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Questions for DF Direct Weekly #21 (Week 29, 2021) (Patreon)

Published:
2021-07-21 16:37:57
Imported:
2022-03

Content

Hello everyone! This week is light on news, so this time around we are dedicating most of the DF Direct Weekly to YOUR questions, dear supporters! That's right, Rich, Alex and John will try to tackle as many of your questions as possible so be sure to leave your questions and comments below.

For retro questions, John & Audi are planning on doing a separate Q&A recording soon, so if you got retro specific questions your chances are higher when when we put out the call for that episode.  

Comments

Anonymous

A couple weeks ago, it was widely reported that Microsoft is hiring engineers to work on machine learning projects for PC and Xbox. Given the existing machine learning extensions on Xbox Series consoles and the relatively high TOPS performance of the Series X in particular (49 TOPS for 8-bit integer operations and 97 TOPS at 4-bit), is it likely that a performant ML-based upscaling solution similar to DLSS could be implemented on Xbox Series?

Anonymous

Howdy gang. Love, love, LOVE the content you put out. My question relates to OLEDs. I know John and Rich both own the LG CX, and I myself have enjoyed quite the ‘ahem’ colourful journey with OLED displays down the years. I have returned more TVs than I have fingers due to a range of uniformity issues, mostly to do with banding. Have you guys ever returned panels due to uniformity problems? While I love the tech, I still think there are improvements that can be made to panel production. That said, uniformity is definitely improved on the C1 this year. I’m currently rocking the 48-inch model as a monitor and the 77-inch version for my living room. My go to uniformity tests usually involve panning the camera across the sky in Rime, the Shadow of the Colossus PS4 remake, and MGS5. And yes… I should clearly seek help for my obsessive Terminator eyes.

Anonymous

Rich, what measures did you take to help prevent burn in on your OLED monitor?

Eric Hurst

Rich, you once teased that you had knowledge about the Watch Dogs E3 2012 reveal and what it was running on. Can you and will you reveal more information about that, including what it was running on, how it managed to look that good, and what may have happened to the game visually between then and launch?

Matthew Glenn

When is the AVR landscape for HDMI 2.1 expanding? Have you heard about / had a chance to test any new 2.1 compatible receivers or switchers? I've been waiting for one to be released that doesn't require a hardware patch, but the only one I've seen is the Onkyo TX-NR5100, and I can't find any reviews for it.

Anonymous

Do any of you play with inverted vertical controls? We exist! Strength in numbers, they can't shame all of us! ..... *Crickets

Anonymous

Hello Gentlemen, with most of the big developers/publishers moving towards service based model, What do you see in the future for "closed" single player and co-op games? With Nintendo sticking to Mario and Zelda for the most part, do you see Sony being the only platform focusing on these with new innovations/storylines etc.? Also how does this shift to "service based games" impacts Retro Gaming in let's say next 10-15 years? From preservation to re-playability perspective. Also btw. Its pronounced Neon and letter V ;)

Anonymous

Will it be possible to gauge the performance of the steam deck now? To install linux, use a zen 2 cpu with similar number of cores and similar clocks, use an rnda 2 gpu with tweaked clocks and number of CUs, run steam proton benchmarks at 720p. The video will be similar in concept to rich speculative video on series x before it was released

Ray

Do you guys have any thoughts as to why so much gaming discourse these days between players, media and devs has become so much more aggressive? It's honestly extremely tiring and disheartening. It seems like many "gamers" and some games journalists really enjoy just beating people down instead of celebrating and encouraging progress. Digital Foundry is a refreshing space in that it doesn't succumb to these issues. And if you have criticisms you present them in a mature and professional manner.

Anonymous

Working on games as you do, you’re often forced to look at games you might have otherwise passed up, sometimes having to look at them multiple times over. Are there any games, particularly frequently released ones, that you feel you would have loved if you’d been able to leave that series alone for a few games prior? For example, would Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey have been less of a slog if you hadn’t played since Brotherhood? From Cliptacular

Simplex

John, could you elaborate on how you are using BFI on your LG OLED? What TV settings, what Windows/game settings are best for BFI?

bb050dba

I've been wondering why both Sony and Microsoft have partnered with AMD for the last two console generations. As the consoles become more and more like PCs, I think it would be interesting to see one of them go with Nvidia. Is it simply because AMD can offer an APU or SOC solution, or is there more to it? Seems like Steam Deck is also going with AMD. Where do you think Nintendo will go for Switch 2?

Anonymous

So, Mario Kart 8 turned 7 years old a few months ago, being only 8 month younger than GTA V on PS3 and Xbox 360. Do you think we can expect a Mario Kart 9 anytime soon on Switch ? Or would we have to wait the next Nintendo console in your opinion ?

Anonymous

The Polymega is (would be) a really great fit for my gaming lifestyle so I preordered it a while ago. But I always live with some level of buyers remorse given the rough waters regarding its production, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this among DF supporters. Have you spoken to the team over there since your excellent coverage of the console, and if so, is there anything you can share to that point? Thanks a bunch!

Anonymous
>>64193387

Feeling old after reading this question ? I do after writing it...

Anonymous
>>64192502

I learned to play console fps with N64 goldeneye, I never unlearned inverted vertical look. Invert ahoy!

Anonymous

Amazon is trying another MMO and is being accused of burning up graphics cards because of unlocked menu frame rates! This hardly seems like their fault, and more something the graphics cards manufacturers should account for with power & thermal throttling. I hesitate to call this shoddy development on Amazon's part, but perhaps this is a slip of the QA process. Do you have a stance here?

Anonymous

A follow up question. If you like it. We have talked multiple times about how digital services and service based games are denting game preservation. But is this not true that services are the best way to preserve games for the masses (as long as it is done the right way)? because not everybody might own a legacy console and the game in original media format. Case in point. Games from MGS series. If somebody wants to play MG (the MSX versions) for masses you can either emulate or play with a compendium. For MGS, you need PS1 (but that's where GOG has come as a savior and preserved the game for everybody to play on PC) MGS Portable Ops (a mainline game) There is no way to play this game for the masses unless you own PSP or emulation. MGS4, unless you own PS3 right now (also via emulation in the future) , you won't be able to play this game. PSNow has preserved it for the masses (for now at least). Thoughts on this?

Anonymous

Curious what your opinion on the rampant devotion to leaked info is. One side maintains that it's fair game as long as no laws are broken and that leaks allow people to plan or budget better. The other side argues that it dampens excitement by killing any surprises and makes companies less likely to experiment should a leaked concept get negative attention. Thoughts?

Anonymous

Do you think the 6nm ps5 will need liquid metal or it will transition to traditional thermal paste? Or maybe liquid metal until the 5nm revision?

Anonymous

PS Vita tech and games retrospective when?

Alan

The console manufactures said that the PS4 and Xbox One would be able to run games at 1080p and 60fps, however this was very limited in the actual number of games that could achieve this, now with the PS5 and Xbox Series X we have been told to expect games to run at 4k and 60fps with ray-tracing and on the current games so far released were are having to choose between 4k, 60fps and ray-tracing, is the PS5 and Xbox Series X actually capable of running games in 4k at 60fps with ray-tracing or have we been suckered in like we were with the PS4 and Xbox One, is this as good as we are going to get with the PS5 and Xbox Series X or are there things that developers can do to achieve this more constantly in games?

Anonymous

I would be interested in an Apple M1 special comparing performance to a range of modern PCs, to find where it fits in. There currently aren’t many native games but Rosetta 2 seems to work well so that could be used with your suite of test games. Could also give a quick evaluation of the gaming in Mac experience.

Anonymous

so it seems like a given that Switch 2 will have some upgraded specs, probably with DLSS support, etc - but one idea I've gotten in my head is whether it'd be possible for a Switch sequel to also have a dual-screen form factor, where it is playable like a DS in handheld mode, but the second screen is detachable and can be used as a controller when the console is docked (a la wii u). from a biz perspective, it'd give them access to a ton of DS/3DS games to remaster/re-sell, and we know that Nintendo likes to pursue off-beat ideas like this. any thoughts?

adam

The history and development of Ray Tracing in games. Including the hardware and Software Development.

Anonymous

Chaps! As the GPU crisis continues on, there seems to be at least a glimmer of hope that things will recover, but for the moment only in the high end space. Prospects for budget and midrange cards are still looking pretty dire. Are you at all concerned that this could have a negative impact on the long term growth of PC gaming as a platform, and could ultimately lead to new gamers flocking to consoles over PCs as their platform of choice?

adam
>>64192130

I recently returned an LG 1440p 32” nano ips LCD that ran at 165hz. I previously had purchased a Viotek 27” IPS 1440p 180hz LCD and I couldn’t see any difference quality wise in the colors and gaming performance between them to justify spending the extra $200 on the LG. I also recently purchased an older 40” 1080p Panasonic plasma to game on. The colors were amazing, better than any IPS display I have yet seen. I couldn’t get used to the low resolution and 60hz to use it as a desktop monitor. Almost Trinitron CRT level good though otherwise. I also have a 24” Sony GDM-W900 that I game on. It’s not the FW900 flat version but it’s still a very nice experience. It will run at 85hz just under 1440p. This would be my monitor of choice if it could run up over 144hz. I really need a 27”-32” Oled that is affordable. I really thought we would be there by now and Im surprised that we are still trying to get costs down.

adam
>>64196245

I had this same thought over the last couple weeks. I think gamers are moving more towards console at this point. Not everyone has PC gaming and computer building as a main hobby, or can afford the current GPU prices.

Anonymous

I've tried Stadia, XCloud and PS Now; all of them 'work' with varying degrees of success, stadia being the one that worked the best for me, mainly because it had the lowest latency, but it's still there and noticeable. That noticeable latency and video compression making the graphics look all mushy when there are a lot of fast moving particles mean I couldn't play games like this. What technology has to change to make cloud gaming comparative to local gaming? Or are there limits with latency and video compression that mean we'll never solve these problems and cloud gaming will always be inferior?

Anonymous

One of the first games that I’ve ever played was Hybrid Heaven developed by Konami for the N64. The history of the game is interesting and I remember enjoying the combat. Has anyone in DF played it and what are your thoughts on it?

Anonymous

What are your thoughts on consolidation in the games industry? I recently finished the book “Press Reset” by Jason Schreier, which explores a few examples of why job stability is still precarious for video game developers despite the games industry as a whole massively growing in revenue. Do you feel stability will be better for developers with more consolidation? Will dynamism in the types of games being created suffer? Does consolidation make it harder for new entrants into the market? Would love to hear your thoughts. On a side note, I think you guys do amazing work with Digital Foundry, and the content you produce is definitely top notch! 👍

digitalfoundry
>>64200660

We actually wanna answer this so I am writing down your question for the upcoming Retro Q&A as described in the post above. I wrote a bit about Hybrid Heaven in my recent book -Audi

Anonymous

Will the Steam Deck get covered on digital foundry or no?

Anonymous

Why don't you cover ultrawide support in PC games? There are so many interesting things that could be talked about, like: - FOV scaling (hor+, vert-) - HUD position (is it locked to 16:9 or does it adjust to screen size) - Fish-eye effect (is there any, how strong it is) - Cutscenes (are these streched, letterboxed, or fullscreen) - How a wider aspect ratio affects gameplay and immersion - How a wider aspect ratio affects performance (mainly CPU) To me, it would make more sense to focus more on this instead of 4K performance for games on PC. More people play on 21:9, 24:10, 32:10, 32:9 and multi-monitor setups combined together than on 4K 16:9 screens and the number of ultrawide users are growing rapidly. Also, huge thanks to John for recommending Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom and The Touryst in his previous GOTY videos. I completed both of them to 100% and I absolutely loved them. Keep up the good work, I watch all your videos!

Anonymous

What is Love?

Anonymous

Is the nintendo switch cpu less powerful than ps3's cpu or ps3 ported games runs bad because they are bad ports?

TheCollector

Recent article in thegamer.com poses that game developers should avoid ray tracing to preserve art style (with the argument that ray tracing is for photo realism, not highly stylized, pixel art, or retro titles etc). How does ray tracing impact game art style and do you see it as an impediment to artistic vision?

Anonymous

Seeing the awesome results of the 40 FPS mode in Ratchet made me wonder if there are other possible framerates that would make sense on a 60Hz screen for games that are not quite hitting 60FPS?

MittenFacedLass
>>64207070

They're laughably wrong. RT makes it arguably easier to achieve photorealism, but it in no way has to be used to achieve photorealism. Considering it often also takes less time to achieve certain effects and results with RT, if anything its an aid to achieving art styles, realistic or no. It's all about how you use it.

MittenFacedLass
>>64192395

Not quite a review, but have you seen this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9zJOYLYX_U&ab_channel=HDTVTest

Anonymous

Hi DF. RDNA2 seems to have a large performance hit when using ray tracing (at least relative to Ampere). Could console developers end up with a situation where some games could actually looker better if they didn't include ray tracing in their game, as it then allows them to allocate much more GPU power to rasterization?

Anonymous
>>64207540

60 can only be divided evenly by 60, 30, 20, 15, 12, 10, 6, 5, 3, 2, and 1. A minimum of 24FPS is needed for fluid motion, therefore the only options (that are above it) are 30 and 60. Plus why would you ever want to play below that? 30 is already bad enough.

Fabian Schneider

Amazon Lumberyard (i.e. Amazon's CryEngine fork) has gone Open Source under the very permissive MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses -- now dubbed Open 3D Engine. What are your thoughts and do we know how much Open 3D has diverged from CryEngine in the past 6 years?

Jay Fischetti

This is a question for anyone who's a bad enough dude to answer it: In PC games throwing on 16xAnisotropic filtering is done without a second thought, the performance impact is so small I don't even think it's counted in frames any more. However, on consoles I often read about games tapping out at 4xAF. Why is this? Even back on the PS3 and 360 it was sometimes not even used. Is the performance window so tight?

Anonymous

Do you think the avalanche of gaming news in our days has disminished the pleasure to play games as we did 20-30 years ago ?

Anonymous
>>64216217

On a personnal level I think it did. Just thinking about the time I spend on internet reading news and NOT playing games or watching movies or anything else.

Anonymous

Does the team have any experience and/or opinions on what developers build HDR colour spaces in to achieve artistic intent and the affect of those colour spaces on perceived colour vibrancy and clarity, for example using DCI-P3 vs REC(BT) 2020.

Anonymous

Much has been said about cross-gen development holding back the potential of the new consoles. Now, can the same be said about the PC, in the sense that targeting a wider range of platforms could hinder console games design? Take the PS5's Tempest Engine, Geometry Engine or storage system for example, and how PCs will take years to have that sort of tech as a standard (if ever).

Anonymous
>>64217328

Context: I finally got a ps5 and booted up demon souls. When I payed the first area it didn’t feel or look right, the atmosphere wasn’t what I expected and seen in YouTube videos or trailers, especially greens were completely mapped out of context. After not excepting it and doing some research and playing around on the TV I changed the standard Samsung “game console” colour space in HDR to 2020 vs DCI and looked and felt much better. I believe the ps4 pro on the Samsung’s always mapped to DCI.

Anonymous

did you see the thing about dolby vision support on xbox? kinda nifty

Anonymous

Retro related You guys produce a ton of great content when it comes to playing retro games either on original hardware, FPGA based hardware emulation trying to reproduce old hardware or low budget software emulation using boxes like the SNES Classic that also don't go far above what the original hardware could do. Question: How about highlighting the advancements in software emulation over the last 20 years made to go beyond what can be done on an original system? Like High Res SNES Mode 7, the MSU soundtracks and the SA-1 anti slowdown patches briefly mentioned in the Star Wars video or the widescreen support some Mega Drive (and more buggy w/o per game fixes) SNES emulators like BSNES got. Run-ahead implementations in RetroArch and BSNES allowing games to run with a lower latency than in part original hardware via save state abuse / multiple instances (no animation issues or sound problems miraculously) also would be an interesting topic for DF Retro. Or for 3D systems using higher render resolutions, MSAA, AF, perspective corrections etc to produce a cleaner image than the consoles could do back in the day, similar to your excellent video about the unofficial Mario 64 port. Maybe include Reshade into the mix. I would also love a deep dive video into PC VR btw :-)

Anonymous

Do you think Microsoft would be interested in making Game Pass playable on the Steam Deck and optimizing it for the platform? Or would they view the use of Steam OS and the Proton software as a threat to the Windows platform, and have a vested interest in the console not succeeding?

Anonymous
>>64192293

Have you seen those Apple TV screensavers? They are perfect for this purpose... I think there is something equivalent that you can come up with on PC/android.

Jordan H.J.

I have a distinct memory of when the PS4 first came out, a lot of people were talking about this being the generation where AI and Physics really evolved, however that never really happened. In the PC space, we even had that short spate of dedicated PhysX cards that Nvidia quickly nullified. Do you think this generation might finally see some big improvements in those areas, or are developers too focused on the shinier features like ray tracing and very high resolutions? - Jordan H.J.

Anonymous

Do u guys play with v-sync on when using g-sync ?

Anonymous

Do you think Sony can/will make a portable PS4?

Anonymous
>>64217490

PCs already have faster NVMe drives and DirectStorage will provide an API for the same sort of performance in gaming, that's coming very soon. You forget, these new consoles are basically PCs, and really only high-mid range, my CPU is a generation newer and has 50% more cores and they're clocked more than 1gz faster. my 3(?) year old 2080Ti has mesh shaders, better hardware support for ray tracing and it's 80-90% faster than the GPU in the PS5. Most console games even now make you trade-off several features for speed or quality. granted, the consoles have a measure of 'secret sauce' but it's not as revolutionary as you might think when faced with PC brute force.

Anonymous
>>64217490

The thing the consoles always do best is setting a standard for developers to work on, knowing exactly what the specs are, how they're implemented and the proprietory, slimed down systems that host them. in that regard, pcs are still more generalised and always will be

Anonymous
>>64217490

Exactly, the key here is the word "standard". Take a look at the Steam Survey and it suddenly becomes clear how long it will take for super fast NVMes to become mainstream. You see, publishers need to target a wide enough audience to justify development costs. And while several aspects of a game can easily scale, other aspects related to the base design cannot. I give you one example: the holy grail of open world design is streaming data that is only closely related to the camera frustum. This is possible on the PS5 as Mark Cerny himself has alluded to, but it will take years for the average PC to be able to do that. Again, note I said "average". I guess you missed that key point in my original comment.

Anonymous

Accessibility is often talked in the sense of making games more approachable to people that were born with disabilities or that became disabled through disease or injury. While this is all fair, shouldn't people also be looking at accessibility from an aging perspective? This could really change the conversation as it suddenly becomes everyone's topic. I'm 43 now and I can already perceive a palpable increase in game difficulty resulting from slightly but progressively slower reflexes. (I guess Audi would say this one is for Rich)

Jonas Taghizadeh (Taggen86)

Are you planning on testing any of the released or upcoming streaming-based switch games? Would be really interesting to see some performance and latency analyses.

TheCollector

Really like the balance that ya’ll strike between looking at performance, image quality, and graphical features/presentation. What can we do as consumers to increase the focus on graphical experience vs just FPS across the HW review spectrum? I.e. is it a problem of time, interest, or tools?

Anonymous

Hi DF gang. Now that we know our expectations for steam deck w.r.t. modern games, i.e., 800p30hz, do you think there's merit in it using a temporal resolution upscaler like ASW/SSW which is used in VR a lot? Sure it doesn't decrease input delay like DLSS, but do you feel implementing frame interpolation methods on a small screen where artifacts will be less noticeable is something that could improve on the user experience on the handheld, or at least when docked? Especially since Valve have done that work in VR space already.