Bonus Material: Dark Souls 3 FPS Boost Analysis (Patreon)

Hi, Rich here with some selected clips from the testing Tom carried out on Dark Souls 3 with its FPS Boost upgrade. He produced an article for Eurogamer based on this work - https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-dark-souls-3-now-runs-at-60fps-on-xbox-series-x-s-thanks-to-fps-boost - so why not just add a quick voiceover to it and get it out on the channel?

Back when Digital Foundry started to take video a bit more seriously (late 2015ish), this is exactly what we would have done. But as has been hinted many times in various videos when mentioning the Patreon, the truth is that it took us a long time to find our feet on YouTube, figuring out what actually worked and crucially, how we could actually get money from the videos we made. Naively we thought we could use YouTube simply as a host for our data, but it gradually dawned on us that data alone isn't compatible with Google's ambitions for the platform.

On pure fps videos, view durations were minimal, the amount of non-monetised views was gigantic and what wasn't fun was to see that whatever internal metric Google used to recommend content was remarkably low for frame-rate tests so the content didn't really work - and could actually harm the fortunes of the channel. The point is, people didn't hang around to watch all of the video, and who can really blame them? Ultimately, it swiftly became evident that building a narrative around the game - an actual analysis, or some kind of interesting story -  was crucial. It's a bit like producing a car review that just gives you the 0-60mph and top speed stats. Yes, the info is marginally interesting, but it doesn't really tell you about the experience of driving the car.

Still, there's no reason we can't share the Dark Souls 3 data with you because it is interesting to see the stress points where Series S buckles but more importantly, just how poor the original experience was on Xbox One S and how big the improvement is. What causes Series S to momentarily dip beneath 60fps seems to absolutely hammer the base last-gen machine.

As for how we can actually use this work productively on YouTube, we are folding these clips into DF Direct Weekly #19 and making it one of the news topics.

Download links here: https://digitalfoundry.net/2021-07-09-dark-souls-3-frame-rate-test