Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 30, 2024) (Patreon)

Hi everyone, time for the weekly update on everything that's cooking here at Digital Foundry. All hands were present at today's #content meeting, and there's a lot to get through, so let's crack on!

• Rich (ie me) now has some good information from Microsoft about Auto SR upscaling, so I feel I can add something meaningful to the what we've already talked about on DF Direct. Beyond that: cheap PC or PS3 overclocking! The cheap PC situation has adjusted somewhat what with some ludicrously low i5 12400F pricing but I still want to look at the i3 12100F too.

• John continues to work on his current projects: he'll be looking at Double STEAL on OG Xbox for all the 720p open world delights it offers, and per Direct #172, work continues apace on the PlayStation vs Saturn face-off. I assisted John on some tricky footage this morning and it's all looking great.

• Alex returns to one of the tasks he couldn't address last week - revisiting Halo 2 Vista Edition on PC with a special guest! After that, there's talk of a new PC Retro Time Capsule... possibly Quake 4 - PC vs Xbox 360

• Tom is completing his look at The First Descendant and I can offer spoilers straight away by saying that frame-gen has been changed since we discussed it on DF Direct with... a 60fps cap? VRR on PS5 doesn't seem to do anything either - it's horribly jerky. That should be complete soon at which point he'll be taking a quick look at Marvel Rivals to see if we should be covering that.

• Oliver has bought an iPad Pro with the M4 processor! We're tying the bow on our iOS triple-A coverage by stacking up those ambitious games by testing on iPhone 15 Pro and the new iPad Pro - the weakest mobile device capable of running those games up against the most capable. Other projects: third party Switch tech retrospective and a choice from other things we want to look into (more on that in a sec)

• Will returns to taking care of our normal Eurogamer content after pouring all efforts into Prime Day and our own Prime sale on store.digitalfoundry.net. Did you buy anything? As we are concentrating more on 4K 120 and 8K 60 capture, we need faster SSDs, so I bought a couple of 4TB Samsung 990 Pros. Did any of you avail yourself of any bargains?

Other stuff we're trying to cram in: we're excited by the No Man's Sky update and are trying to figure out the best way to tackle it. We're also going to take a look at No One Wants To Die, which looks very nice indeed. We also have Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess code which we'll assess for #content opportunities.

Meanwhile, I've spent a lot of time in the last week working with Illusion on our revised benchmarking workflow. Lots going on there, and it looks like we're making progress on custom benchmarks for games that require manual inputs. That's the final hurdle really, having conquered automation for standard canned benchmarks and other benchmarks that first require gameplay to reach (eg the 'Highly Explosive Materials' run from Crysis 3 (Remastered). I will be putting some kind of bonus materials together for that.

We're still choosing between CapFrameX or Nvidia FrameView as the benchmarking tool of choice, but the great news is that our interactive benchmark viewer on Eurogamer has been updated behind the scenes to support captures from both tools.

And that's the end of the update - do feel free to suggest anything we might have missed!