Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 42 2026) (Patreon)

OK, so I'm making a concerted effort to do the weekly update actually on a Monday for a change, having completed the editorial meeting and the subsequence Q+A show taping. Hopefully a bit of a simpler week this time around and we're not anticipating post eight videos as we did last week!

Here's what's on the cards:

John recently visited the Embracer video game archive, which aims to preserve every single physical game media release and hardware release across the history of gaming. The set-up is remarkable and the quest likely never-ending, but in John's video, you'll get to see what it looks like and how it aids developers. John's also looking at Final Fantasy Resonance with a view to completing that before moving on to other projects.

Oliver is working on embargoed content (no not that one) and also wants to take a look at the Switch 2 demo of Monster Hunter Wilds.

Tom is almost done with our deep dive into the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 engine, before moving onto the review process. That'll keep him occupied for some time...

Rich (ie me) continues to attempt to find the time to get to grips with stuff like the BC-250 project while juggling all of the other stuff. And when DF Direct has a lot of testing requirements (eg ROG Ally X20 and DLSS frame-gen preset C), that eats into my time as well... will do my best!

Will continues to power our website: digitalfoundry.net and aims to take a look at the Acer Atlus G3 Extreme handheld!

Next up, let's talk about our ongoing tools upgrades. We had hoped at this point to be rid of screen-tearing but it seems to be returning, as seen most recently in The Witcher 3 Remastered. And this presents a problem. Tear detection works by finding common partial info with the prior frame. The size of the frame containing matching data defines frame-rate. No problem. Except that PS5 HDMI output - and the output of some games more generally across platforms - does not have fully matching information. Check out this image:

This is what we call an absolute difference visualisation. If a pixel is the same as the one at the same location in the prior frame, it's black. If it's different, it's white. You can maybe see the black "bar" there above the located tearline which represents the common info. But owing to the "noise" in the image, it's very difficult to track vs a pure HDMI output where the bar would be completely black.

Previously we've relied on fast moving footage to make the difference (or the lack of it in the bar sections) more obvious and trackable, but we've now improved this to work on more static scenes. This has been an enormous pain point but will hopefully solve the issue we've been having. You can mitigate this on PS5 by using the -2 video transfer rate option, which gives a noise-free HDMI output, but that only works at 60Hz.

OK, that's enough for now! As usual, feel free to comment, suggest topics or ask questions!