a whole layer of complexity to it and requires really great programming and investment and all these other things as well as like competent drivers to allow it but that's another thing that in the future in future games and in future hardw we'll get better support more explicit support that's just an example of things that they can do in DX um to just even get better usage of the CPU resources that we have instead of spending time uh doing commands so I I think there's a lot of that and also since uh they've already done it frame gen has now one frame in the middle of two real frames why not 2 to four why not let's go let's go let's go all out yeah let's do that uh Oliver what do you think about this one I think Nvidia is probably in a position like the 3000 Series where they don't really need a ton of new like headline features obviously there could be lots of optimizations and you know in like a a micro sense the 3000 Series did have new features and did have you know better RT acceleration traversal and all that but they are the market leader and I'm not really sure that that the Blackwell needs to have an enormous increase in like headline features but I'm sure that they will have like lots of demos that look awesome lots of interesting new machine learning stuff like they did with the covert protocol demo I think they they will have things that will entice people towards these new products but it's hard to think at the moment of something that would really stand out I think doing more interpolated frames with frame g could be one of those things but I don't know if that's like a big uh eye-catcher I mean maybe you know just promoting like hey we can do this game at like 480 frames per second or something that the competition can only do it 100 or whatever maybe that's like really enticing but uh I think it be to a certain people yeah oh well I think we've got 4K 240 HZ screens you know coming online now you know those new range of oleds that're they're pretty spectacular so being able to actually utilize the refresh rate of those uh would be compelling um interesting though I think ultimately whether the 5090 is CPU bound or not is kind of irrelevant it just needs to be the fastest GPU around it just needs to cement Halo status if it comes along with a bunch of um new software features like you know an enhanced frame gen or other things you know I think the the thing that you can't underestimate with Nvidia is the commitment not just to Hardware but to software and to features and you know it's all about producing that overall package that leaves the competition behind which is you know I think they've been quite successful on that it makes the competition always in a place where they needs to catch up um which has been core to the brand for the last you know couple of generations now um so yeah the 50/90 I think just needs to be the fastest GPU new features would be great and then basically as you go down the stack I think ultimately it's it's just got to be cheaper and to retain those new extra features it's you know I don't think we're ever going to have uh another scenario like ampere where you had you know tremendous price Cuts Plus big uh increases in performance I think the GPU Market is now moving into what you might call the mobile phone phase where prices are stable and you get like more incremental increases in performance but it's basically then shifts to what you're doing on the software side and um yeah that basically as I said it puts the compostition in a position where they needs to catch up but I would argue right that um you know we've often talked in the past about uh Nvidia being a software company as much as a hardware company thing is Intel are not short of money at this point AMD successes with ryen which a legion they can't be in a in a situation where they are also cash strapped right you know it's just a question of whether they think the return on investment is going to be there whether they think they can take am um whether they think they can take Nvidia on they've got the money the question is are they going to spend it um but yeah I mean Blackwell is a big sort of um sort of question mark over it because you know with um the 4,000 series with the Ada cards they basically had the advantage of both an architectural leap and what was effectively two process load jumps because they went from Samsung 8 nanometer down to you know their own custom 4 nanometer sl5 nanometer thing so I'm curious as to what kind of raw performance increase we're going to get because there's been some crazily outlandish um suggestions on how good it's going to be versus 4,000 so I'm very curious to see what the hardware will actually deliver but I'm also exceptionally fascinated to see what they're going to be doing on software because you know they're not taking the foot off does it the accelerator anytime soon you know they've they've they've hit the golden formula it seems so yeah have to see what happens next um let's move on to the next question this one from uh yonas tag isagi tagad in Brackets tagen 86 I have a question been thinking about from the day I was born that's quite an interesting uh conceit what do you mean by an x86 license why can't Nvidia obtain an x86 license or create x86 CPUs Alex do you have any insight on that uh well someone originally came up with the instruction set and they own the the rights to it yeah um I in and it Intel and in this case you know they've licensed it out uh other people have expanded on it x64 is amds absolutely yeah it's like a cross licensing Arrangement that basically has produced this standardized platform yes which is good obviously um and it also prevents certain things like imagine if you had to Shad or compile for your CPU imagine imagine the hell we'd have to go through for that um that would be interesting uh so it prevents a lot of things the hardware standardization is great but I mean they want to control their own market and they they do so Intel and AMD have not been giving that x86 license to Nvidia um and they've gone instead to arm in the past yeah and they've done worked on arm CPU course um I think that's their thing in the future uh is what they want to do and I think you know the whole mobile development platform and like C you know x86 is great I I actually like x86 I like just this great historical continuity uh but it leaves room for there's not as much Innovation space as a result of it and then as a result things that have more they can you know they can conquer different things like P like power and performance in different ways or they can take the the Apple route with that interesting like embedded memory so I think the the other things that aren't x86 also have their a great place in the world of computing mhm Oliver any additions yeah basically it just boils down to like very few companies have an x86 license um AMD in have a cross- licensing agreement that basically allows them to continue to develop CPUs using uh the other competitors technology and to continue to maintain it so that they can both produce CPUs but they have no obligation to license to third parties um in patent law there's a concept called FR or free rather Fair reasonable and non-discriminatory Licensing um this does not fall under FR but perhaps it should be but at the same time we are seeing a lot of competition from arm and uh so is it that impactful at this point maybe not but in the past I think it has been pretty impactful but yeah it just one of those situations where they have no obligation license and they don't yeah there are other companies that have x86 licenses like I think via is the is the classic one but they can't actually um produce anything other than 32bit x86 uh CPUs so they're not tied into the cross licensing Arrangement that Intel and AMD have got so you uh you couldn't really use a via CPU and secondly you know you might imagine that maybe Nvidia could buy via and get get access that way but they can't because the licenses are not transferable and there are specific Clauses that cover acquisition from another company so yeah the lawyers had presumably had a field day with that back in the day but it does result in what we have today which is basically a duopoly on x86 and um nothing is going to change soon in terms of competition um that argument you know you could possibly have you know appealed against this duopoly but um what with everything that's happening with with arm now um and the fact that Windows is supporting arm again you know it's it's coming into the four there as a form of competition so that's kind of closes that off MH yeah okay uh let's move on to the next question and we've kind of got a couple of questions here related to PS5 Pro uh I'm going to start with this one from Andre sures we're we're all the Last of Us remastered get a PS5 Pro remaster asking for a friend uh Oliver obious a joke based on the fact that the last of us has had so many versions at this point but I do suspect it probably won't get a remaster but it will probably get a PS5 Pro patch well there there is a distinction here The Last of Us remastered was a PS4 game I believe right yes that's the original yeah the naming original remaster I believe was The Last of Us remastered and that ran 1800 p60 so it did you know might be a candidate for PS5 Pro re Master but I suspect that's probably not the not going to be the case but for the last do part one and the last do part two remastered to use the corck terminology I think they might uh 1440p for you know 60fps mode on PS5 is fine but PS5 Pro can probably do better maybe 4K with pssr upscaling could be achieved probably something along those lines would be really good um I'm sure they could be upgraded certainly they're real relatively recent um first party Sony games you would expect it that those are prime titles to be upgraded I guess we'll have to see they they're you know they're not like at top of mind when it comes to potential PS5 Pro uh updates because they are already in pretty good form but they certainly could be in better form yeah and The Last of Us Part One obviously has fixed resolutions as well so the the ultra boost uh hyper fighting mode isn't going to be doing much on those ones apart from a more stable 40 FPS experience perhaps well they do have vrr as well so right yeah so that would be boosted as well yeah absolutely but that kind of leads us onto this uh question from uh tiil heighton hello digital PS exclamation point looking forward to this year's midgen coverage especially on the patches will accompany the new PS5 Pro so the entire team what are your most anticipated patches to existing games I look forward to seeing updates to cyberpunk and control which were unable to run RT and 60 FPS at the same time and a resolution boost to returnal Via pssr Oliver you considered this one my number one I think is Avatar um I think it could look outstanding with pssr like maybe achieving similar or better visual quality in its performance mode as the base PS5 in its quality mode that would be really exciting um because that game just looks extraordinary and I think you get a more PC like experience if you combine that title with pssr on a PS5 Pro I'd also just think about games that have unusually poor image quality on consoles so like Jedi Survivor and its performance mode maybe um or I don't know uh skull and bones looks pretty bad say not for that one yes I'll be covering Skull and Bones day one day Zero and then the the other kind of flip side of that is that games that use more RT on PC that don't use RT on consoles so you know it's had like Allen wi 2 for instance either in its raate tracing or or potentially even path tracing mode but obviously if those games are not scaling well on AMD architectures on the PC like Alex mentioned a couple weeks ago I think um I don't know why those would necessarily be scaling all that much better on the PS5 Pro it all depends I'm sure it could run on the console in some form but would it actually be a good experience kind of up in the air at the moment but that would be like the other area that I'm interested in is games that really could leverage more RT on the console yeah absolutely um this isn't really your bag is it I mean you don't really care PS5 coming along do you Alex I want to see the pssr stuff the most because I'm very interested in the technology to see how the resolve is how it scales from like 1080p to 4K um I'm actually curious to see how many games keep DRS while doing it and don't I'm also um yeah the RT stuff I'm also interested to because we do have examples at least from the PC side of Sony titles having more RT on PC like you take Ratchet and Clank and also Spider-Man games uh will would they backport that is like is like there's a lot of question of like effort versus reward here for example I asked behind the scenes of uh the chance of a certain game getting a PS 5 Pro update uh with a developer who had like an early gen PS5 game and they said the for them in the product life cycle of the game right now uh upgrading to the most recent SDK to take advantage of the things they would want to take advantage was too much for them right uh just like with all the stuff they have on their plate already uh that they didn't want to like uh engage in that opportunity cost so they wouldn't do it but that doesn't mean that it applies to every title um but you know so I don't expect every game to get it but I think the ones I'd really want to see are the ones mainly for pssr and titles where I have a great ability to compare to PC like I'm very curious to see what it looks like versus like what if 4K pssr uh it 1080p 4K like dlss or xess looks better than like 4K um FSR 2 quality mode you know like we get to show then just like how important ml is for these things yeah I would like to do that on PC well I would expect to see a lot of patches coming particularly for the first party Sony titles because they don't have um you know AAA juggernauts for the PS uh 5 Pro launch period And there are some good calls here I mean a resolution boost to returnal don't even need the resolution boost it's running at 1080p pssr could potentially produce a really good 4K image there right yeah with with uh performance left over to stabilize Fame rate um which would be great um I'd be really interested to see if they did update control because uh I mean we didn't get any updates to the PC version to the point where it took one of the one of the internal redy guys to produce their own mod for the game to add native HDR where it should have been a you know a proper upgrade from would been nice different budgets I think um I'd love to I mean but the thing is you don't need to update the SDK to add pssr and that could be transformative in some scenarios one that I'm thinking of Metro Exodus because the upscaling is really severe there in some scenarios sub 1080p to 4K so you know pssr injection there could be really really good and again you would have uh presumably the kind of boost mode advantages as well extra GPU power um so you know yeah Plum that in with Dynamic resolution Plus pssr that would be amazing um I can't really think of other specific titles I would expect cyber Punk maybe to get an upgrade because you know that would be cool that would be cool I don't know what you would actually get though apart from improved upscaling and the upscaling isn't really that bad because they aren't aggressively pushing FSR to uh on the I think Reflections could be great yeah absolutely that would help the visual presentation not quite a lot and i' see it as totally doable in that case I'd expect um insomniac to be all over that um in terms of adding extra features possibly some of the work nxis did with you know RT Shadows could be back ported into the PlayStation versions uh that would be really cool um yeah but I guess sky's the limit there uh let's move on to the next question this one from Stefan St how far away are we from Sony releasing their exclusives on the same day as on the PlayStation Now with trophies officially supported for the first time on PC Sony seems to embrace the PC more and more and I think they have to with the crazy production budget for their exclusives yes this is an interesting point Oliver because um what we actually see in terms of what we know about the sales of the um of the PC versions of Sony games is that it seemed to sort of peak with Horizon zero Dawn um when that came out because it was possibly because it was a bit of a novelty to see a PlayStation game on PC but there doesn't seem to have been in that kind of similar uh Megaton sales since then and I do feel that maybe um releasing like two or three years after the fact harms the sales and at the same time Sony would have been looking at Hell divers too and thinking well actually maybe we should be going more towards day and date yeah I think uh well I mean it depends on the title like some titles have sold pretty well after their debuts on on consoles like um like you said Horizon Zer on sold very well I think day's gone as well as the 2018 God of War those all sold pretty well yeah but I think it's been like a sort of downward TR yeah you're right you're right yeah it's agree I think it could be very valuable uh to do day and date just because like like I said earlier the uh Prospect of addressing a much larger market with your exclusive titles does help a lot and I actually think that there isn't a whole lot of Cross Shopping between PC consoles are at least not as much as you'd think because the PC Gamer and the console gamer both in terms of their display targets and in terms of what they're willing to put up with I think they're very different you know yeah different kinds of consumers and when you look at some of the reporting especially uh last year on like the Insomniac leak some of the numbers that were suggested there in terms of the break even point for some of those titles um it was like eyew wateringly high and the fact that like you could have an enormously success game by critical standards like maybe Ratchet and Clank Rift apart that is still struggling to clear some baseline of profitability years after its release that's a real you know it really does get the get the brain jogging there and it's it's a tough thing to to contemplate and consider a future where that might actually be pretty common right Alex what do you think about this yeah I think it would help for sure it would also help cement this transition to getting more a a larger audience instead of just staying because like right now I do think they are like in a slight rut like what Oliver just described about like profitability for the style of games they're making and targeting with these longer development times and budgets and this would help the only thing is I think they need to like make sure if they do that that they like for example when a game comes out and it's a PS5 late poror uh it's like two years later and it's got like certain things like issues with it and I'm thinking like I don't think they'd ship the console version like that like what I would want to see if is if they do day and date that they don't like just maintain like the same like like feature set and quality that they currently have um I mean I like the Nixie ports don't get me wrong but I think the like the day and day like polish of like day zero could always be higher and so I would love if that they pushed if they did push that to day and date or like maybe like two months after release 3 months after release or something like that that it would really be like yeah this is like a finished article when it comes out and it's um really really good because like some of the stuff in the past like ratch and Clank I was pretty disappointed with certain aspects of the of of its like release quality we don't need to talk about Horizon zero Dawn but like The Last of Us Part One was abysmal um so like you can't you can't do that if you're going to move it closer I mean it doesn't excuse it that they're two years apart and that they're poor quality but like you just literally can't do it then because then it will throw off all of the discussion about the game and you don't want that you want to have like discussion about that Prestige quality right so right I think it would need a complete change in logistics from Sony's current approach because you know developers like in I can't really tolded up to produce PC ports day and date yeah with the PlayStation versions so you know maybe nx's role would evolve at that point and they'd actually be involved with game development as it happens rather than after the fact uh which would be interesting but then again you know your hell Di's was day and date I guess it's just a you know it's just a a factor of development uh but it's just something that the current Studios aren't really sort of uh set up to do um I do think you know even if um I think the window has certainly got to contract quite significantly 2 years isn't great at all um because you just lose a lot of the hype you lose a lot of the potential sales I think you know by all means um contract that window down to say three months I think that would be perfectly viable it's kind of I remember that's the way a lot of PC ports used to be that'd come out you know a certain point after the console versions but not too far apart so I think that would be definitely a sort of way to increase sales and therefore increase profits and I agree with you Oliver I don't think the concept of um uh having a console version and a PC version launch within a very close proximity will affect uh PlayStation 5 possibly PlayStation 6 where people are looking to buy new hardware that would might be a particular issue at that point but certainly right now I think they should be looking at producing versions that are much closer to the to the launch window the console game it just kind of makes Financial sense um that's all I've really got to say about that um okay let's move on to the last question actually the last but one this one from uh Kellen sandaire sanderfer sorry can FSR 3.1 save this console generation if improvements to image quality are as advertised would 30 FPS be acceptable at that point I'm not sure I can understand the conceit of those two questions in that single one uh what do you think Alex well I mean I'm G to be a real jerk really briefly that that like every this is the AMD hype cycle stuff I just really want everyone to be a little bit careful like avar 3.1 they've already shown it it's going to improve something but like the idea that it's a savior just like rdna 3 is a savior or you know any of these like this hype cycle stuff that is like is this the Savior product from AMD is just don't ever get into that hype cycle not because AMD is going to disappoint you because it's more like the the lofting of the goals and the hype is just Way Beyond reasonable stuff so I don't think Evar 3.1 is going to save the console generation does it need saving no 60fps modes are the only thing that look really rough usually so I think um for 30 FPS gaming you're in a pretty great image quality place this time around for a lot of games uh not all but a lot of them so I think um FSR there's a lot of other aspects of FSR 3.1 that they didn't touch on that are still important like disclusion f fizzle sorry um just the way alpha and transparencies are handled in FSR looking radically worse than what you see in xcss or dlss there's like a lot of things and so if one aspect is changed it we don't know what it means for the rest and we also don't know other couple other implications like performance um when you're changing the model if you're not increasing the size of a model of an ml program it'll still run the same but it'll just like inference differently and get a different result the weights are different maybe but like with FSR each time they add a new mask for example this is a memory footprint and like maybe a a GPU footprint too so differences in quality if they are just additive and not uh exchanging what what they did in the past it could actually lead to like performance differences U like big there's like a lot of unknowns which is why I don't want to say almost anything and a lot of the discussion around my most recent video which had I think it's like maybe 18% of the video is about FSR 2 vers versus the other the other techniques um was all about like why I didn't wait for FSR 3.1 or why like is this even a fair comparison like this is not what I'm talking about like you just got to just keep calm down I don't think it has anything sorry to answer the question very specifically though um I don't think it'll save the generation I don't think the generation needs saving I think 60 FPS titles look rough um but FSR 3.1 is such an unknown that I don't want to give any promises about it I would like to see it in person just like when people were talking about dlss 3 before it came out uh like there was a lot of both good reporting and not good reporting about like what it could be and uh I would rather let experience it myself and then like break it down before I say anything fair enough all of our thoughts well will FSR 3.1 save the console generation uh maybe probably not but will 30fps save the console generation that's the question thinking of that's a good one yeah because I I think like when we do look at 30 FPS titles in the consoles almost universally I'm not going to say universally but almost universally they're like shipping in good shape you know they're only upscaling from like you know 1296 or 1440p mostly at worst they still look really good in a 4K display for the most part not too much aliasing again there are some exceptions but like mostly they look pretty good actually um and image quality with those 30fps modes that are not pushing resolution down too far plus FSR 3.1 you know that sounds like a recipe for decent image quality in my opinion it's mostly the performance modes that are a problem but I also kind of flip the question a little bit where I would say well maybe TSR is the savior because that could actually end up being more significant because the widespread use of of uh ui5 now I don't know that we've seen a ton of TSR in the consoles it's it's been kind of weirdly underutilized actually um but TSR in our testing in my testing seems to have a big quality advantage over FSR I know when John took a look at I think uh was it Street Fighter or Tekken earlier this year he saw that it had a big Tekken yeah big image quality Advantage with TSR on uh steam deck and on on PC so I would suggest that probably that's more helpful is is TSR potentially with those e ttles um because we just don't know how FSR 3.1 matches up yet yeah yeah fair enough I haven't really got anything else to add FSR 3 is you know potentially going to be an improvement over FSR 2 the question is the extent of the Improvement we just don't know because we haven't seen it we've seen like one animated shotar shot literally not exactly from the same angle either too which is a little bit bothersome for someone like me but way but you you get the idea of what it was trying to suggest is that a lot of the issues are resolved in terms of uh common breakup that you see with FSR 2 yeah I mean I don't think you know you could a console generation doesn't really need saving it's it's doing great there are obviously image quality issues particularly on 60fps modes which people have pointed out already um if it really does bother you that much I think PS5 Pro is going to s sort that out for you um but ultimately there are other Solutions coming and FSR will continue to evolve I just think you know I think there has been a tendency to rely on it too much um there's also going to be other things happening um that are just not related to upscaling I mean there's a lot going on with Unreal Engine that's going to really uh you know shake things up um we were hoping to do a video this week that didn't quite work out did it Alex no as to say the least I was working on the idea of an Unreal Engine 5.4 video looking at the purported performance improvements but let me tell you compiling the engine easy compiling the demo The Matrix City sample for unreal engine 5.4 impossible I went through so so many iterations to try and figure out what the issue is like first there was a visual studio issue which apparently is is like an issue that happen happens with a lot of people who use u5 with Visual Studio it like puts the um quotation marks in the wrong area on a on a make command and it totally F sorry yeah either way that's not coming out that's not coming out I'm gonna be working on something else yeah I mean ultimately you know the thing is we we're kind of at a weird stage in this console generation where actual development targeted at these machines was put off for years because of cross again so yeah I mean we do have this situation now where we are seeing Advanced Technologies roll out but with a certain degree of lag and um yeah obviously FSR 2 uh is is one of those technologies that stands to see great Improvement as we'll see with the likes of Unreal Engine 5 uh the second part of the question would 30 FPS be acceptable I think it is acceptable and actually it looks pretty fine right now so you know the bottom line is that um I keep saying this a console is a fixed box it's not going to you know suddenly get twice as performant uh developers have to Target their games for a specific performance level be it 30 or 60 um and 30 FPS is going to be acceptable for certain experiences uh let's move on to the final question this one from leftist tomed this is a really important question if DF released a variant of the motherboard t-shirt that was explicitly a console mother board would Alex wear it if it was a mega drive like board heck yeah every day not a not an Xbox series X motherboard no that's boring boring okay you know like some of the ones like yeah like where you could see like the the cartridge eject on it and stuff that'd be cool oh dear what about a Master System board would you wear that shirt right Rich no I'd burned it I was going to say yeah only a fiery death can UD the world of anything related to The Master System by experience man Master System Oliver any particular DF merch that you would never wear never wear uh maybe something that depicted like uh oh jeez I'm struggling to think something that depicted uh poor frame pacing I probably wouldn't wear yeah although it' be hilarious it be funny well I was just sort of flashing back to our um team meeting earlier in the week where uh will was wearing an outside extra t-shirt actually seemed to be exhibiting chromatic aberation yeah that was my eyes yeah so so like any sort of visual phenomena that is like a little bit distracting probably wouldn't want an Ure chromatic aberration you know something like that you would you would wear motion blur shirt presumably I would wear a motion blur shirt actually that'd be great the depth of field yeah it's just like the DF logo completely Boke ited out you just don't even know okay enough of this nonsense uh that was the final question therefore the end of the show so please do like subscribe share on the off chance that you did enjoy it ring the bell for notionally instant notifications no guarantees etc etc uh uh yes um the DF supporter program join us become part of our community contribute to this very show and get it early each and every week and store. digital foundrynet in order to uh pay money to advertise us to the world which is uh just a win-win from our perspective at least but that's all from us for this week thanks for watching and supporting digital foundary

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 167,128

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Id: Bsxf85FbftA

Length: 126min 18sec (7578 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2024