Coming this week on Digital Foundry (Week 45, 2021) (Patreon)

Hello everyone, it's Rich here with your outlook on what to expect from Digital Foundry this week! Today we're going to be going live with our detailed PC breakdown of Forza Horizon 5 - which has been on early access since yesterday. If you're on the standard supporter tier, moving up to the premium tier is worth considering. Any non-embargoed content that sits in the YouTube queue gets offered up to premium and retro supporters as soon as we are able to share it, complete with high quality downloads. And it looks like our Tales of Arise video will also be getting early access soon.

But here's what the team is up to this week!

* Rich (ie me) is finishing up a behind the scenes video for premium+ tiers on how we brought our Forza Horizon 5 coverage to bear, then moving on to the FH5 developer interviews. There is a ton of new information here and I can't wait to share it.

* Alex is moving on to a smaller video concentrating on the 'mod' from DF Supporter Frosticles that allows for RT reflections to be active at all times in FH5. How does RT look in-game? What's the cost to Nvidia and AMD GPUs? Could it be added to Series X quality mode?

* Tom is knee deep in our Call of Duty Vanguard work, starting off with a look at PS5, Series X and Series S consoles in both 60Hz and 120Hz modes. 

* John and Audi are working on the next DF Retro instalment, taking a look at the classic Splatterhouse franchise. This also means that the brilliant Ridge Racers/Ridge Racer 6/Ridge Racer 7 DF Retro episode launched last month will be going public soon.

As regular readers of this column will know, it's all about the pivot. And we have two massive pivoting points incoming - GTA Definitive Edition (no code there from R*, I suspect we'll be getting it on day one via our favourite digital stores) and then the Elden Ring network test. So we'll be covering both as quickly as we can, work will likely start this week, but coverage will take time so bear with us there.

I also wanted to share a bit more news now that embargoes are up. You might be wondering what the other major studio visit I did actually was - well, I took a flight over to Poland last month to catch up with the Infinity Ward tech team, who had a lot of input into Call of Duty: Vanguard (it's based on an evolved version of the IW8 engine used in Modern Warfare 2019). There's lots of fascinating stuff to share there: a VRS solution superior to AMD's hardware implementation, just for starters. All being well, I'll be starting work on the tech deep dive there soon but for now... enjoy your week!

Enjoy your week!