Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 26, 2024) (Patreon)

Hello! Another week, another Digital Foundry #content meeting and I'm here to tell you exactly what happened there and to prime you with details on what everyone is currently working on, so let's get straight to it.

• Rich (ie me) just has product filming to do on the Asus ROG Ally X video, then it's time to move on to a deeper dive on the Surface Laptop featuring the Snapdragon X Elite. The budget PC video is still on the cards too.

• John is on point for our Luigi's Mansion 2 HD coverage for Nintendo Switch and is also going to be working on our next big DF Retro project - N64: Year One. That's a look at every N64 release that arrived in the first year in each of the major territories.

• Oliver is working on an iOS emulation video, then taking a look at Assassin's Creed Mirage on iOS - which should tie a bow on our triple-A iPhone 15 Pro coverage... for now.

• Tom is deep into our Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree coverage, which also features a look at how Elden Ring on PC is looking now. While we're looking at the DLC, the main thrust of the piece is on the extent to which - if anything - Elden Ring's dodgy tech has improved since launch. After that? Likely Beyond Good and Evil.

• Alex is still working on his Lossless Scaling video, including a look at double frame generation! He's also putting together formative plans on a big, big PC video looking back at PhysX.

• Will continues to deliver most of our output on Eurogamer, and we're starting to revamp our PC CPU benchmark suite. Will's also going to be chasing up merch, as we may have a very nice product launch coming soon!

On the subject of benchmarking, we're continuing to work behind the scenes on our own automated system for this. We now have our own working demos of being able to swap in config files into any given game, load the game, navigate to the benchmark, start the benchmark, quit the game, swap in the next config file, then rinse and repeat. We're using Python scripts to do this and optical character recognition to pick up on when to make selections, when to start the benchmarks etc. It's similar to the Linus methodology you may have seen, but we consider swapping in and out config files as the best way forward in ensuring automation produces good results.

The next big challenge is represented most fully by CPU benchmarking. In finding CPU-limited areas, inevitably you find that manual runs are required - not canned benchmark sequences. We're looking into recording and playing back joypad commands here. Tricky! In some cases, we're even hacking game save files so the save brings us directly to the benchmark point, as opposed to having to manually navigate to, say, the Psycho cutscene at the beginning of Welcome to the Jungle in Crysis 3.

The key objective with all of this is to retain accuracy but to essentially have the PCs benchmark themselves so we can spend time with new products actually using them as opposed to just benching them. The other key benefit here is that we won't just be limited to ultra settings runs... wouldn't optimised settings be a better fit for, say, an RTX 4060? This is a long project that will take time to complete, but fingers crossed we will have tests ready for the Zen 5 launch.

Anything else we should be looking at? As always, the comments box is invitingly empty below.