Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 32, 2024) (Patreon)

Hi everyone and welcome to the 32nd weekly update for the year of our lord 2024! It's here where I'll be sharing the minutes of our content meeting and giving you some idea of everything we have planned for release in this week and beyond. We had a full house this week, with even Audi joining us via John's house, so let's get straight down to the #content breakdown.

• Will is working on our reviews for the first wave of Ryzen 9000 processors, with gaming benchmarks put together using our new automated benchmarking systems. The amount of games covered will be slightly lower than usual as more automations are still in progress, but this has proven to be an excellent test for how robust the systems are. We're not quite ready to deploy video CPU reviews yet, but that might change soon. Exciting times though!

• Rich (ie me) has finished our Auto SR coverage (screenshot above) and the video is out now on Early Access to premium tiers. I also completed the Eurogamer write-up too, which sees the return of the zoomer comparison gallery. I'm also working on the new benchmarking project and will be producing a behind the scenes video on this next. Yes, I'm still keen on the budget PC video and PS3 GPU overclocking!

• John is continuing to work on our mammoth PlayStation 1 vs Sega Saturn face-off, but (along with Alex) he also found time to talk with Ninja Theory about the stunning visuals of Hellblade 2. We'll do our best to get that #content to you this week, while we're also hoping that the PS1/Saturn face-off will be ready for Retro Tier supporters by the weekend. The concept of bringing modern DF testing methodology to mid-90s consoles proved more challenging than we thought - but we've done it and we're really excited about it.

• Alex is back from vacation! He's producing a new Tech Focus video on VRR: what is it, how does it work and why you can't assume that it'll solve all the technical problems facing games today.

• Tom - after having saved Direct #174 with his various tests! - is now moving on to take a look at the Dark Souls 2 Lighting Engine Mod - this looks like a truly fabulous effort that aims to restore the lighting removed from the original game, while modernising it with the latest PC features.

• Oliver is working on the Hellblade 2 interview edit based on assets provided by John, Alex and Ninja Theory. He's also going to be moving on the second part of our Switch retrospective, looking at the most remarkable third-party Switch games. More #content? How about re-assessing Xbox Series S vs Series X and PS5 viewed through the lens of a 1080p display owner? Does the gulf in fidelity reduce and to what extent does Series S make sense for a full HD screen? And conversely, what about the premium consoles at full HD?

I'm not going to lie - the last month or so have been challenging as the lack of games and hardware has had an impact on our YouTube stats, while the huge amount of background work on our revised PC benchmarking system has reduced my own contributions to the channel significantly. It's your support that makes all the difference, so I'd just like to thank you all for everything - it's deeply appreciated. Have a great week!

Oh, and of course, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, the comments box is 'below', as ever!