Coming this week on Digital Foundry (Week 31, 2021) (Patreon)

Good morning - Rich here. It's Monday. Not exactly the most favourite day of the week for many, but for us, it begins with a #content meeting where we talk about new releases and just generally, stuff we fancy doing. So here's where we are going this week:

* John is heading up our Halo Infinite technical preview coverage - but with so many formats to cover, Alex is sharing his thoughts on the PC version while Rich (ie me) had the honour of looking at the base consoles. Meanwhile, John examined Series S and X in both 60Hz and 120Hz modes

* Alex is teaming up with John and Audi to revisit Dead Space on PC and indeed Xbox 360 and maybe even PS3. To get a flavour for how this will pan out, check out this Splinter Cell video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnlvSci_PCE

* Tom is taking point on the PlayStation 5 SSD upgrade coverage. The Samsung 980 Pro we acquired for this task back in December 2020 finally gets the testing we bought it for! We may well do further videos on this - this particular video will cover installation, loading times vs internal and a Ratchet and Clank stress test. If you want MORE on this, do let us know your ideas.

* Schedule permitting, Tom will also be looking at Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Interestingly I've spoken to the guy who did it - the Xbox versions essentially remain unchanged from the FPS Boost renditions, so it's still running on the XDK. It addresses a bug that FPS Boost had. PS5 though? That's new work - VGTech (definitely worth a sub!) has already done an FPS analysis, but we may be able to add more to the story.

* Rich is working on a sponsored video. I was given the brief of talking about RTX laptops but otherwise could come up with whatever content I wanted to. What I've done is to take some of the most taxing and/or advanced games around - Control, Metro Exodus, Doom Eternal, Flight Simulator, Cyberpunk 2077 - and to see how they run on a laptop I bought from Amazon. It's the Razer Blade 15 with the 95W RTX 3070 (I got it for £1399 courtesy of @dealsfoundry). The challenge? To run all of those titles at console settings targeting 4K, then to go for pure 1440p performance - to match the laptop's 165Hz screen. The point of this testing? PC GPUs are defined by bar charts and percentages - but what about actual application to a baseline defined by games developers, and then to customise from that, as is the PC way? Let's just say the results are fascinating.

Premium content? Expect some early access, possibly even starting today. Also, I'm going to share some testing from the laptop video you may find intriguing. I played through some Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox Series X in 1080p performance mode upscaled to 4K with the console scaler. I then played it through on the RTX 3070 laptop at Alex's non-RT optimised settings in 4K DLSS ultra performance mode - essentially top-tier rasterisation settings. I think you may find the comparison interesting and it's inspired me to look more into 4K DLSS ultra performance with an eye to Switch Pro/Super Switch/Switch Model S/Switch 2 theory-crafting. 

Retro content? The Resident Evil 2 N64 playthrough is happening, with guests Chris Huelsbeck and Alex Aniel. Also: expect a Retro Q+A! Meanwhile, if you're a Retro supporter and you've not already checked it out, make sure to watch the new F-Zero episode. When I first set-up Digital Foundry, I'd never have dreamed we'd be able to push this quality of content. It's a privilege to see it happening and so I'll end up this update by thanking our supporters for making this possible. Cheers!