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Hey everyone! It is time to seek your wonderful questions. This week, John will be hosting Alex and Audi through another episode of DF Direct Weekly, and the boys will be tackling subjects such as Japanese talent being poached by Chinese companies, Windows 11 soon releasing and how it will affect games and the return of Dead Space.

Leave us your questions and comments below!

Comments

Luke

@John do you think they could've done a better job on the Hellblade Upgrade. Was honestly hoping for 1440p & RT. EDIT: 60FPS RT @ 1440p of course

Anonymous

Over time, I’ve come to appreciate the look of 360/ps3 games on non-native panels (eg 768p, 1080p, and 4K). There is something appealing about the blurriness and imprecision of seventh gen games, particularly games with advanced lighting and effects, that can make them look more than the sum of their parts, if that makes sense. Is this just nostalgia goggles or is there something to this? I love my 4K games as well on PS5 and Series X, but there is a special quality I think to 360/PS3 era graphics that has its own merit.

Benjamin Addison

I am curious how Alex keeps up with the new and emergent technical aspects of game development. I get the impression that Alex works for DF full time now, so is that a hinderance in any way to appreciating how new tech impacts on gaming production pipeline? For example Alex and John talked recently about the new techniques being implemented in UE5 such as nanite. Does their understanding now come from reading white papers and talking to developers etc? Or is there another way that you get see how the ray traced sausage is made?

Anonymous

Will we ever see the return of console cartridges in the form of expanded memory, discrete gpu's etc.?

d0x360

A follow up to last week's Microsoft DLSS alternative question. If Microsoft were to develop something for the series consoles couldn't they use it to say natively render series x games at 1080p then upscale to 4k which would leave allot of rendering budget to enhance the visuals? Something like that should be able to extend the life of the console and have it produce higher quality visuals and frame rates than the competition right?

Anonymous

Have there been any games that you've had to play for the channel that have pleasantly surprised you? Whether it's due to low expectations around the performance, or simply because you weren't expecting to enjoy the game itself.

DAVE_RAM0S

Or to add, what are reasons a dev would skip a 1440/60/RT option. A hypothetical best of all worlds option.

MittenFacedLass

It's sort of come to mind again with various PS5 upgraded games, like GoT, HZD..., why do you think AF levels are still kept so low on console? On PC, 16xAF has been a negligible cost for arguably 15+ years, if not longer? And it can provide a significant visual improvement, especially on large screens at high resolutions. Why is this such a challenge/still so uncommon on consoles, especially on back-compat upgrades, where it would be a fairly simple and cheap upgrade, with considerable visual benefit, often? I personally just find its omission baffling at this point. It particularly feels weird when devs go to the effort of including high-res textures, but then within a few feet or anything at an angle, you visibly see things transition to a blurry mess. Just, bizarre, IMO.

Simplex

Will you cover Psychonauts 2? I'm still a bit salty you ignored It Takes Two :) I'm sorry John has to take insults from trolls on Twitter. Remember they are a small minority. Most of us love and appreciate what you do. Sending virtual hugs to John and whole DF crew.

DAVE_RAM0S

I like this question as Sony (so far in gen 8) has done a better job showing and shipping spectacular looking games (R&C, new Horizon). Could this same question address the gap we see atm. Flight Sim (truly spectacular) aside Xbox has yet to ship a narrative driven single player game with the same fidelity as Sony's best.

Anonymous

Do you think the avalanche of gaming news in our days has disminished the pleasure to play games we had 20-30 years ago before internet ? Do you feel affected by that ?

Anonymous

You've previously discussed measuring image quality, I'm just wondering where you are with creating a way to objectively measure IQ?

Anonymous

any love for the 3ds and it's backwards compatibility and emulation capabilities, it's a solid machine for most of the Nintendo back catalogue

Anonymous

Since John Linneman is a fan of Shenmue, I was wondering if he could do an episode of Digital Foundry to bring attention to the fan-made project Shenmue: The Dragon and Phoenix Collection.

Anonymous

In light of the Steam Deck, why are low presets on PC so incredibly unbalanced? They often disable *basic* effects - such as bloom, depth of field, FXAA, etc. - that don’t improve performance when turned off. SSAO usually gets the ax too, making the lighting look broken for a very minor performance bump. Some games even disable real-time shadows. I feel like even most Switch ports strike a better balance than these low presets, which feel like they abandon all reverence for a game’s art.

Anonymous

Any opinion on the future of GBA/DS games coming to Switch? The replay, save and orientation options for DS games running on Wii U are really limited, and now my hope lies in current/future hardware for DS games. Looking further, my dream is for full 3D support of 3DS games via VR on Super Virtua Boy. Hahaha... no.

Anonymous

Since PC CRTs are still readily available (and affordable), do you think they're a worthy alternative to PVMs for retro console games when paired with a VGA adapter and a linedoubler with artificial scanlines enabled, such as the OSSC or any of the RetroTINK products? You of course get the added benefit of easily being able to use the same display with a PC!

Ben Fisher

Any progress on objective measurements of image quality? I.e how to objectively measure DLSS Vs checkerboard Vs native bilinear.

Anonymous

The 6th anniversary of the release of Metal Gear Solid V just went by. The Fox engine remains sadly underutilized and will likely stay that way because Konami. Are there other promising game engines the team can think of that got wasted this way?

Anonymous

What is Alex's favorite console game?

Christoph Zürcher

Do you think that it was worth upgrading to Windows Vista for DirectX 10?

Anonymous

With the release of Psychonauts 2 (which seems a great game so far) I’ve noticed a bit of a ruckus over on the Steam community pages about performance/stuttering issues in the game, ostensibly due to late shader compilation, but reportedly ONLY on PC. Furthermore there is a general frustration being voiced that too many Unreal Engine 4 titles have suffered from this late compilation issue of late, when running on the PC platform. Could there be some truth to this, and if so what could be causing this to continue to be a blind spot for developers?

Anonymous

Any thoughts on doing a GOTY so far. Either a classic ie best game so far from each team member. Or doing it with a DF lens in terms of graphics, New tech or features, frame time consistency etc

Anonymous

Any plans to test/compare Little Nightmares 2 Enhanced Edition on PC

Anonymous

As a person who hopes to someday get into video game journalism, what advice would you give to someone like me? How do I get started and on that note, how did you all find yourself in the industry?

Anonymous

What are your thoughts on if the Xbox Series S could potentially gain some One X enhancements on a case by case basis. Or does the reduction in RAM (or some other reason) mean this is a no go?

Jonas Taghizadeh (Taggen86)

Are there any plans to include crysis warhead in the crysis trilogy collection? If not, why? Thought you might have the answer to my question given your close contacts with crytec

Anonymous

Afternoon lads. Audio issue if you please? I'm a huge Battlefield fan. With 2042, we now have crossplay. But no cross platform audio link for parties. Is a janky "discord through phone/headphones into one ear under headset" the best option, or are there other ways around this conundrum?

sj33 (Jake)

The WATA Games scandal is hugely worrying, it is upsetting to see people negatively impacting the gmaing hobby that we all love. That said, I an more concerned about the impact on used software and hardware. Have we seen a coincidental spike in prices since WATA came onto the scene, and what examples of inexplicable price increases have you noticed?

Anonymous

Can we all join forces in a side channel and come up with great questions for AGONIZING RECTAL PAIN ? 😁

tod weitzel

I was recently at Vintage Computer Festival West where all the local retrogaming people brought their period appropriate quake 1 beige boxes from the Pentium/K6 era. It got me wondering if 2010-2020 will ever be an iconic period for building a retro gaming PC? What would you bring to a retro lan party* targeting the PS4/Xbox One/Windows 10 era? *Yes I know the LAN party is a dead concept between COVID and mandatory online accounts.

Anonymous

With Nvidia's RTXGI (Ray Traced Global Illumination Solution) now available on Unreal Marketplace, do you think this could be a better solution than Lumen for UE5?What ive seen of some example usages, it gets similar results and the perfomance scalability is much higher. It seems like many games are using light probes and this looks like the next evolution.

Anonymous

Good day gentlemen! Would love to see a video at some point where every one of you talks about your one (or two or three) favourite games of all time and explain why, much like you’ve started doing with your GOTY-lists at the end of the year. Any chance you will do this? And if not, would you mind answering this now? Cheers S

André Scheffler

A 4k screen might not be native, but an integer-scale of 3 (720px3 = 2160p) will create a perfectly crisp image.

d0x360

I know it's been addressed a little bit but do you think Intel's discreet gpu's will help bring prices back to a reasonable level across the board. Basically undoing the slow but steady increase in prices nVidia has been doing for the last decade.... Chip shortages and scalpers not withstanding.