Home
Creators
Search Recent Missing Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Call For Questions For DF Direct Weekly #201 (Patreon)

Published:
2025-02-13 16:35:19
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:
Q&A

Content

Hello there, it's time for our regular Thursday ritual - the call for questions for inclusion in the next edition of DF Direct Weekly. While it is indeed Rich writing this post, I'm still suffering from flu and won't be participating in tomorrow's filming. Instead, it'll be Oliver, Alex and Tom comprising the panel.

The team will be discussing the latest Sony State of Play, highlighting the titles that appealed to them, before moving on to mourn the lay-offs at Crytek and the deeply saddening news that Crysis 4 is on hiatus. There'll be some chat on the technology of Assassin's Creed Shadows and maybe we'll tackle some peripheral topics, like Alan Wake 2 finally entering the realm of profitability.

Everything's up for grabs though, so please do consider suggesting some topics or indeed posing questions for the panel. Thanks in advance!

Files

Comments

DaJaCo (Dan)

Happy Half Fortnight Lads, I hope you’re all in cautiously cromulent health! I have been looking more closely at the switch 2 patents and teaser video, and noticed that both joy-cons have a feature that may have been overlooked. If you look at the bottom end of each joy-con, there is an unusual seam-line which is also shown in the patent drawings. It suggests that there is a window of different material adorning the entire bottom and side of both joy-cons. This is not especially noticeable because of the colours and lighting in the images, as well as the rapid camera cuts – but it seems highly likely that there are IR-LED emitters along the joy-con perimeters, which require a semi-translucent material window. Does this add further weight to earlier sensor bar patents. Has everyone overlooked this? The pertinent images: RHS Joy-Con IR Window Seam: https://imgur.com/a/Ak9nwIF LHS Joy-Con IR Window Seam: https://imgur.com/a/hTdtHDj Joy-Con – Window Full Panel: https://imgur.com/a/4vhcLmh Patent Seamline Corroboration: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/docs2/pct/WO2025027803/pic/mZIJWXQDlXOB507bhcrvGG4E_4WF6HIz6Fx7vuu2Nb3znfx1x2vk24QWXgCKOh90 With Window Detail Highlights: https://imgur.com/a/X7LDtQd

Skyrimfest 26 FPS Edition

I think people may be underestimating the impact MFG could have on next gen consoles. TVs have settled on 4K 120Hz, which means devs have a fixed output target to hit and frame gen means they should be able to do so consistently. In this world devs could choose an appropriate base fps depending on the appropriate latency for the type of game: e.g. base 40fps for story heavy RPGs, 60fps for arcade titles and native 120fps for pvp online shooters. All upscaled of course. This seems like the answer to delivering a next gen experience without radically increasing transistor budgets. You could also see how a next gen Series S could offer 4K 120fps like its hypothetical bigger brother, just with a 30fps base and 720p upscaling. The latency trade off and upscale/framegen artifacts could become the defining metric to differentiate consoles instead of frame rate or underlying graphics settings.

Peter Karadimas

Hello Gents! Is there a reason more developers don't use Cryengine? What are the advantages and disadvantages it provides compared to Unreal engine?

USCStevestromo

Hey DF Crew! Congrats on passing the 200 milestone! Here's to many more. My question is relating to upgrades. I have an RTX 4090 at the moment and want to know if an upgrade is really....really worth it for 4K gaming. 4090 owners looking to upgrade can currently sell theirs at a ridiculous uptick on price and potentially wait out 5090 restocks? All the best.

CABBAC

I have never worked for Digital Foundry, nor for Richard Leadbetter, but I would like to echo John and Alex's view from last week's Direct where they said that Rich was the best boss they've ever had by saying that Rich is also the best boss that I've ever had too. My question is, now that Rich is out of the equation due to illness, what mischief has occurred whilst he is out of action?

KiMoSaBi

Hi DF Team. Love your work, and solid as ever. I enjoyed Oliver's look at the mobile port of Grid. I understand that adding iOS or Android ports on top of the current Gen consoles is a lot, but would you consider something doing a bulk review of mobile ports on some sort of "DF Bites"? I'm especially curious about the mobile port of Alien Isolation, since John's glowing Switch port review (and the fact it was also handled by Feral Interactive). Keep up the great work!

Macky Dee

Hi DF crew. Thoughts with the Crytek team members who've lost their jobs, and with Alex over the sad news around Crysis 4. Betting all of Crytek's future on Hunt: Showdown seems like a risky bet, given the age of the game and its solid but hardly earth-shattering player numbers. It seems like a classic single-player, PC-first Crytek FPS ala Far Cry 1 or Crysis 1 could find a healthy audience given the growth of Steam - but do you think hopes are diminishing we'll see a game of that type from the studio in the coming decade?

Mauro Sans Jr.

Hello DF! Hope Rich gets better soon! So, after so many opinions that games using frame gen to up 30fps to 60 were going to be awful, I used it on FF16 (RTX 3070, so FSR) and I found it completely playable on a controller in the living room, not perceiving any awful lag as predicted. The only problem was ghosting when talking to NPCs, not on battles or traversal. Have you guys tried this setup to evaluate this issue in a practical sense? Thanks!

gartenriese

Alex, do you think it's your fault that Crysis 4 got cancelled because you refused to light the shrine last week?

HelenX

hello! looking at my 4090 and modern games, have we reached the stage where with raster rendering GPUs have now exceded the demands that even AAA developers can afford to fully utilise. By which I mean that, excluding troubled releases, is a 4080 more GPU than game budgets can fill? I think it is and believe all that die area on the 5090 was completely wasted on 6000 cuda cores when what we need is more RT acceleration cores.

The Knight Who Says Ni!

Happy 201 episode gents, had this question for last week but forgot to post it... RTX Mega Geometry looks like a very promising technology, and I'm curious whether you think AMD could develop its own version, as it currently requires an RTX GPU. Do you think it could be the next big game-changer in graphical fidelity? It seems like it could be a great benefit to next-generation GPUs and consoles if AMD can implement something similar.

Someguyperson

It's really sad to see Crytek still having some financial woes, even after Hunt: Showdown and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Will Crysis 4 save them in 7 years when it comes out?

Someguyperson

Are you guys going to cover the Elden Ring: Nightreign network test this weekend?

Someguyperson

Will Oliver & John cover the network test for Sonic Racing: Cross Worlds on the 21st?

Someguyperson

Do you guys have concerns with how the new Onimusha game's performance looked? Capcom is on a streak of really well designed games with really bad performance in RE Engine. What do you think the issue is over there?

Someguyperson

What do you think about all the AAA games coming out that have been developed by countries not known for such development like South Korea (Stellar Blade) and China (Black Myth: Wukong & Tides of Annihilation)? Is it just that Western developers put all their eggs in the games-as-a-service basket?

Someguyperson

With all the talk about how PC game is getting "too expensive", how much do you really need to spend on a GPU to have a good experience? Do you really need to spend $1000-$2000+ on a GPU to feel validated and loved? If I buy a $500 GPU, will people kick dirt into my face? If I spend a measly $300 on a GPU, will my family abandon me for how little I spent on a GPU? Help DF!

Alan

Hi Guys, Well the Sony State of Play was a letdown, many of the games just looked the same and some were for 2026, 2025 has only just started! Where was more GTA6 news and the Bot Of War announcement?

Someguyperson

I think it looks more like a rubberized grip than an IR window. It just looks too big to be an IR window, although it could be a very large & weird one. I just feel Nintendo would remove it from the BOM considering how few games actually used it.

Someguyperson

I would absolutely recommend holding onto your 4090 until at least the 6090 comes out, if not the 7090. It's just such overkill still and it won't be outclassed by an 80 series card for probably 2 years at least. The only reason you should move to a 5090 is if you have a 4k 240Hz+ monitor. Otherwise, it's a bit of a waste.

DaJaCo (Dan)

I would encourage you to take a look at the MEMS mirror sensor bar patent. If that is part of the Switch 2 - then the Joy-cons wouldnt have IR cameras, they'd have IR-LED emitters.. to help the sensor bar orient them precisely in different grip scenarios - this would also make sense with why the panel is so much bigger. Also bear in mind that this keeps the joy-con price lower as LEDs are cheap. You could be right, it could just be rubber, but thats an odd place to put it (i.e. why not in more places that the hand contacts), and rubber would not blend in visually as well as a translucent hard plastic does in their promo video (assuming the rendering is fairly representative)

1040STF

The PS5 Pro is close to its 3 months birthday. So far, how are you satisfied with what it brought to PS5 games? I might be wrong but it doesn't feel like gamers have a big interest for it so far, at least less than for the PS4 Pro when it released. What could convince them in your opinion - if anything could?

1040STF

Consoles are known to have more lag than PC. But what is the cause? The hardware? The SDKs? In complete theory, if one day Microsoft brings alternate stores to the Xbox, like let's say Steam, or SteamOS to go even further, again in complete theory, could we observe a difference in the latency of games between the Steam version and the Xbox version on the same machine?

Leftisthominid

Hello DF'ers. This question is for Oliver more, but I would appreciate all answers. I am currently running an RTX 3080 in my rig. For gaming purposes, it is cromulent, but I do sometimes wish it had more VRAM for AI image generation (i.e., Stable Diffusion, Flux, etc.). The RTX 5070 only has marginally more VRAM and the 5080 is far too expensive. Have any of you tried image generation on the Battle Mage GPUs?

Ed

Hi DF! With the 50 series graphics cards release, we saw (very) modest improvements on the rasterisation side, and the main areas of improvement coming through AI enhancements. Do you see that continuing to the next generation of graphics cards, and if so, my question is, how do you see Nvidia "gating" these features? For example, RTX 20 series cards and onwards received the transformer model updates, a first for older cards to still improve years after release. However RTX 40 series cards did not receive MFG. Do you think this was by choice from Nvidia, since say 4080 super users would have no real reason to upgrade to a 5080 otherwise if MFG was ported back in the same way transformer models were? Do you see them continuing in this way, keeping AI side improvements that could be ported back exclusive to new series?

CABBAC

My question is for Tom. Where have you been? 😂

CABBAC

He's locked in Rich's basement again. #FreeWillJudd

BespokeEP

I believe there were two 2026 games. 90% of the over 30 games got actual release dates and all but one had actual gameplay… what more do people want? 1st party, or 3rd, these are all games that you will get to play on your PS5. Sony maintains great relationships with its 3rd party partners, if they had shown Yotei gameplay it would have just undermined everything else. GTA6 …see previous statement lol. Nothing Sony does would please people. If they showed off 10 brand new 1st party sp IP’s. People would complain that they should have shown 11. Gameplay trailers of games in development put a lot of stress on teams, and cost a lot of time and money. Do I miss E3 trailers of stuff 4-6years away, sure!! But at least what we see is what we get

Joseph Caruso

PlayStation just announced that Astro Bot is getting a PS5 Pro update "featuring a constant best resolution while still running at 60 frames per second." I assume this means Astro Bot used a dynamic resolution to try to maintain a 60 FPS experience and that on PS5 Pro the resolution is more consistently high. Naturally I'm a little disappointed, hoping we could get a higher frame rate mode. Do you think this type of change in dynamic resolution is noticeable to the average PS5 Pro player or even noticeable to the crew of Digital Foundry?

Mario Rosa

Hello, team. This isn't really a technical question, just wanted to hear your thoughts on what are your favorite console or handheld designs and which are the less appealing ones? Personally, I think the original PS2's design stands out out for it's simplistic beauty which I believe makes its design timeless as it wouldn't look out of place in today's tech world. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the original PS5 which is just bizarre to me and I've never particularly gotten used to it. When I first saw someone comment that it looks like a wireless router, I knew I was never going to be able to unsee it. At least the revisions have been an improvement, especially the PS5 Pro which I legit *really* like the design...up until the moment I stuck the external disc drive on it which just makes it look awkward. I actually have the disc drive facing the wall so I don't have to look at it from the front. Geesh, what was Sony thinking this gen?

USCStevestromo

I do agree with your statement mostly, but there's this niggle at the back of my mind. We're reaching a point in modern titles that even the 4090 struggles with max settings, at 4K and I'm thinking will the 4090 be even more redundant at that resolution in say another couple of years? Am I making sense here, or is my logic totally misplaced,

Rich

There are far more RT acelleration cores on the new RTX cards, the RT Teraflops numbers Nvidia claim are much higher on each generation since Turing relative to everything else.

Rich

Graphics are a never ending story, there will ALWAYS be applications that can use more compute, that's the inherently scalable nature of rendering itself. There's never going to be an answer beyond what your budget allows, your display and what games you actually play. In the kinds of cutting edge games where the 4090 is useful, the 5090 is significantly faster (like 40-50% in RT and AI heavy workloads), so it's not as if the upgrade would be a total waste.

FrametimeSommelier

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2's open world runs smoother than butter on a hot skillet, seamlessly across a spectrum of different hardware. It seems to have gracefully dodged the dreaded pitfalls of compilation and traversal stutter. So, could CryEngine be the unsung hero of open-world games? Or do you think that this was the engines last great moment of glory?

Question Generated By JensenGPT

Astro Bot just got a PS5 Pro update, but what could it have possibly done? The game already used DRS on base PS5 and stayed higher in the DRS range on PS5 Pro, and it doesn't use any form of ray tracing. The wording in the news post about it is also pretty ambiguous.

randyrrs

Hey i just joined for the first time, is every question guaranteed to be answered or just a few are picked?

Diego ElRey

I don't understand why some feel that controllers are a sponge of input delay? Maybe in terms of a professional esports player of high refresh FPS games? Lag can definitely be felt on a controller especially in the fighting genre. The fighting genre even moved from PS to XBOX for tournament play during the PS360 era because a few frames of delay between versions. Fighting games take frame perfect precision to excel at; from 'just frame' attacks, to being plus or minus on attack or hit, and knowing what you can do based on that info. There are versions of games not played over a 2 MS difference from the least laggy version. These games are not played on a mouse, and you can definitely feel an additional 3+ or more MS even on a controller.

Justin Valero

I’ve noticed that in many of the reviews for the 50 series cards across tech YouTube, the comparison is to the previous generation. But realistically people aren’t going out and buying $2000 graphics cards every 18 to 24 months. Wouldn’t it be more helpful to snapshot some comparisons between different classes and generations. Someone going from a 4070 to a 5080 or a 3060 to 5070? For example, I went from a 4070 to a 5080 and I’ve seen double my performance along with multiframe generation working out pretty well and more VRAM headroom than I had before. I’m really happy with it but, apparently, I bought a terrible product because it’s not as good as the 4090 was. Any thoughts, gentlemen?

Diego ElRey

Hello, DF. It's been stated that the PS360 era would've performed better if the games hadn't tried to be forward looking. I can't wrap my head around PS2 graphics at 60 FPS for that generation. The forward-looking aspect of that generation is why it is my favorite. So many games that looked beyond what you could imagine for the time, and so many new experiences, and because those games were so forward-looking, you can play most of them today on Series X, PC, or a slight remaster, and they still hold up. PS2 era graphics don't hold up nearly as well. I was wondering in retrospect, do we feel that the correct choices were made?

Container7

Do you think that the Switch 1 will lower it's retail price this year?

Someguyperson

It's difficult for me to parse exactly what they're doing in this patent because I don't speak Japanese, but it actually looks like the controller implement doesn't need anything special in it at all, apart from a retroreflector, so that window/grip part could actually just reflect IR light as opposed to having a sensor or LED in there. If I'm reading it right, the sensor bar will shoot rays of light out and when they hit the controller, they bounce back into the sensor bar, which allows the sensor bar to determine where the controller is. If I were to theorize a use case for this, I would actually say this is for Labo 2.0, where the sensor bar could tell where an entire object is as opposed to just a controller. Overall, I want to say this is very interesting, but I don't really have a clue what Nintendo is going for here without seeing a game that utilizes it.

Vlad

All modern HDTVs support 50Hz, many 100Hz. I believe 50Hz support is much more common than Variable Refresh Rate. I would love to play a game at a locked 50 fps at 50Hz instead of 30fps at 60Hz. And a locked 100 is much easier to reach than a locked 120. It's 20% free performance. What is stopping console developers from doing this? Have the PAL ports of the past really shacked the minds of the future?

CaptBrick

Hello DF crew, I have a shader stutter question for Alex. It seems that Nintendo emulators like yuzu (RIP) have largely solved the shader compilation stutter problem. The emulator saves Vulkan pipelines in a way that is architecture-independent and shareable. Before launching a game, these pipelines are compiled for the user’s hardware. The only catch is that someone has to endure the initial stuttering to generate the pipeline cache before it can be shared. To me, it feels like we're just two steps away from a perfect solution: 1. Let the "unlucky person" be the QA team or reviewers (sorry, guys). 2. Automatically distribute these pipelines to users—perhaps through a platform like Steam. If something gets missed by the QA team, the first user encountering a new shader would contribute it to the shared cache. As an added benefit, players who don’t pre-order but instead wait for reviews and the first wave of patches would have the highest chance of starting with a complete shader cache. Could it really be this simple? What am I missing?

CaptBrick

Hello DF crew, I watched the "Shader Stuttering: Unreal Engine’s Solution" live stream, and they mentioned an interesting detail I didn't know about. The shader cache is managed by the driver and appears to be stored on a per-game basis. However, the cache size isn’t unlimited, and the driver may decide to clean it up. This means the cache could potentially be cleared during the shader precompilation step in a game, effectively nullifying its intended benefits. Could this be the reason why some games still experience shader stutter despite having a precompilation step? Should NVIDIA and other GPU manufacturers make the cache fill level more transparent to users?

TheUnrealRich

Hello Founders! Since the pre-release phase of the ps5 pro, I feel your impression on pssr has shifted from a rather positive first impression on the titles Sony showed initially to a more critical one following more and more lacklustre implementations in ps5 pro patches. What do you think are the reasons for this? Were the initial games the handpicked exceptions whose engines were better suited for pssr? Were they more closely helped by the pssr engineers, while third party developers did not get the same assistance? I‘d be interested to hear your thoughts! Keep up the great work and here‘s to another 200-and-one episodes!

DudleyTheGentleman

Hi DF Team, does Nvidia's MegaGeometry completely eliminate the need for proxy geometry to be used in Ray traced and path traced scenes? If so, how do you see this technology effecting UE's Hardware Lumen and/or MegaLights, assuming it's integrated into DXR? A separate but related question, are there other areas related to the BVH building and maintenance process that are clear problem area to improve in the future?

Anxiously Chrono Triggered

Hey DF crew, with Xbox going full on multiplatform which means fewer people will want to buy their hardware do you think it’s a great moment for Steam Machines 2.0 to appear? With more and more blurred lines between console and PC gaming I think having a nice box with SteamOS in living room could win a lot of hearts. Cheers!

Anxiously Chrono Triggered

I really like this idea. I think someone’s already asked this question but it didn’t make it to DF Direct.

Anxiously Chrono Triggered

Hello gentlemen, PS5 Pro was released 3 months ago. What do you think about the hardware now when you have more experience with it? Cheers

Anxiously Chrono Triggered

Hey Guys, what’s your usual „go-to-game” when you have some free time and just feel like playing? Also, Rich, John - I hope you recover shortly. I’ve had flu for the last 2,5 weeks and I must say it’s worse than any stuttering in Jedi Survivor! Cheers

digitalfoundry

We've described this before as the Poor Man's G-Sync but I assume 50Hz isn't built into system level tools - and would play havoc with pre-rendered cinematics

digitalfoundry

Well, the 5080 review did have prior 80-class card comparions... 4080, 3080, 2080!

Project Nite

Hello DF Gents! With talks of the next gen consoles swirling about, what are the chances we end up with 3 different approaches? Sony would continue with the traditional model. Steam steps in with licensing their OS for other manufacturers to make, leaving the cost of manufacturing HW to someone else. Then Microsoft doing something in between. Something like manufacturing a base model, but allowing third parties to manufacture licensed upgrade components. Upgrades to GPUs or RAM? Could this enable Microsoft to take a cut of the profits from higher spec hardware while third parties foot the bill? I feel like the storage strategy Microsoft is using in the Series systems is a test to see how well they could keep unauthorized components from working on the console. Thanks for your insights!

digitalfoundry

Just a few - in fairness we say this in the show every week

DaJaCo (Dan)

Thats plausible, it would drop power consumption and likely be cheaper still, however IR is just reflected like any other light / from a polished surface. It could be absorbed by it.. or perhaps the window is invisible to infrared, and then there are a series of reflectors underneath it. Either way.. the function would be the same.. create a distinctive perimeter pattern that the sensor bar can track better. I dont think it would be limited to Labo though, just be for more accurate pointing / motion controls when docked.. which if it has dual mouse controls on a table top - makes a lot of sense.. dual pointer or dual motion are relatively analagous to dual mouse..and you cant really expect dual mouse to work in a typical living room TV setup.

Ali Antiasing

Honorable gentlemen, do you think the success of KCD2 could sway more studios into using Cryengine as their prefered open world engine? Could Cryengine fill the hole that studios otherwise need to fill with in-house engines such as Decima, Anvil or RAGE?

VeryProfessionalDodo

Agreed. Comment sections are a mix of complaining that AAA is unsunstainable, they should do more like Astro Bot, and simultaneously complaining why there weren’t more AAA announcements. I quite enjoyed this State of Play, some great indies that I’m intrigued (especially Blue Prince and Dreams of Another), and the Saros reveal was brilliant.

VeryProfessionalDodo

I feel like there are only two types of builds on YouTube. It’s either “I built this ITX PC with a 5090” or “I built this PC for 400€ by lowballing 10 people on Facebook Marketplace and digging this RAM out of a landfill”. Although with the disappearance of the sub 300€ GPU market, it feels like you either are forced to get a 4060, 7600 or now a B580 if you want to stay away from the used market. Still, it almost seems like the 800€ PC using new parts appears to not exist on YouTube.

alpha54

Based on the post it sounds like you will cover this already, but just in case, my question is: Were you able to glean anything interesting from the latest AC: Shadows "PC features" trailer, particularly from a technology perspective? Did we know about all of these features of Anvil Next already, or does anything jump out as particularly cool or noteworthy? For reference: https://youtu.be/Xs2w3qSEBCs?si=GinOioLxpWMHEspz

alpha54

I have always wondered this every day I see the shade cache size option in the Nvidia control panel. What does "driver default" actually mean, like how much space does that indicate? How much space do compiled shaders actually take up, should I be manually setting the cache size to the max of 100GB or wtv it happens to be? It's a very opaque setting imho.

Justin Valero

Oh you guys are terrific, I mean the overall consternation that quite a few tech reviewers have had. A cursory glance at reviews across YouTube aren’t helpful for those of us who are looking to go up a class+generation.

Jellyment

Hi DF crew, Xbox are putting more and more of their titles on the playstation store, claiming it's good for revenue. But if they continue this approach, consumers won't buy the Xbox, and means less consumers use the Xbox/Microsoft store. Wouldn't this result in Microsoft loosing out on revenue from third party games sold on their storefront? Can their first party title sales outweigh their cut on third party game sales?