Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 3, 2024) (Patreon)

Hello there and welcome to the latest update from Digital Foundry - basically a summary of the #content meeting we have at the beginning of each week. Everyone was present and correct for this one, including our returning heroes from CES - Oliver and Alex! So, let's talk about stuff in the works:

Rich (ie me) starts work on the first of our RTX 50-series reviews... which is interesting bearing in mind we have not received the cards. Thankfully I am using the time to refine our automated GPU benchmarking system, the ultimate aim being a single push-button solution that generates all the data. And that's what the video embedded above is - we have a launcher where we choose the games we want to bench, we press a button and away it goes. I can't benchmark Nvidia cards yet (new driver is yet to land) but I am catching up on the AMD stack! The less time spent benchmarking other GPUs, the more time we can actually spend with the new product - pretty critical for the RTX 50-series feature set, right?

Alex is currently rebuilding his PC ready for the year ahead, and upgrading his 7800X3D test system to 9800X3D (thanks, AMD, for the upgrade). Once Nvidia cards arrive, work begins on a full review for DLSS 4 Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction, followed by a separate review on Multi Frame-Gen. He's also keen on looking at Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 when the time is right.

John is putting together a review on Donkey Kong Country Returns HD on Nintendo Switch, then will be moving on to the second chapter in our Sony PlayStation vs Sega Saturn face-off - this time covering off shooting games.

Oliver is working on a couple of videos based on CES 2025. There'll be a DF Direct special with more on the RTX 50-series reveal and then later in the week, a very special interview. The Busiest Man in Videogames has also just finished his GRID Legends iPhone review and fancies taking a look at Hogwarts Legacy on PS5 Pro.

Tom is putting the finishing touches to his Bloodborne/ShadPS4 video and is slated to start work on the console versions of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.

Obviously there's a lot going on - we still need to figure out how to handle Marvel's Spider-Man 2 PC and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth PC, but that's enough info to be getting on with for now!

And now, a bit more info on the embedded video above, which shows our work-in-progress one button approach to benchmarking a GPU. This process - covering fewer games - used to be entirely manual, taking around six hours to produce data. The new system, designed in collaboration with Illusion does the following: we have a menu of games and settings configurations and then the PC works through the list: typically we bench raster and RT at 1080p, 1440p and 2160p. A game like Alan Wake 2 has no benchmark scene, so per the B580 review last month, we've made our own, based on one of the most challenging areas in the game.

Mods are used on all games, starting and stopping Nvidia Frameview in the background (taking into account shader compilation burns where needed - eg Wukong and Forza Horizon) and skipping menus etc. So, the six hour manual process of old is now a fully automated 2.5 hour exercise. This means we grab all the data points in the FrameView captures, including PC Latency, power consumption and efficiency. Those files can then be input into our bespoke Adobe Premiere filter to get the visualisations you know and love... along with new ones for the new data. You might have seen the PC Latency metrics in last week's DLSS 4 video.

With data capture now that easy, we can just start the day by benching any piece of hardware, which can then be added to our collection, the aim being to build a database that opens the door to much more PC hardware coverage. I particularly like the hardware 'lookback' videos that stack up older components against newer ones. Easy to do if the data is essentially gifted to you, right?

Anyway, that project has been progressing in the background for months now and we're approaching the end of it. It's not been an inexpensive process and even when complete, we're not done: we're going to be re-evaluating our console tools. It's high-time we sorted out a VRR capture solution (that factors in low frame-rate compensation) and that's very, very tricky - but we've got some good ideas on how to do that now and the hardware to do it. But software requires a full do-over!

We'll keep you updated on all of this progress, but for now, have a great week!