Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 20, 2025) (Patreon)

Sup! A bit of a depleted #content meeting this morning: Will's got some time off, while John only joined us fleetingly from Japan as our meeting conflicted with his eating plans - but regardless, we do now have a plan for what everyone is doing this week on Digital Foundry. Here's the news:

John is on the tail-end of his huge Doom: The Dark Ages tech review. This one has been a long time in the making and will hopefully surprise you with some of the insights and content within that video. Should be a good one! We're also looking to get together an id Software developer interview for you.

Continuing with the Doom: The Dark Ages coverage, Alex is working on the PC review including this all-important optimised settings. We're also looking to do some path tracing content on this, but owing to the staggered release of the PT mode, that'll be a separate video.

Rich (ie me) will - I promise - get that Switch 2 video out for the middle of this week. Per Direct #213, I'm still waiting for clarification on puzzling latency test results before the RTX 5060 Ti video comes out. Supporter Taggen86 also pointed out to me that with most of the tech press at Computex, RTX 5060 non-Ti reviews will be thin on the ground. I will be covering that one. Interestingly, I bought an 8GB 5060 Ti today from Amazon for £320. However, the cheapest 16GB model I can find is something like £440... what's going on? [EDIT: The Discord guys are telling me I need to shop around a lot more!] Oh... and the AyaNeo 3 is still here, ready and waiting.

Tom is going to be working on embargoed content - it's not a huge game but certainly a welcome one for FPS fans (well, assuming it's good of course). Right now, Tom is also upgrading the Ryzen 7 5800X/RTX 4080 games machine he has to a 13900K motherboard I've sent him.

Oliver is coming off what must be one of the most intense - and successful - weeks he's had on DF so will be taking things a little easier. However, he's returning to his previously mentioned 'frame-gen on Steam Deck' project that I'm very interested in seeing. The Deck seems to have a lot of in-built latency in it, particularly with its system level fps caps, so I'm curious to see what kind of impact FG has there.

Finally, a quick update on our work in getting together a VRR capture and analysis workflow. In the image at the top of this post, you'll see a screenshot of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 running on PS5 in its unlocked performance mode, along with two readings.

In putting together a VRR capture solution, we're using the latest Elgato capture cards. We've found that combined with external tools, a VRR signal sees full frames delivered to the capture tool as and when they are ready. So we need to convert a VRR video signal to one compatible with Adobe Premiere while at the same time measuring the time taken between each frame to get an idea of actual frame-times.

Creating a compatible stream for video editing means we capture everything into a 120fps container: real frames from VRR spaced with duplicate frames we add to 'pack out' the 120fps video. You can see that in the red line in the image - which looks a lot like one of the VRR capture methods I've seen for analysis online. However, the frame-time graph looks like v-sync and VRR is not v-sync. That's where timing frame delivery comes from - and that's what the green line represents: accurate VRR frame-times. Frame-rate is basically the same then, but frame-time is very very different. Our technique reflects how smooth VRR is and graphs it.

There is a lot of work to do still as it seems like low frame-rate compensation is handled quite differently between say, PS5 and Nvidia G-Sync compatible. We've not even looked at Xbox yet so who knows what happens there - but the days of pointing a camera at a TV screen should be over sooner rather than later.

Have a great week!