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Call For Questions For DF Direct Weekly #248 (Patreon)

Published:
2026-01-22 16:07:58
Imported:
2026-01

Content

And here we go again! The Digital Foundry team will be convening tomorrow morning to discuss the latest gaming and technology news - and it should come as no surprise to discover that we'll be spending a lot of time talking Developer_underscore_Direct. Yes, Microsoft has its own "Direct" and we're expecting to see Forza Horizon 6, Fable and more. We're excited!

Other topics? We received Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade on Xbox this morning and we'll have some analysis on that, while we'll also be talking Donkey Kong Country Returns HD on Nintendo Switch 2. And how could we not cover the Ningtendo PXbox 5?

But we need more - much more. And we're asking you to deliver. Feel free to share your own topic suggestions comments on the above and, of course, your questions for the DF team. It'll be Rich (ie me), John and Oliver at the mics and the deadline for your input is 8am GMT Friday morning. Thanks in advance!

Files

Comments

TMoney58

Preset L vs Preset M for DLSS Quality… thoughts?

CABBAC

Digital Overlords, given that the SEGA Saturn can do ray tracing, is it now time for us all to ditch the current generation of consoles and high powered PC's and get SEGA back making Saturn consoles? The past is the future! https://youtu.be/p8rQ47YRbFs?si=xuniFtrb-2bKQljb

Buzz Bee Spoke

This a question mostly in regards to the Rich among you. But the others may also answer. Chip chip. What games do you all enjoy in your free time? Do you all ever analyse a game and find yourself just having fun playing it? And vice versa.

minty-hippo

Hi gents! With Valve committing to using FEX on ARM silicon with the Steam Frame, do you have any interest in exploring the current state of playing PC games on Android? There’s a world of devices out there like the Ayn Odin and Retroid Pocket that allow for Steam games through apps such as Gamehub and Winlator. These devices tend to be much more pocketable and less power-hungry than their x86 handheld counterparts, so it’s cool to see the ever-evolving state of PC gaming on these devices. Thanks for all the work you do!

Marcus

Hiya foundrymen! 5k displays are suddenly being marketed for gaming with high refresh rates and local dimming. How viable do you feel gaming at 5k is? Will upscaling lead to a future combined with frame generation where your GPU takes whatever temporal or spatial resolution you have and fills it out using drs and dynamic frame generation to maintain performance? Hope you have a great week!

Darryl Stewart

Hi team, Is there a topic on which you’ve done a feature in the past that received a disproportionately high degree of engagement (whether positive or negative) from the community relative to your expectations? In retrospect, do you have a theory on why that was?

Michael Tiedemann

First time caller, long time listener. Proud to now be a supporter. You have recently raved about id Software’s id Tech Engine. Microsoft owns id. Why don’t more Microsoft studios use it? P.S. Happy to chip in with John to get Alex a retro handheld to take on his next flight.

zephyr

Will the team be purchasing the new Talking Flower?

Will Cooling

Have you ever thought of turning the DF tools onto some movies that use heavy CGI? Could be a fun look at what does and doesn't work in that space

glerox

Dear digital gents, over the years I heard you say the best way to play a game with VRR is to set a maximum FPS just below your monitor refresh rate. In the midst of the upcoming variable FG from Nvidia, I wonder what you think about Fast Sync in the Nvidia control panel? Isn't this a way to avoid tearing while having a lower input lag if your framerate is the highest possible?

Speedworth

Not included in the topic but if you have time, what are your (or Oliver’s) thoughts on the Apple leaks from fpt’s channel? Only pro and a fold model for 2026? Tim Cook stepping down?

Andrew Barker

I am running Bazzite on my secondary PC and loving it but the one thing holding me back from shifting my high spec machine over is the lack of adrenaline app to config things to my liking. Do you think the main players will release Nvidia app / Adrenaline software for Linux with it's surge in popularity.

Buzz Bee Spoke

Well, what can I say! Likewise and thank you!

octorox

Hello DF Crew. While we don’t know the price of the Steam machine yet, Valve’s positioning seems to tout it as a low-cost solution for gamers who want a secondary living room box or are stuck on old hardware and looking to upgrade. I am right in the middle of that venn-diagram and have been using an aging gaming PC as a Bazzite console. For gamers on something like lets say pre-Alder Lake intel, what do you think about the prospect of switching to the Steam Machine vs keeping an old CPU and upgrading the GPU to something more powerful like the 9060 XT 16GB? How often are modern games CPU bound vs GPU bound? In other words, when is an upgrade the better choice vs totally new hardware like the Steam Machine?

Luke

Dear gentleman, a warm hello , of sorts. I'm interested in the audio setup everyone (especially John) is rocking. I've just bough Dali Opticons and I'm blown away by the difference from very small satellite speakers. Love the work, keep it up!

Eric Benoit

As of writing this question, Valve has not announced a price yet for the Steam Price. If the Steam Machine price is more expensive than the price of building an equivalent PC, could the difference in price be labeled as the price to never have to deal with Windows again? My PC hasn't upgraded to Windiws 11 and i've wasted hours of my gaming life fixing, reinstalling windows, and OneDrive fiascoes. I know PC gaming requires more work to set things up properly but i think the Windows experience is knocking on the door of Sadomasochism.

Lukas Underscore

Yesss looking forward to the donkey kong coverage. Whats stopping them from adding funky kong as well, they could do a reprint and add "NEW FUNKY MODE" to the box art 🍌

James Vitale

Howdy! Before the Switch 2 was officially announced I harbored the irrational hope that it would have 2 game slots so I would not have to change carts as often. I was equally disappointed when my irrational dream did not happen. What irrational feature, be it hardware or software, have you ever hoped for and was let down by these companies that don’t listen to the whims of one guy on the internet?!

Someguyperson

John has mentioned several times that Japanese developers are actually a lot more open if you speak with them in Japanese. Using John's technical knowledge and language skills, do you think John could meet with From Software and Capcom engineers to help explain why their games aren't performance as they should? As Rich says, "the proof of the pudding is in the tasting," so have a big bowl of From Software pudding.

Special Agent Cooper

I'll shamelessly re-ask my question from last week because I'm really curious: When DLSS was introduced, there were a many a frustrations from you guys in the DF Directs that you will no longer be able to compare hardware with one another in the classical sense – from here on out everything would be apples and oranges. And while that has certainly held true, it is my personal feeling that "comparing apples and oranges" has rendered hardware discussion, and as such Digital Foundry, even more relevant and useful than before. Do you feel the same? Was the machine learning curse a blessing in disguise or would you still press a button that made it all go back to apples and apples?

captain crunch

You don't know a Lenny Tency by chance?

Special Agent Cooper

John probably would've hoped the Switch had a 40" OLED display.

Cory

With Intel announcing the Panther Lake handheld ecosystem, what would be on your wishlist for a better handheld gaming APU?

Buzz Bee Spoke

Sorry, I only have an older brother called Patt Tracing.

Pomps

Hello finely dressed gentlemen, I wanted to ask if any of you have heard any update/ confirmation on the potential new switch 2 model that John brought up some time ago. It was mentioned that first impressions seemed to have better response time for the panel than the current model. Thanks gentlemen!

Special Agent Cooper

I think they've answered this before on DF Direct. Iirc … 1. In contrast to UE5 id Tech Engine is not a one fits all solution but a rather specific thing for what id wants to do with it and not made to be a universal tool that's intuitive to learn 2. They keep saying "the engine is less important than what the developers do with it" and another developer might very well develop a game with id Tech that stutters and runs badly. On the otehr hand maybe the id Team would be able to build the smoothest, stutter-free open world game with UE5.

Karvox

A question perhaps best served by Oliver, but during his time at CES this year, did he see any vendors interested in 8K displays or really pushing that technology? It seems the shine has come off the apple for higher resolution displays at this point, and we're more focused on motion clarity and brightness. Do you still believe 8K will someday be an 'inevitability' as a path of travel for display technology and if so, when?

Will Cooling

Erm...what i said? Resolution mapping, framerate monitoring, etc.

Belkeri

Hello there! A question for John. Due to my entertainment dungeons ever more limited space, I have to let my retro corners crt go. Very sad indeed. I'm planning to buy a decent 26-28 inch monitor/tv to replace it. However, since the retro corner only has seven machines with scart/s-vhs/vga cables, what kind of display and upscaler would you recommend for me to buy. To make this a bit more challenging, I'm not related to Rockefeller.

Stiefin

I've seen your video about NVIDIA Pulsar, and I agree that it's going to be awesome for any content, but there's something that worries me: time‑accumulation techniques. From TAA to RT denoising, many modern game rely heavily on them, and I believe they work against motion clarity. Could you share your experience on how these techniques interact with Pulsar? Does it make their presence more noticeable compared viewing on standard displays? If so, could Pulsar also partially undermine the effectiveness of Asynchronous Reprojection (aka Nvidia's Reflex 2)?

NikeOne1

Ahoy Gents! I don't know about other viewers, but I've found that nothing satiates my morbid curiosity quite like your reviews of the nadir of gaming (e.g. pre-patch Lichdom Battlemage). Thusly I must ask... Marvel Rivals PS4 wen?

Orcacle

A while ago you did a dedicated comparison video between the 3060 12gb and the ti variant to see how badly the vram cut on the ti impacted its potential. With the 5060 12gb and 5070ti supply going down and prices coming up, I'm curious as to how current gen 8gb models fair against the previous generation higher vram cards and whether it's worth buying second hand one or even two generation old cards for a more stable experience. Cheers for the content lads

Anxiously Chrono Triggered

Hey DF crew, do you think nVidia will add Ray Reconstruction support for DLSS4.5? Given it’s mainly aimed at performance and ultra performance presets it seems like a great choice for path traced games, don’t you think? Cheers!

gartenriese

Hi there, in the last Direct you said that you're cautious with leaks because you don't want to generate too much hype. Also you acknowledged several times that future AMD GPUs are always hyped up way too much. However, whenever you're talking about RDNA5, you're always talking about it in high regard and with huge expectations. Do you know more than we do? Blink twice if you do (or say 'blink blink' for us podcast listeners)!

BespokeEP

I think the biggest issue with the Oblivion Remaster is it still plays like a game from 20 years ago and doesn't really look much better. The improvements from HZD to the Remaster are much greater than Oblivion and they were 7.5 years apart not 19. I hate calling devs lazy, but the Oblivion Remaster is the laziest, FU, cash grab ever. I fear that with MS in control, the rumoured Fallout remasters will be just as bad. Review outlets need to remove their nostalgia glasses when reviewing these games and start treating them as if they are a new game. As a new game Oblivion Remaster would have got mid 30's to low 40's meta

Red Phoenix

Good afternoon foundry folk. I find myself feeling challenged by John when he discusses about visual related stuff with monitors / hdr implementations as game changers. I must be visually challenged, but also I am old school. For me, the move from 2d to 3d was a game changer. The analog stick was a game changer. Z-targeting was a game changer allowing us to move more effectively in 3d spaces whilst keeping us focussed on enemies. Game changer is such a lofty term with highly historical recall for me. I can barely see some of the stuff John talks about. He clearly has a very trained eye that Im not convinced many of us share. So I am curious just how exactly this stuff is game changing. Thoughts? Thanks as always for the great and engaging work.

Alan

Hi Guys, What is going on at Ubisoft? canceling games, studio closures etc, they have some great IP but in recent years that seem to have just stumbled from one issue into another.

Alan

Hi guys, If you could combine any three games consoles, which three would you combine and why?

Eric Benoit

I asked Mr Ledbetter, the same question last summer, i had/have a 1st generation 17-875k with a gtx 960 2GB🫣, he advised to upgrade my gpu, which i did to max possible on my motherboard with a rtx 3060. I keep my expectations in check but im very happy with results. I have it hooked up to a CRT, which looks great, i have an oled too so i lower the resolution and use Shaderglass to clean up the image. Im having the same thoughts as you on this.

AKevin15

Good day gents! First-time-question-poster here. Things are pretty dire right now with RAM (and now NAND) price increases, GPUs being (perhaps?) discontinued and a plethora of products being harder and harder to purchase at reasonable prices. Right now, anything bought at MSRP feels like a huge win, even when MSRPs have been climbing for some time anyway. So I can’t shake the feeling that, regardless of the actual potential of AI (which can be great), we’re being played. That all of this is an elaborated ruse so governments heavily invest on Big techs and us consumers desperately buy their products at ridiculous prices, “before it gets worse”. Do you think that prices are being increased artificially to mess up with our price expectations? Are we just pawns on billionaires' 4D chessboards?

Renan

Hello DF podcasters! With current and future gaming hardware relying more and more on AI techniques, the gap between what capture tools say about a game and what we experience is only gonna get wider. Are you guys experimenting with any new tools to better analyze the end result as perceived by gamers? Thanks for the great content every week!

Peter Caught

Hello there digital over and underlords! I also think the situation with W11 is almost unbearable, and I would like to get it completely replaced by linux in my home pc. But I have some concerns regarding HDR and VR support. I know HDR is supported in KDE and Gnome desktop enviromenta through Wayland. But for fullscreen content apparently there are some concerns with all the compositors involved that might make things not ideal when using non steam games. Also with wireless VR I see complainta regarding problems with steam link, virtual desktop and alike. What is your experience in those areas? Thank you and keep up that amazing work!

MittenFacedLass

Not so much a question, but 3 older far-cry games got 60fps patchs on consoles this week. Might be fun to do a look-over, though it seems there's not much changed beyond framerate. Still would be nice to have some coverage of some kind though!

BespokeEP

That Fable framerate though.... Yikes.

SuperGT

Hey DF dudes. Watching Oliver's video on FF7 remake for switch 2 made me think of my experience playing FF7 Rebirth on my pc. I have everything maxed out and using DLSS. I sometimes see extremely low resolution textures, especially on wood and rock surfaces. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how dlss works but why doesn't the upscaler make those textures look better? Isn't it basically taking low resolution images and upscaling them to a higher resolution?

HarryB

In last week’s podcast Alex spoke about as Tensor cores get better and the frametime cost of DLSS going down, it makes sense to use costlier models. Is there an argument to be had for keeping the model light and giving some of that frametime back to the developers?

Anxiously Chrono Triggered

Hey DF crew, it’s looking like Microsoft might end up with a stronger first-party lineup this generation than SONY — and none of those games would even come from Activision. Do you think that acquisition might’ve actually been the nail in the coffin for them? Maybe Xbox would be thriving more now and Microsoft wouldn’t focus so much on Winslops 11? Cheers!

David Adams

Hey DF exclamation point! I remember playing the Witcher 3 for the first time and being incredibly disappointed. Do you all have memories of a game that everyone else seemed to love, but you just didn’t get the hype when you played? Thanks!

Spudnik

Hi DF, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on Fable’s new NPC system. Playground Games are suggesting a high level of depth, with NPCs that are unique and very reactive to player actions. If that ambition is realised, this could be a whole new level of immersion for the player. From a technical and design perspective, do you think Playground can realistically pull this off at scale, or is it more likely to land closer to something like Watch Dogs Legion and in practice be pretty shallow?

Anxiously Chrono Triggered

Hello there, what do you think GOG should do to get a bigger market share? I feel they deserve more with their anti-DRM policy, caring about game preservation and being super customer friendly. Do you think a GOG-themed handheld could help them? Cheers!

PassTheSauce

Hello team, I've been enjoying your content even more since becoming a subscriber. This is my first question so please throw this into John's Windows 11 recycle bin and empty if required. A recent post by fellow YouTuber YongYea in which (if I've understood correctly) Jeff Bezos possibly describes a future where our PCs would be on the cloud. With rumours over the last year where Microsoft/Xbox possibly pulling out of the hardware space, could this be a possible end game where the next generation hybrid will actually be in the cloud allowing for the specs to be altered via settings and obviously paying for what you use etc?

Kaveh PG

Any predictions for games that get announced this year?

Peter Karadimas

Hello gentlemen, Could you guys elaborate on what the situation is for the new Intel 18A fabrication process? Is this a big deal that can finally break the TSMC monopoly? Could we potentially see Nvidia GPU’s using it now that they have a strategic partnership? An Intel soc with Nvidia tensor cores for DLSS seems like a match made in heaven for gaming handhelds.

DaJaCo (Dan)

Happy Half-Fortnight Gents. This week i was packing up my Series X to put on ebay, when a felt a flash of FOMO as more Fable details emerged. Seconds later I realised that it's launching day 1 on PS5 Pro, and that I would never have bought the Xbox version anyway.. and there are even rumours of a future Switch 2 version circulating. Even if Microsoft completely turns around the hardware and software situation.. will they ever recoup the mindshare?

DaJaCo (Dan)

Lads! - How do you think Panther Lake will shape up against Nvidia's ARM based N1X when it comes to gaming handhelds, will Steam OS (or "Windows on ARM") save the day for Nvidia, or will Intel get the upper hand due to broader compatibility (x86) and better upscaler support than AMD's mobile SOCs?

MeanwhileInTheHere&Now

Salutations lads! I think everyone has accepted that GTA VI will be 30 FPS on modern consoles, with better performance on next-gen (whatever that looks like) and PC. But do you think that Rockstar would be interested in giving the PS5 Professional a 40 FPS VRR mode? I can't help but think that with the game now having been delayed by a full year they've had time to explore every option. Cheers!

Anxiously Chrono Triggered

Hey DF crew, as much as I love those electron guns, they’re not ideal. What do you think are the biggest flaws of the CRT technology? Price (at the moment), size, flickering for interlaced content, ghosting aka phosphor persistence in a lot of consumer sets, what else? Cheers!

Anxiously Chrono Triggered

Hi gentlemen, why do you think Microsoft hasn’t announced anything for Switch 2 yet? It seems like an ideal platform for their previous gen titles and perhaps newer ones too. Cheers!

Kim

How has Playground Games managed to make seemingly very-well-optimised games with the Forza engine (FH6, Fable), yet Turn 10 arguably fell short (on Xbox Series X|S and handhelds anyway) with Forza Motorsport?

DaJaCo (Dan)

Go look at a Samsung S95F (or H now), or and LG G5, with a game like Horizon Forbidden West setup on PS5 Pro with the HDR setup - and compare it to a washed out basic LCD with grey blacks, narrow colour volume, or only SDR signal. It's HDR + GOOD OLEDs that's the real game changer. I can't even go back to a using a high end 8K QLED (which supports HDR), after using a QD-OLED or Tandem OLED TV.

Series Xistential Crisis

Good day Eurogamers! (and Oliver) After digesting things for a bit, Fable looks kinda rough. Almost every bit shown was stuttering, the lipsyncing was abysmal, the animations were meh, I could go on. To be fair, the environments do look very good from a detail standpoint. What are your professional thoughts? Also, Forza looked absolutely awesome!!!

(Don’t be a) Richard

Would like to hear thoughts on the patch for Donkey Kong Country Returns HD, how the game performs and what the introduction of Dixie brings gameplay rise. Worth a revisit?

SaintBaBo

Honestly the phosphor trails which can so often appear when any bright object is against a dark background really undermined everything else that I enjoyed about my CRT monitor. It actively makes the otherwise dramatically improved motion clarity much more difficult to appreciate. At some point that became apparent to me and now I can't see anything else. I personally find the phosphor trails more distracting than persistence blur on an OLED. Obviously CRTs are still fantastic and have many use cases, but for this reason I would be hesitant to recommend that most people go out of their way for one. The geometry issues that inevitably plague most sets are another huge reason, in my experience anyway.

Jeff Messer

I think I'm late to the party here for DF Direct, but I thought I'd throw in this observation. I decided I wanted to build a 2026 Intel Living Room Gaming PC (first parts attempt here - https://pcpartpicker.com/user/jefmes/saved/#view=r6t4Bm) with an Arc B580. Even with opting for 16GBs of RAM because of the state of the world, it's looking to be a $1500 PC. It's not entirely apples to apples, but checking TechPowerUp's GPU charts, and thinking back to some DF coverage, this gives the impression that the Steam Machine's RX 7600-ish GPU should perform somewhat similarly. The RX 7600 XT, Arc B580, and RTX 4060 are in the same performance class. If that truly does end up being the case - perhaps a $1000 Steam Machine *IS* a "good deal" in 2026?

MattGPT

For me it was always the glow from them, the pure black and infinite contrast of OLED for me makes a scene so much better. Having seen an ultra high end CRT (film production) the top end is very very good, but for my personal preferences OLED is better at 240hz (or even 120) although I know others have different priorities. I think it does depend on game genre as well, side scrolling games on early flat panels are awful, and even on top end modern OLED monitors there will be more persistence blur than on a CRT, but I rarely play that type of game so it is not an issue for me, those who play them a lot will probably value a CRT far more, hence John's love with his fan of retro games.

Toby King

I don't need anything read out but I've joined to show support after the bloody awful way you've been treated after 'that' opinion piece. I've been listening to you guys for years and I think you are amazing. Thank you so much.