Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 5, 2025) (Patreon)

Well, I'm still a bit confused at whether this is week five or week four, but here we are with the latest DF weekly update. We're a couple of people down this week - both Will and Tom are heading off on vacation! So, it was Rich (ie me), Oliver, a rather hoarse John and Alex at the meeting this morning.

Here's what's going on:

Rich (ie me) is heading into RTX 5080 territory with a review I hope to have on embargo day, though let's just say that Nvidia giving 3-4 working days to review it basically ensures that I can't do the full review I really want to do, which is super-frustrating. I have also now acquired another RTX 2050 laptop, so I tempted to do a quick thing on how/if the DLSS Transformer model is in any way viable on it. Meanwhile, the boxes for the SFF PC components are still sitting in the hall...

Oliver has a number of projects on the go - par for the course. He'll be handling our Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth PC coverage in collaboration with Alex, he's circling back to look at Hogwarts Legacy on PS5 Pro and he's also going to tackle Sniper Elite Resistance once we have code.

John has been a bit under the weather, but he's looking at the Ninja Gaiden 2 remaster on all systems, compared to the Xbox 360 original. He's still planning to do a DLSS multi frame-gen collaboration video with Alex and after some Adobe hilarity, the good news is that the old Saturn vs PlayStation project is now working again, opening the door to continuing the second chapter.

Alex has a LOT going on. Today, he's working with Oliver on getting some data together for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on PC from a mid-spec build. Then he moves on to a deep dive on DLSS Super Resolution. We're also seeing some very interesting stuff from RTX Mega Geometry in Alan Wake 2, which may get a small break-out video.

There's a couple of hanging threads then. Marvel's Spider-Man 2: we have no code on this whatsover, so the chances of doing a big, expansive review are basically zero. We have to work with material actually in our possession and it's not great to start a project, then pause it to do something else as it plays havoc with the schedule. So it'll happen, but no idea when. It's not our fault!

Secondly, DLSS multi frame generation. We will tackle this but having seen content online where commentators say it's good but show compromised assets (only the compromised assets are shared on social media of course), it's clear that we lack the delivery mechanism to show the system in motion. I still think the 50% 4K 120 captures we did on the preview are the best way, but even this is sub-optimal. The gap between multi frame gen frames isn't 8.3ms but closer to 4.1ms. We're still puzzling over this! The RTX 5080 review at least will show latency and frame-rate numbers compared between 4080 Super, 5080, 4090 and 5090.

Do let me know of any comments or ideas you may have but in the meantime, have a great week!