Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 28, 2024) (Patreon)

Hello there and welcome to your weekly update on everything that is happening with Digital Foundry! The Monday morning #content meeting happened as per normal with all hands present - bar Tom, who's got the day off. No worries though as we know precisely what he's going to be up to this week.

• Tom - for it is he - will be taking a look at The First Descendant on all consoles and with perhaps a dash of PC in there too. We've not even loaded it up yet, but apparently the console versions have (a hushed awe please) some actually tangible differences, which will be a bit of a novelty.

• Rich (ie me) continues to work on the Surface Laptop with Snapdragon X Elite. You saw some of my work with Auto SR in this week's Direct, which looks rather fascinating actually, but there's a lot more to dig into on this one - specifically GPU and CPU performance. Beyond that, I am interested in the budget PC piece (still!).

• John has three projects lined up: he'll be making good on earlier promises to deliver a big behind the scenes piece on Penny's Big Breakaway, which has had a huge amount of input from the developers. PlayStation 1 vs Sega Saturn face-off is next, along with N64 Year One beyond that.

• Oliver has been somewhat prolific of late! His iOS emulation video will go live this week (it's been on early access for premium tiers for a little while now) and he's just handed in a look at AC Mirage and Resi 7 on iOS... the problem being, Ubisoft has now significantly retooled its game. This will require a bit more time, therefore. Beyond that, in preparation for the big Switch 2 reveal, we're going to be putting together some big Switch programming, kicking off with an appreciation of everything Nintendo has achieved in its first-party titles from a technological standpoint.

• Alex - if the image above isn't helpful - is on the final furlong of his big FSR 3.1 upscaling breakdown. This one has proven troublesome as banked footage of all prior scalers on an external HDD corrupted, meaning he's had to do it from scratch. Thankfully, we have access to a build of Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart that still uses FSR 2.2, so we're good to go there. After that, Alex is intrigued by a pretty hardcore lighting mod for Dark Souls and he may well be doing a video about it. More details here: https://x.com/DS2LightingMod

• Will continues to bring our content to Eurogamer and delivers all of those DF deals - he's also preparing for the next generation of CPU reviews, which - we suspect - will be kicking off with Ryzen 9000. We're rediverting our attention on automated benchmarking to our upcoming CPU benchmark suite, containing a mixture of games old and new.

And it's at this point that I ask you if there's anything you'd like us to be looking at or investigating? We're not expecting any substantial game reviews until late August, so this is an opportunity to do more original and distinctive stories so feel free to suggest anything you like. In the meantime, we'll be recording the next DF InDirect in the next couple of weeks.

Hope everyone has a great week!