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Call for questions on Digital Foundry Weekly (Week 36, 2021) (Patreon)

Published:
2021-09-08 15:56:20
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Hello everyone! We are back with another round of DF Direct Weekly, and of course we need the essential ingredient: YOUR questions! This week, we'll talk about the new PS5 model CFI-1100 controversy, Alan Wake is back, Quake Remastered, a bit more on No More Heroes 3 and we answer the biggest question of all... does Rich love horses and think they are the best of all the animals?

Leave your questions below!

Comments

TransTechGirl

Are horses the best of all the animals?

AGSMA
>>67433284

If a horse spews cobwebs out of its mouth and devours a human child, does that make them the best animal? Also, I'm totally not in a Terry Gilliam mood as of late.

Matthew Glenn

Could we get an update on John’s HDMI 2.1 AVR investigation?

Rip Van Winkle

Do you think that future hardware will be able to brute force software and optimization issues such as bad frame pacing in games? For example, imagine a 50GHz CPU playing a notoriously heavy single threaded DX9 game.

AGSMA

If real life had a LOD system, how many meters would I have to be away from someone for said person's polygon count to decrease and reveal its edges? DF's crew at its highest LOD level likely wouldn't look out of place in a Dire Straits music video.

Sloth

Question: Is getting a reasonably optimised performance from newer PC games starting to require increased hobbiest/technical knowledge again creating a higher barrier to entry for new pc gamers? Optimisation is always a part of PC gaming but things felt more straightforward during the Windows 7 era when there were fewer variables compared to the previous or current eras. Context: These days settings for newer features like HDR; freesync; resolution scaling; modern antialiasing types and so on are fragmented across graphics card and monitor dashboards, old and new Windows control/system panels; and in-game menus and are often poorly labelled. This is on top of considerations that have always been there like resolution, texture quality and so on.

Richard S

Question/Clarification With console reviews of late you often mention running a game not at the maximum resolution supported by a console. Eg. Series S/X at 1080p and not 1440p/4K. This confused me somewhat in that having my Series X connected to a 4K display and then setting output to 1080p just gives me a poor quality image. Same with my Series S set at 1080p and not 1440p.

Christian Büschel

Hey 👋 I feel PC ports gotten a lot of attention from devs over the years. Considering that how come that some pc ports lack proper 21:9 support? Either there are black bars or the frame is cut of at the top and the bottom. In most cases it’s just an number change in an settings ini. Also what’s up with games removing AVX instructions after release?

Fabian Schneider

(I'm reposting this question only because Rich is on this week. I shall never repost it again) If you had to put a curse on yourself, would you rather: 1) Join Crazy Chicken (Moorhuhn) for 1000 frog leg dinners where yes, you do have to eat up 2) Play 10000 hours of a Crazy Chicken game, with sound, where the birds have been swapped with loudmouth Crazy Frogs

Lee Yarker

Every week my questions seem to revolve around DLSS, and this week is no different. The implementation of DLSS in many games seems to be to have options for performance, balanced and quality, with the newly added ultra performance for particularly taxing games when playing in a 4k resolution. Quality mode is clear that you take a low res image and up-sample the image so it appears to be a higher resolution but with hopefully a greater FPS. Performance and ultra performance take higher resolutions, down sample them and use AI super sampling to make up the difference?? (My lack of knowledge is quickly revealing itself). And finally balanced which seems to be set your resolution to 1440p, witchcraft happens and you get more frames per second. Or that seems to be the most optimum solution for watch dogs legion anyway. So, my question, what are the benefits/drawbacks to using each option? And what quality/performance differences are there with each one?

Somatyk

Afternoon gents. Do you think we're reaching or have reached peak gaming, technologically speaking? We're still using sticks and buttons connected to machines that connect to screens. Everything sounds and looks better, but I feel that some AAA titles now have lost a lot of their ingenuity and humour. Castle Rock being a notable exception. Everything feels like a sparsely populated huge map devoid of anything of substance just to keep us playing.

Jonas Taghizadeh (Taggen86)

Are there any plans to include crysis warhead in the crysis trilogy collection? If not, why? Thought you might have the answer to my question given your close contacts with crytec

1040STF

Why are Alex's files on Patreon so heavy ?

MittenFacedLass
>>67434076

I feel like it's kind of always been like this, to an extent. Though it has arguably gotten maybe a bit worse. PC gaming has always been fiddly, both for better and worse.

d0x360
>>67433819

Bad frame pacing can't be brute forced, it's a coding issue.

MittenFacedLass
>>67434995

I'm not quite sure what you're referring to 100%, but there is a difference between internally rendering at a non-native resolution, and outputting to a display at a non-native resolution of the display.

d0x360

A follow-up to my previous question about Microsoft working on their own DLSS alternative on consoles but more specifically the series x. If Microsoft does come out with something wouldn't that give them a very large advantage in visuals and frame rates? If they render games at 1080p couldn't they pack in more detail and effects while matching or exceeding performance levels of the PS5? Thanks for everything you guys do, we gamers genuinely appreciate it.

Oliver Mackenzie

John and Audi (and to a lesser extent Alex) seem very interested in retro titles, even those that came before their time. Richard however does not seem nearly as attracted to older games, despite the fact that he lived and worked through basically the entire era of 2D gaming. Why do you think this is?

MGsubbie

4th time is the charm (I hope) : Which games you do you guys think will be the first to support DirectStorage on PC? I'm guessing it'll be an optional feature for the highest quality LOD setting(s.) If that's too specific, what are your thoughts on the impact on the immediate future of PC gaming in general?

MGsubbie

Do you think we'll see a "native" mode for DLSS, where the original resolution remains and it just upsamples it to basically act as superior anti-aliasing?

J3llyS4ndw1ch

It has been a couple years since Control came out, what are the odds we get to see Remedy's Raytracing suite deployed in the Alan Wake re...make? Remaster? I think it would be a real showpiece for their tech but it seems like a big project.

Anonymous

Good day gentlemen! Would love to see a video at some point where every one of you talks about your one (or two or three) favourite games of all time and explain why, much like you’ve started doing with your GOTY-lists at the end of the year. Any chance you will do this? And if not, would you mind answering this now? Cheers

Expansion Pak

A few weeks ago, Rich proposed the idea of submitting questions for him to test against the Ryzen 4700S, and I brought up being curious if it was possible to test how much performance the CPU is left with for other tasks if the IO unit was handling the bulk of the storage load in a PS5. Rich responded that it would be hard to test because of poor pcie support, but also because most PS5 titles aren't currently using the hardware blocks. With this in mind, I'm curious about a few things. Are you only aware of this fact due to speaking with developers, or are other things leading you to that conclusion as well? More importantly, I'm curious why it is that most software is currently not using the IO unit - presumably then leaving most IO duties up to the CPU. According to my understanding of Mark Cerny's presentation, Cerny measured the output of the unit in terms of how many PS5 CPU cores it would take to accomplish the same task the IO unit could, and that core count exceeded the number of physically available CPU cores. Thus, assuming that the hardware blocks were heavily saturated by demanding storage tasks, including decompression, I find it fascinating that this bespoke hardware could perform something that would potentially otherwise overwhelm the CPU. Is it just a matter of most games not currently benefitting from this, or needing the potential CPU headroom? Lastly, do you have any general hopes or expectations for the way the IO hardware could benefit performance or design in the future? This curiosity also extends to Direct Storage on PC and Xbox , as well as its hardware blocks and BCPack texture compression algorithm.

D G

Hay DFGuys, I am curious what your take is on the ever increasing Development costs of AAA Games. It seems that every Generation they go up. I read a game having a 150 million dollar budget is not a rare thing. Are we seeing more 'crunch' time, as well as development time increasing, due to game prices not going up proportionally to costs? How long do you think the Industry can continue on like this without a major price increase? Any guesses on how much of an increase would it even be?

WMCheerman

Hello guys love the show. My Question is what are the exact differences between Mesh shaders and Primitive Shades. I keep hearing the PS5 only has Primitive shades is this correct and how will that impact games.

TheCollector

With new GPU hardware on the horizon what feature(s)/capabilities would usher in the next generation of graphical immersion, realism, or interactivity?

Matt Hargett

With the OLED Switch having differently spec’d RAM, will it be possible for homebrew tools to overclock the memory bus as the community has done for other handhelds? How much additional headroom could be visibly gained in some of the more challenged games?

Robert Brown

Would you rather a theoretical PS5 pro doubled the computer units to 72 or added some kind of machine learning core for better AI upscaling.

Dissecta
>>67433680

The situation hasn’t really changed much Yamaha are launching one that should work… but it is dependent on future firmware updates so unknown when. Denon and Marantz are now fixed, but only have one port that is compatible (so pointless if you have Series s/x and PS5.] Onkyo (and Pioneer) have one that works and has been tested by Vincent of HDTV Test, but unknown when they will be out and may no be in UK at all as another Brexit “win”. Personally it’s still a wait until next year and see how it has panned out situation.

Anonymous

We've seen Microsoft get significant mileage on back-compat titles (FPS Boost, 16X AF) from tweaks at the various hardware abstraction layers on Xbox (virtualization/DirectX/Driver/System level). However, we've also seen some apparent CPU bottlenecks/stutters in certain titles like Control which have since been rectified with system updates. Is it possible that these abstraction layers add "baked in" overhead to the platform, negating some of the "on paper" advantages that the Series X has over the PS5?

Marcel Fritz

With Nvidia's RTXGI (Ray Traced Global Illumination Solution) now available on Unreal Marketplace, do you think this could be a better solution than Lumen for UE5?What ive seen of some example usages, it gets similar results and the perfomance scalability is much higher. It seems like many games are using light probes and this looks like the next evolution.

Oliver Mackenzie

With respect to the CFI-1100’s performance differences, is it possible that there are simply unit-to-unit performance variations between individual PS5s of all models that have not been previously reported? Obviously Sony has claimed that PS5 consoles are pegged to a “model SoC” for clockrates but maybe there is some variance (perhaps unintended).

gruntelite

Hello DF Panel. What do you think we may see regarding backwards compatibility on PSVR2 for old PSVR titles? Could we see significant improvements to resolution, visuals, and tracking? Could there be something akin to Backwards Compatibility+ on VR? Possibly any improvements at a system level not requiring game patches? Is there a chance it will be so fundamentally different that there will simply be no backwards compatibility?

J3llyS4ndw1ch
>>67455942

Trailer is out and I didn't see anything that looked like RT to me. Oh well, it's a nice game anyway.

Iain Stannard

Following on from Alex’s excellent Serious Sam video: which classic PC game do you feel would most benefit from the same kind of ray-tracing/global illumination makeover?