r/digitalfoundry

>The show kicks off with the news that Sony is no longer bringing its single-player narrative-driven games to PC before moving on to supporter questions! How competitive would PS5 with Linux be to Valve's Steam Machine? Will FSR 4.1 come to Xbox consoles and could a PSSR Lite come to base PlayStation 5? Would there be any point bringing Quick Resume to PS6 and... is it Xbox or XBOX and should we change our pronounciation of the name?!

>Video sponsored by Io Interactive. As we draw closer to release date of the highly anticipated 007 First Light, developer Io Interactive brought together key members of the game's tech team to answer a wide range of questions from Alex Battaglia. Topics covered include 007 First Light's 60fps target, the new lighting systems added to the game, new effects and AI - and much, much more. Io Interactive's Glacier Engine has always impressed us and here's where you find out just how much work has gone into improving it for the new Bond game.

>PS5 Linux continues to yield dividends as Rich tests path tracing on PS5 with Quake 2 RTX, Portal RTX and Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive (!) on Sony's console. Beyond that, there's great news with the announcement of FSR 4.1 coming to older Radeon graphics cards, and there's a hint that Xbox may have some kind of "disc to digital" way to bring your physical purchases over to a potentially disc-less Project Helix. Finally, the team celebrate a duo of key anniversaries - Uncharted 4 and Doom 2016!

The others should get treadmills too. Or, alternatively, just use image stablization software to add bobbing.

I'm sure their analytics also show that most people are watching videos on mobile devices. These tend to have small screens. Personally I do too in a pinch when commuting etc but if it's something I care about I'll wait until I'm on my PC at home. Having a 3, 4 or 5+ way side by side split makes it just plain difficult to spot differences as the main or only way of showing them. And I feel DF in recent years tends to sometimes only or mainly present it this way.

I much prefer the "optician method" of flicking between stills or video in full screen. Then you can cap off at the end with side by sides.

This thought came to light when watching Hardware Unboxed's graphical optimisation video for Forza Horizon 6. Again beating DF to the punch.

Doom 2016 and Eternal are praised for their visuals, optimization and tech, but...

I wanted to replay Doom2016 and while tinkering with settings, i have noticed, that when you disable sharpening and antialiasing, the game looks awful at 1440p. Not because of aliasing or shimmering, like it would in any other game, when you disable AA, but here it looks like it is rendered at much lower resolution. It looks extremely blurry. Like upscaled from 720p. I have all settings maxed out and resolution scale at 100%. Only after you enable antialiasing and set sharpness to at least 3.0 out of 4.0, you get rid of most of the blur, but image becomes obviously oversharpened.

I'm wondering, what performance tricks the game uses? Is it some form of early upscaling? That would explain why it runs so well even on old cards. Textures, volumetrics and shadows look pretty low even at ultra as well.

No wonder the game runs great, when it's ultra settings look like medium in other games and it runs at what seems to be half the resolution and needs tons of sharpening.

Anyone knows what's going on? Does the game look that bad without AA and sharpening for you as well?

>The MacBook Neo has a lot of people very excited - and rightfully so. Apple's play for the budget laptop market is a game-changer, even if its salvage part iPhone processor and 8GB of memory may give some users concerns. Oliver gets to grips with the Neo's build quality, system capabilities for apps and browsing, then dives into gaming, putting the device through its paces on a range of games - triple-A and otherwise.

>AMD's FSR 4 "Redstone" upscaling and frame generation suite debuted as an exclusive feature for the company's latest generation Radeon 9000 (RDNA 4) graphics cards - despite a leaked build that clearly worked with older models using the less capable INT8 instruction set, as our testing in the video embed above shows.
Now, AMD has announced that FSR 4.1 is coming to older Radeon 7000 (RDNA 3) and 6000 series (RDNA 2) cards too, with a phased roll-out that suggests specific architectural optimisations are being made - ideally to shore up performance which could be a bit ropey on the earlier generation cards.

>Indiana Jones' latest adventure arrives in fine form on Switch 2, with developer MachineGames pushing for visual fidelity close to the other consoles. There are cutbacks of course - but ray traced global illumination is in tact here, alongside a unique use of DLSS upscaling on Switch 2. The only snag is the cost in performance: a 30fps target that does sadly have issues in stability around the game's open-world segments. Tom goes in depth on the pros and cons of the Switch 2 effort, with some insights from the developer itself.

>Another packed Direct Q+A show sees Oliver, Rich and Alex getting to grips with high-end graphics: are they actually worth it and are technological advances worth pushing? Meanwhile, can Switch 2 last for the 6-7 years Nintendo wants it to - or will next-gen consoles make it obsolete for multi-platform titles? All this and - inevitably - a lot more in the new Direct Q+A Show.

>In this week's Direct, Oliver, John and Rich get to grips with the reveal of Nintendo's Star Fox remake for Switch 2, there's justified concern over the Nintendo price hike for its new console, while Activision confirms that the next Call of Duty will finally leave last generation hardware behind. Meanwhile, the Pragmata resolution saga continues with an undocumented resolution hike for the PlayStation 5 Professional, while Pragmata (again) has an unconventional way to boost performance on Switch 2. And finally, the panel mark the 10th anniversary of Nvidia's remarkable Pascal architecture.

>Forza Horizon 6 is here and it's a superb new series entry - but what about the technology? Truth is that on the console side, we're looking at technical refinements as opposed to game-changing new visuals - but that's exactly what you get on the PC version, thanks to RTGI and RT reflections. John shares his impressions of the game, Playground's take on Japan, and beyond the PC upgrades, how the game looks on consoles.

Article: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/reviews/forza-horizon-6-pc-ray-tracing-looks-great-a-hint-of-the-project-helix-port-to-come

I usually avoid free to play games (especially mobile) like the plague but ever since a recent Q/A episode where a supporter mentioned Neverness to Everness having path tracing got Rich curious on the title, I became interested. Unreal Engine 5 has an overall bad reputation for performance so a good working title using all or most of its' hallmark features seems noteworthy.

I haven't tried it but based some YT videos and comments on Reddit, performance seems pretty good on PS5/Pro using nanite and Lumen but no ray traced reflections, even on pro. A few comments on both platforms seem to have their negative opinions on Unreal Engine 5 reconsidered because of the game's performance. The game also utilizes some UE World partition system which I can't seem to figure out if it's rare or very common but if it's rare/new, perhaps it could help with UE5 traversal stutter?

Based on a little YT searching, it seems PC performance is great but full path tracing is soft locked to 50 series only cards I believe but using either a replacement ini file or a Regedit, you can enable path tracing on older RTX cards and even AMD GPUs. It looks playable at 30fps at native res DLAA on a 4070 without FG.