Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 3 2026) (Patreon)

Hello there and welcome to your latest weekly round-up of everything Digital Foundry, based on the outcome of this morning's editorial meeting. Here's what's happening this week and what we have planned more generally!

First of all, I wanted to thank Sam Machkovech for all of his hard work as Launch Website Editor for the digitalfoundry.net website. Sam was taken on for the role of launching and establishing the site with a three month contract that ended today - and he leaves us with a detailed piece on the Intellivision Sprint so please do check that out.

The image above? It's early experimental work on creating a Steam Machine simulation rig, based on AMD Ryzen 5 8500G paired with an RX 7600 GPU running with four compute units disabled (something you can do in Linux!). We're looking at getting some #content together on this but will need some time as it's proving tricky! The 8500G may have a similar core configuration to the Steam Machine, but it doesn't have the PCIe bandwidth. And while we can remove CUs from the 7600 to match the CU count of the Valve hardware, well... there's more to a GPU that the CUs. Chances are we'll pick an equivalent AMD CPU to match 8500G performance - one that can give the full PCIe x8 lanes we expect to see in the Valve unit.

Oh, and Alan Wake 2? It never came out on Steam, which may explain why the game really seems to run poorly on Linux. What you're seeing in the image above is best case based on our test sequence.

Anyway... the #content!

Tom is going to be picking up on where I left off with the Steam Machine simulation project. We'll have ballpark PS5 and Strix Halo comparisons, 8GB VRAM limits testing and possibly some CPU tests using Baldur's Gate 3.

Alex is continuing to work on his DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution piece and beyond that? How about a look at dynamic frame generation based on Lossless Scaling's effort, discussion on the Nvidia take and commentary on how frame-gen up to display refresh limits is essentially the end-game - check out the Tom Petersen interview we ran a while back for his views on that!

John is working on the concluding part of his Xbox 360 launch title DF Retro episode! We've also been discussing a look at RPCS3 and how well it emulates the existing PlayStation 3 games you cannot run on any other system. This was inspired by him playing Motorstorm in 5K ultrawide on his PC!

Oliver is our man who'll be tackling our full Switch 2 review for Final Fantasy 7 Remake. He's also interested in checking out the Switch 2 version of GRID Legends in due course and really wants to review his brand new M5-powered iPad Pro.

Rich (ie me) is working with Tom on the Steam Machine project, may well crop up in Alex's content and is still working on the 70-class GPU sponsored video, charting 70-series performance and features from 2018 to today. Quite excited about this actually, early concept work is looking good.

Oh, and we'll be posting a new episode of the DF Retro Super Show on Sunday, focusing on the year 2006 - 20 years hence, but a remarkable year for gaming! The topic after that? A comprehensive lookback at Unreal Engine 3.

As usual, do let us know of any potential projects you'd like us to take a look at - and if you liked Tom's Bloodborne emulation piece, feel free to suggest similar "off diary" but DF-adjacent #content you'd like us to tackle.

Have a great week!