Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 2 2026) (Patreon)

Hello there - and a warm welcome to the first news post of the year of our lord, 2026! Apologies for the lack of a news post last week. I was still supposed to be on holiday as of January 6th, but which time the #content roll-out had already begun. The first meeting of the year took place this morning and here's what we have cooking for you.

Tom has been playing the latest version of ShadPS4 with Bloodborne and - holy crap! - the performance of the game running under emulation on PC is astoundingly good. I've had quite the time playing it myself on the ROG Xbox Ally X, actually. I'm actually starting to wonder if 30fps on Steam Deck is possible with a resolution mod. Look out for that later in the week.

John will be returning to the world of retro. First of all, he's filming the very next episode of the DF Retro Super Show, the "circling back" as the January saying goes, to the Xbox 360 Launch video. Part 1 is out there, Part 2 next!

Alex is back from CES 2026 after a nightmarish, delayed journey. Rested now over the weekend after a mammoth 11-hour sleep, his intention is clear - to go in depth on the DLSS 4.5 upgrades to super resolution.

Oliver thankfully didn't have a nightmarish, delayed journey since the hop from Vegas to Vancouver isn't quite the same as Vegas to Berlin! This morning, he sat down with Alex and I to tape an Intel Panther Lake special, which will have more benchmarks - best of the best iGPU comparisons plus some entry-level dGPU comparisons, like the Doom: The Dark Ages image embedded above. And yes, that's ultra settings at native 1080p.

Sam will continue to adapt the work of the team into the articles you see before you on digitalfoundry.net and may well look into the new Intellivision Sprint in the free time he has.

Rich (ie me) helped out with the Panther Lake benchmarks, is helping Tom with some Bloodborne handheld stuff and is looking forward to an interesting Asus sponsored video, charting the evolution of RTX 70-series cards from 2070 to 5070. Admin? Yes, I'm still doing that but I must say "thanks" to everyone who has applied for the junior producer role. I hope to be scheduling interviews soon but the application period is still open.

It's time to talk a bit about 2026. Obviously, we're still keen on expanding out our PC coverage both in terms of video and on the web. We're also looking to do more in the way of "news" - hinted at in the junior producer job ad, we want to react to news more quickly and better "stock up" DF Direct Weekly. Talking about news and reporting the news is one thing, but crucial for us is adding value to that news - testing and offering more as opposed to just copying everyone else.

It may also be time to say "goodbye" to our capture tool of choice: VirtualDub. This open source tool has been the best capture software for decades - I first started to use it for Game Capture in 2004! We've heavily adapted it, added real-time fps analysis as we capture etc etc, but the AVI files it dumps out are proving increasingly incompatible with Adobe tools. We are working with Illusion once more on bringing our custom software to OBS, and improving deficiencies in OBS as we see them. For example, OBS has no indication that you have dropped frames in the capture, and we kinda need to know whether the captures we're taking are actually valid or not!

Where OBS is untouchable is its support for all file containers and a vast array of codecs - and there's no problem at all taking its captures into Premiere Pro. So, we're looking forward to that transition.

Plenty more to come in 2026 and I'm hugely excited about some of the new stuff we're looking to do, stuff that we couldn't even conceive of before full independence. So, once again, a big "thank you" from me and the team in making all of this possible!

Oh, and looking at the picture, yes, the RX 6600 does seem to run Doom: The Dark Ages at native 1080p on ultra settings faster than an RTX 3050. I was a little bit surprised too!