Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 29, 2024) (Patreon)

Hi everyone, Rich here - once again - with your weekly update on everything that is happening with Digital Foundry. As usual, 'there's a lot to unpack' as people say, so let's get straight to it.

• Oliver has a trio of projects lined up. First of all, there's a discussion video with John discussing the triumphs of Nintendo's first-party Switch output across the generation. It's the first of several Switch videos we're planning in the run-up to a Switch 2 reveal. Total guesswork here - but we're expecting a reveal trailer before the year is out. After that, he's working on Ace Combat 7 on Switch. Then, finally, by popular demand, we'll be revisting the entirety of the Apple triple-A line-up, this time played on Apple M4 on the latest iPad Pro.

• Alex is working on a PC Time Capsule video for Halo 2, with a very special guest! We're also looking into a mod that massively ramps up the RT in Forza Motorsport (!). Remember the Dark Souls 2 lighting mod? Chance are Tom will be looking at that now once his current projects are over.

• John is moving back into retro territory! He's working with (another!) very special guest looking at Double STEAL: The Second Clash on OG Xbox... an open world game that run at 720p! There's more to this story, but I'm not going to spoil it. Simultaneously, work continues on the epic PlayStation vs Sega Saturn face-off. THE classic fifth generation head-to-head, with choice games compared with today's Digital Foundry techniques.

• Tom is producing a video on Concord in collaboration with John, and we're looking to cover off both PS5 and PC versions. This will be a smaller video, as befits a beta, delivered in the same way we did Astro Bot. A kind of mini-Direct if you like. Then, he circles back to complete work on The First Descendant, which is a bit of a time sink, bearing in the wealth of modes in there - plus frame-gen.

• Will once again continues the hard work of maintaining our presence on Eurogamer and, of course, it's Prime Day this week, meaning he's at the forefront of our bargain-locating efforts. Me? I'm after mass storage HDDs and discounted Samsung 990 Pros, which we've discovered are essential for 4K120 capture.

• Rich (ie me) spent the weekend working with Illusion on our automated PC benchmarking plans. More on this shortly. I'm also happy to report that Microsoft will be sharing more on Auto SR with us, which means that all of the assets I prepared (some of which you saw in Direct #170) can form the basis of a good story. I may move the analysis of the Snapdragon X Elite into a separate video. When the ARM stuff is out of the way, it's time for a video 'for me'. I got the latest hackable PS3 from Facebook Marketplace this weekend and I've very much like to return to my PS3 GPU overclock concept video!

So that's where we are right now but I want to talk a bit more about the PC benchmarking project and why it is so important. We've come to accept that at most we get a week to review a new CPU or GPU. At the moment, our FCAT-based workflow requires massive operator effort. Automation is clearly the way to go so we can get 'the numbers, Mason' done more quickly to make written/video reviews possible and also just to enjoy the product more holistically.

A lot of research has gone into this. We've looked at the Linus OCR/script technique and given that a shot. Last month, I met up with Nvidia's internal benchmark team in Santa Clara after IGN Live to discuss our approach and see how they do things. However, ultimately, we've decided on a completely different approach to anything anyone else does. We've discontinued our own efforts on OCR and scripts in favour of game mods that essentially make the games bench themselves. I may do a behind-the-scenes video on this, because it sounds nuts, but it's beautiful to see in motion.

More data, both in terms of quality and quantity are what excites me here. I mean, why benchmark exclusively at ultra settings? Fine for a 4090, but a 4060? The dream would be to bench with several configurations, including with DLSS - and this is going to make that happen. With our system you can just stack up however many configurations you'd like to see tested and it runs through them all in turn. On a basic level, that's ultra at 1080p, 1440p, 2160p - but there's no reason you can't add as many more as you'd like. Optimised settings, medium settings (which look fine these days), whatever you like. It just powers through.

Automation typically limits you to canned benchmark sequences, but we feel we have a route forward for titles that require manual inputs too. I'm eager to share more but also to get feedback on the system and what you would like to see in terms of data. We're really hoping that we can get this fully on line for the next CPU reviews - and that's going to be interesting because so many of our new CPU tests do require manual inputs (Cyberpunk, Baldur's Gate 3, Dragon's Dogma 2 etc etc).

Ultimately, the idea is to use that review week we do get more productively - benchmark the product but actually investigate it more thoroughly outside of the numbers. All of this is a much longer term push to do much more with PC without diminishing the quality or quantity of anything else we do.

Anyway, that's all from me on this one - so feel free to suggest subjects for coverage or anything else in the comments box that remains, as ever, below. Have a great week!