Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 18, 2024) (Patreon)

Ladies and gentlemen - hello! - and welcome to the latest update from Digital Foundry. Fresh from this morning's #content meeting, we have detailed descriptions of everything that's happening this week.

First up, we're going to be updating DF Direct Weekly #160 with a new 'Future Rich' intro to the Fallout 4 news topic. This is required as Bethesda has tweeted out that there's nothing wrong with the Xbox version of the game, even though we continue to see no difference between the performance and quality modes. Meanwhile, what you do get on Xbox is a clear settings downgrade compared to PS5's quality mode and even the standard 4K 30fps experience of the Xbox One X version running under back-compat.

We reported the bug to Bethesda on Friday and did so again yesterday complete with comparison images, so hopefully it will be resolved, but for now, let's crack on with the plans for this week. John's away this week though!

• Tom is, of course, concentrating on our Fallout 4 coverage before moving on to a deeper look at Paper Mario on Nintendo Switch.

• After his surprise pivot last week, Alex is returning to his Unreal Engine 5.4 breakdown, now we have the Matrix Awakens City Sample demo running successfully on the latest iteration of the engine. We'll look to get that downloadable to premium tiers as bonus material.

• Oliver has completed his look at ray tracing on Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally (expect that on premium tiers soon) and is looking into a Nintendo Switch vs iPhone 15 mobile gaming face-off.

• Marc 'Try4ce' Duddleson has handed in a draft of his Final Fantasy 14 for Xbox video, which I'll be taking a look at soon. Look out for that this week. After his epic FF14 video for PS5, I can't wait to check this out.

• Rich (ie me) has finished work for now on the Omen Transcend 14 sponsored video (path-tracing on a 65W RTX 4070?) which will likely spawn a few exclusive DF clips as a lot of work went into that. I'm then moving on to some R&D and benchmarking work, but I do want to indulge myself with my budget PC build at some point - Core i3 12100F and Intel Arc A750... can it beat PS5?

• Will continues to mastermind our renewed merchandising push. I've just seen a new product I'm quite excited about which hopefully will be revealed soon. He's also updating his monitor reviewing methodology and has a number of monitor reviews heading to Eurogamer soon.

Is there anything else you feel we should be looking at? This can be games or concepts or anything really. We're encouraged by the success of Alex's Dragon's Dogma 2 path tracing video, for example, and feel that a slight change in balance between reviewing games and pursuing original concepts is how we're going to make our way through the next few months, which look somewhat threadbare otherwise.

That's all for now though. Thanks - as ever - for continuing to support Digital Foundry and I hope you have a great week!