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Call for questions on Digital Foundry Weekly (Week 39, 2021) (Patreon)

Published:
2021-09-29 13:42:53
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Friends, family and diplomats, DF Direct Weekly is once again upon us. After being mortified Audi was let out of captivity and allowed on camera, Rich is back again this week ensuring the universe is back in balance, and with him comes John and Alex. This week, they will be talking chip shortages, Dolby Vision on Xbox, Unity scrolling, and so much more. But most importantly, your questions, comrades.

Leave your comments and questions below!

Comments

Leigh Ashton

Considering some people prefer physical media, why not release games on USB sticks? They can be packaged in boxes, all the consoles have USB and I'm sure they could add some DRM to prevent duplication...?

Allan Lindqvist

Why do you think so many games have frame pacing/frame rate cap issues? It especially seems like frame rate caps would be a solved problem, still even in the latest halo beta, the frame rate cap is broken. Is there some technical challenge or do you think it's just a low priority issue for devs? Also, driver level caps seems to almost always work, while games struggle

Michael Pearn

Hi team, I’m really fascinated by Ratchet & Clank’s fixed 40 fps in a 120 hz TV setting - and wondering if you have any developer insights or commentary as to whether that could be a more common pattern we see being implemented? It seems to me an exciting middle ground between fidelity and performance on console for those that have 120hz screens.

Leigh Ashton

John; Why do you think there is no resurgence of boutique CRT manufacturers? You can buy vinyl turntables, cassette players and cd players.. i would imagine there would be a niche but strong market for high quality modern crts, the tech would surely be better nowadays?

Leigh Ashton

John, Audi; Why do you think we get poorly written emulation on virtual consoles and ports of old games? I would imagine it should be easy to hire (or contract) some pro emulation coders and give them the support they need to make something excellent. poorly emulated games surely hurt the image of these companies?

N30n V

I'm gonna repost my question from last week since it never fit the theme of the last episode. Looking at Rich's latest video with regards to PS5 SSD testing and our DF Discord homebrewed #TapeGate, it seems like the random read IO requirement for current games like RnC are not that big (<190K for SN750SE 250GB) whereas the internal SSD in PS5 in theory should be able to do >1M 4K IOPS. So my question is, What do you see as potential use case in future games to utilize that many random read IOPS? considering real-time fast traversal (e.g Portals in RnC) is already possible using alternative techniques using much slower hardware? Would we ever need to render everything full res in real-time? Would the SoC be able to handle it? And last but not least do you think a use case for Sequential bandwidth requirement of 5500MB/s or 9000MB/s (compressed) in future could be large scale decompression of game assets in real-time which might have originally been e.g. 300+GB in game size on PS5 if they were not compressed?

Leigh Ashton

Alex, Rich?; Given your praise of DLSS 2.x, what are your thoughts on DLAA as a high-end AA for discerning patrons... :)

Thermopyle

Last week a new Mario movie was announced to land in 2022, just short of 30 years since the poorly-received live action movie. Since then there have been many game-to-screen adaptations, from Resident Evil and Tomb Raider to Uwe Boll to Sonic and Pokemon. Starting even before then, there have also been many games with licensed content, from Goonies and E.T. to Witcher and the many Star Wars, Lego, Marvel, and DC adaptations. What are your favorite and least favorite game to TV/movie adaptations, and on the reverse, your favorite/least favorite games based off of other media?

Allan Lindqvist
>>68776585

Right? I been wondering this as well... I really think it will come at some point, they could ditch the optical drive to save money too

Art Vandelay

Hey, DF! As we approach one year into the new consoles generation, what tech features would you say are the defining ones so far? SSDs? Zen2 CPUs? What about the next few years, as we leave the cross-gen period behind? Perhaps UE5-like features such as Nanite? And lastly, what do you expect will be the hallmarks of future generations? Full-on raytracing and AI, maybe?

Ray

How does DF handle work life balance?

Somatyk

Afternoon gentlemen. Are we as gamers currently placing too much at the altar of ray tracing? I sometimes struggle to tell the difference between it and other less expensive, methods in quite a few games. And when do you think the tipping point will be breached to be able to fully utilise rt with current console hardware?

Leigh Ashton

Guys, would you prefer a rock steady 60fps at 1440p with TAA upsampling, or native 4k at 60 with regular dips to 50-55fps. Does the story change if its 1800p with occasional small dips? Do you think there will come a time where developers remove the option to set a resolution, or decouples the render resolution from the display and automatically scales to hit a framerate target instead

Jonas Taghizadeh (Taggen86)

More and more pc games suffer from streaming/shader compilation stutter (especially UE4 games e.g., Kena). Why do we see these stutters? Is there anything you can do as a gamer to minimize them/make them less noticeable?

Gordon McBain

I play alot of multiplayer games with friends. In recent times, this has started to become a chore. Back in the day, you popped a disc in and played the game. Now you have to plan ahead to ensure everyone has the games installed or not archived on an external hdd. Do you think developers should add an option for the multiplayer mode to be separate (kind of like cods options to install certain components of the game) or runnable from a mechanical hdd where ssd is not entirely necessary? I was wondering what your thought would be.

xwurm
>>68776694

They did a video in that and concluded that it's a great mode they would like to see more often.

Lee Yarker

Can the AI tech used in DLSS and DLAA be transferred to other graphical improvements, say textures, global illumination or particle effects? etc.

Jonathan Thomassen

Why don't we see SSAA as a graphics option in more games? I think it's a great option for enhanced image quality, especially in older games where modern graphics hardware will often breeze through playing it at 'normal' resolutions.

Joe Tangco

Labo VR could be used for Switch Online Virtua Boy games, right? lol.... *sigh*

Leigh Ashton
>>68780255

I used to love SGSSAA :) I'm hoping DLAA is a great option for this, but you can use DSR on Nvidia through the drivers to create 'virtual resolutions' and through AMD's drivers using VSR

Mr Bespoke

Whats the most biggest technical issue(s) you ever faced when trying to create content for Digital Foundry or DF Retro?

Wakka Wakka

You've mentioned before that the Patreon supporter program has been a great boost to the DF team, and it's obvious from my position as a supporter that the output of DF has only gotten better and better as a result. However, are there any ways in which the Patreon program has made your lives more difficult? Has the Discord's constant pings and ramblings from adult children made you think, at any point, "What have I done???"

Stefan von der Krone

As I recall, DXR reflections cannot be upscaled via DLSS. Do you think this will be possible in the future? Maybe through not only pulling color information on ray hit but also motion vectors. And what about path traced games like Quake 2 RTX? Or does that game already have DLSS support?

MGsubbie

For the entire team : What is the worst ragequit you guys ever experienced in a game?

ShwaMiller

I was thinking about how cool it would have been if DF Direct had been around the last 30 years, so there was an archive of the weekly developments in gaming -- as this show shall become to Patrons as yet unborn. Would John and Audi ever consider a DF Retro version of the YT channel The Great War (but less frequent); say, monthly: 'this month, in 1989' (of course dressed in time-appropriate apparel) and take us through the years of the past in parallel to the "here and now"?

Demstel

Hey DF team. Did you consider moving the filming of the DF direct on Friday and adjusting dates accordingly? Filming on Thursday means missing alot of important weekly news that had to be covered on next weeks direct delayed, while filming on Friday from what I noticed on the recent months would not miss anything major. Thursday had a lot of news and even showcases that you missed for the week so wondering if you considered the move.

Anonymous

What’s the deal with resizable BAR support, anyway? Does this really provide a substantial performance increase in some games, and in what specific ways?

Brian Anthony Seals

Greetings, Digital Foundry! I'd like your opinions regarding the future of keyboard and mouse support on console.  I spend a significant amount of gaming time on PC and I believe certain genres (such as RTS and Card based games) suffer too much when confined to controller inputs. There are small lists of games, on PS5 and Series consoles,  that are keyboard and mouse compatible, but I don't see these lists growing. In fact, I suspect the number of gamers that would take advantage of such functionality, will always be too small to cater to. Will this continue to be a niche concern, unworthy of development time? And, will this doom some genres to limited success?

AGSMA

Hi there! Have any of you ever bought a game solely for its presentation? Not the graphics or tech, but rather the game's personality, basically judging the game by its cover. If so, what was the last game you bought solely based on its cover/premise and if you would recommend it to anyone else?

bjorktribe

Hey Gents, do you suppose the power situation in China will have any long-term effects on the games industry from software to hardware & parts production?

Anonymous

The PS5 and Xbox Series consoles both use GDDR6 for both the GPU and CPU. What impact, if any, does this have on CPU performance for the next gen consoles?

Anonymous

I was curious if you think there will be a new steering wheel announced for GT7 that includes DualSense features.

Dubuc Nathan

Greetings !! We've seen this week another exemple of a game that uses Screen Space Reflections, but always has a foreground element (here the bike) hiding objects from the view, thus causing objects to disappear from the reflection all the time. This also happens in FPS with weapons, or in TPS with your own character. The question is this: Would it be possible in such a scenario to render the occluder seperatly from the rest of the scene, kind of in another layer, have a foreground layer for the weapon/bike, rendered separately from the rest of the scene, which would be the background layer. Then calculate the Screen Space Reflection using only the informations of this background layer, preventing your own weapon/bike to occlude anything. Sorry for the very long question, have a great day !

Small Town Volcano

Seeing the same issues crop up again and again regarding poor and uneven frame rates on a number of unity titles recently, it's hard not to imagine someone extrapolating that into unity being a poor or broken engine. I understand game development is complex and that glaring issues can stem from a number of different factors, but I often wonder if Unity and even to a degree Unreal (though I suspect they have this since they are working in the AAA space more often) should place a greater emphasis on QA processes ensuring these obvious issues with a possible easy optimization / fix are ironed out. After all, a splash screen "Made with Unity" followed by a game with a myriad of technical problems could reflect just as bad on the engine as the developers.

Eric Hurst

John, you clearly put a great deal of time and thought into your living room gaming / home theater setup so I’d like to ask you a question: Do you have a preferred method for playing pc games in a living room environment? I personally have my gaming pc in my office running while using the Steam Link app on my Apple TV to stream my game to my living room tv, and I use the Steam Controller to play games that have controller support or require mouse and keyboard. This solution works very well for me for more causal play. What is it you do?

Rick Champ

I assumed the proliferation of Android and Apple TV devices would drive a smartphone-like gaming market. Was this a missed opportunity or simply infeasible?

Rick Champ

Moss VR was stunning and used the top-down perspective of the original Final Fantasy 7. The remake looked great but a moss-like FF7 would have recreated the next-gen Wow experience of the original. Also, it’s just nice to play VR seated with a gamepad.

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?

Expansion Pak

When Sony adds 3D audio support for surround sound systems, as Mark Cerny described would eventually happen, do you think this will be a viable substitute to Atmos for games? At the Road to PS5 event, Cerny suggested that Atmos doesn't support as many sound sources as they wanted, at 32, when Sony wanted hundreds. Dolby denied that this is the case, saying that it's a purposefully imposed limit. Whatever the case may be, I'm curious how you think they might compare. As an aside, do you expect Dolby Vision to come to PS5? Thanks as always; you all inspire me and my love of gaming technology.

Daniel Fearn

Any chance DF will cover Elder Scrolls Online? They recently patched HDR and the game looks remarkably different (old settings are available as a toggle). It had a next gen update earlier in the year. They also announced it would get DLAA, a new tech from nvidia similar to DLSS but its some form of supersampling rather than up scaling.

Jay Fischetti

First parties can have a lot of control on what they require for games to pass certification. In the past they would have steep requirements like n64 games must not have z-fighting. Is there anything you would like to see required for developers like allowing gyro control for camera as a requirement?

Mat Azel

RE:Audi [DF30], I'd love for you guys to do a DF retro crossover and/or a have this guy on a weekly direct, his content is simply incredible^^ https://youtube.com/c/strafefox

Anonymous

Hello everyone! I'm ashamed to inform you that I found out about your existence quite recently, but your content is so much fun. So I decided to join you on Patreon, and now I have even more fun, so thank you all for the awesome content. My question is about 30 (or 24 for that matter, Kena) fps cutscenes in 60 fps games. I struggle with 24 fps even in movies, but when a game jumps from 60 to 30 and back again. It's just torture, in my opinion. What do you think about this? Should games have a consistent fps or is it just me? Or maybe they should at least add the options for that like they already are doing with a gameplay fps?

Rick Champ
>>68840218

i agree. you can increase fidelity by adding film’s signature “flaws” like 24 fps …but no movie switches between frame rates. when they occasionally do lower fps for things like fragmented flash backs, they’re momentary and meant to be jarring

Dr Delectable

Hello gents. Would it be possible, going forward, for you all to briefly mention what games you are playing each week in your free time? I'm genuinely curious what games you all enjoy that aren't necessarily a part of Digital Foundry work. Thanks!

Alex's Retro PC

When you play games in your own time on PC, do you prefer to adjust settings to lock to your maximum display refresh, or do you get it to a "good enough" balance between visuals and performance?