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Call for questions on Digital Foundry Weekly (Week 49, 2021) (Patreon)

Published:
2021-12-08 14:49:58
Imported:
2022-03

Content

Ooooyyyyyyyy everyone! Can you believe we are just a few weeks away from Christmas? Time moves so fast when you are having fun, and one of the big reasons we are having such fun is your spanking fine questions! And would you know it, we need even more as the DF Direct Weekly team reconvenes shortly for another session. Leave your questions below, and tell us what you keeps you up at night.

Comments

Anonymous

Ho ho ho, merry framerates to you all. What are your favourite games with a Christmasy feel and which games do you think have the best snowy environments?

Anonymous

Whats your opinion on Nvidia's RTXGI (Ray Taced Global Illumination)? Could this be a reasonable application for Raytracing on consoles, seeing as it is really scalable and relatively easy to setup for games which are alreasy using light probes. Is this an even better alternativ to something like Lumen?

Anonymous

Hey DF Team, how would Rich look in a Santa costume? This doesn't have to be answered directly, Audi may as well just edit it visually into the direct ;-)

Anonymous

Hi, I hope everyone is well. After watching My Life in Gaming's latest excellent video about how the different Nintendo Online re-released controllers work with Switch games, it got me thinking. What is everyone's favourite ever controller? Peace and love.

Anonymous

Will we ever see expandable ram on video cards?

Anonymous

In the spirit of giving, what peeves thee? Each of y’all! I’ll start: VR games that aren’t first person. Looking sideways at the player character crawling over terrain is nauseating…

Anonymous

I keep hearing from people that they won't pay $60 for a game that's merely 30 hours long or less. I've even read reports how people are refunding shorter games on Steam due to their refund policy. Do you think that some games from the recent years with their meaningless to-do lists of chores have damaged the perception of what a fun and engaging game is and do you think it's even viable for developers/publishers to continue building such huge messes which just waste everyone's time and only increase budget?

Anonymous

When do you think Microsoft will cut the last generation of consoles loose and focus entirely on Series X|S and PC?

The Dressing Gown

In the future do you see most bigger games leaning more on a hybrid of local hardware rendering and streaming to allow for better performance and quality, (similar to COD) or do you see it being more or less one way or the other?

The Dressing Gown
>>73324609

If this question doesn't make it into the direct I think I'll be disappointed in Audi 😉😛

Nico Simmons
>>73324714

Oh, what an admirable spirit you have =) Great question for a lot of viewers i'd imagine!

The Dressing Gown

As an additional question, will current hardware based raytracing limitations (or the lack thereof) on consoles hinder games from moving over to only having native ray tracing this generation (similar to Metro Exodus)?

C Nguyen

In the retro scene, certain CRT TV’s have gotten quite sought after for various reasons. Do you think there will be a similar niche that will grow for other older display technologies such as plasma or rear projection when the nostalgia wave for games of that era get more popular?

Anonymous

with the recent underwhelming release of halo campaign on pc when was the last time a AAA game or any game for that matter released and wasnt riddled with bugs and annoying stutters from day one? i cant seem to recall a game for a while that hasnt needed a major patch, are pc gamers getting short changed with poorly optimimized ports? are we being held back by games being optimzed for both last gen and current game consoles? thanks DF GODS

Oisin Brannock

Hey guys new retro supporter and long time fan here. I’m in the AI space (studying a masters in it currently) and wondering how I could get started in the industry. AI is playing a crucial role in the games industry in things like DLSS and would love to dive into that more, whether it be a research phd or something more industry based! Cheers

Anonymous

Does any of the DF team let game performance effect the enjoyment of the game? before i started watching DF my favourite game of all time was witcher 3 on ps4 (day 1 release) , i was totally oblivious to the sub 30fps performance and couldnt feel or see anything wrong with it, now i am a pc gamer and watch guys like DF, hardware unboxed religiously and worry more about fps rather than enjoyong the game itself, does any the DF team ever have the same issues as me? thanks

Dave Brown

Hi team! I would love to know your impressions of the current "state of the game" for the PC port of Horizon: Zero Dawn. A new patch (v1.11) just dropped this morning, adding DLSS support. The PC version had a somewhat rocky launch, with performance issues that were unexpected for what is essentially a 5-year-old game. I would be very interested to hear Alex's thoughts, or better yet to see in action, on a 'then vs. now' comparison of the launch version to the Patch 1.11 version.

Anonymous

Since you've been lamenting the framerate and performance of the era, do you think poor response times of commercial LCD televisions at the time helped standardize 30fps during the 360 and PS3 era? I know the advent of filmic effects helped, and a lower framerate probably hid deficiencies of animation as well, but I remember hooking up a PC to my living room at the time and finding that everything at 60fps looked "muddy" or "just weird" but couldn't quite put my finger on it at the time.

Anonymous

I noticed that DF videos are encoded at 59.4fps. Why do this when the vast majority of the audience watches on a 60Hz screen? Why not encode at 60fps? Thanks!

Gaboou

What do you think about the DLSS implementation in Chorus? I've found that stars flicker too much with it turned on, sadly (they probably lack motion vectors)... The good news is that the game looks great and performance is excellent even without DLSS, though unfortunately marred by typical Unreal Engine stutters (I'm assuming)... :-(

Anonymous

Besides frame rates SLASH frame pacing, are there other maladies that really inhibit your enjoyment or once it's all in motion does it all fade away to HASHTAG enjoyment? Great work as always, thanks!

Anonymous

Can 60fps games experience inconsistent frame pacing on a 120hz TV? We’re all too familiar with 30fps titles such as Dark Souls and Bloodborn having inconsistent frame pacing. Can this occur with a 60fps game on modern televisions? And if so, are there any examples of this?

Anonymous

Hiya DF crew! Here’s a quick one: what are your favorite personal Christmas memories related to video games? Happy holidays, and keep up the incredible work!

Anonymous

What are your favorite game development anecdotes? Examples include the Nuclear Gandhi urban legend from the Civilization series, and Street Fighter II Rainbow Edition.

Anonymous

Avoiding a debate on various surround sound equipment you can buy, what is the general level of support for surround sound setups in modern games? I've spent years playing with either TV speakers or stereo headphones but have recently considered buying a surround setup but would like to know if that money is even worth spending. This isn't even about Dolby Atmos support in games, just 5.1 or 7.1 that's actually worth enabling at the very minimum.

Anonymous

With SIE recently hiring for a 'head of machine learning', and a patent being published that suggests some kind of ML-based upscaling, do you have any thoughts on if something like that could be performant on a machine that doesn't seem to have support for low precision 4 or 8 bit calculations? Might this be for a PS5 Pro? And is Cerny able to perform these calculations with a pen and paper?

Anonymous

Do you foresee more developers making use of or at the very least allowing users to play their games at above 60 fps In cases where perhaps 120 is not feasible on the latest gen consoles? Could there be opportunity for DSR 90fps or even better a slider that lets you trade resolution and framerate within a certain window of performance?

Anonymous

Why aren't more Xbox PC games implementing Nvidia DLSS? The only games I'm aware of with DLSS are Doom Eternal and Hellblade which were both developed before being acquired by Microsoft. Is AMD or some other factor responsible for this?

Anonymous

What is your favourite line or text in video games that has been localised where the translation went wrong and it then made it into a commercial release?

tod weitzel

If Audi/John are there: Why is genesis/mega drive audio so hard for emulators to get right?

Anonymous

Tom's videos say "XBOX ONE" while everyone else goes with "XBOX ONE S". Is it fair to assume Tom's the only one using OG Durango, and everyone else's testing has a 6% GPU boost over Tom? This. Changes. EVERYTHING.

Anonymous

Did Tom have a bit of a cold recording that halo video? His voice had a bit of extra sultry scratch ;) Remember to rest buddy!

Anonymous

Which version of Pickle Rich does the team prefer: 1. Original Dill 2. Crazy Frog 3. Licorice (Black or Red) 4. Frankfurter 5. Disciplinary I will post the corresponding options in the Media section of the Discord!

Anonymous

It is highly impressive that Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite run on 8 year old hardware without any gameplay compromises, with the newer consoles' beefier hardware used to improve visual fidelity, framerate and/or load times. Where do you think we'll see the greatest leaps in gameplay in the inevitable Forza Horizon 6 and Halo Infiniter, once hopefully the last-gen consoles are no longer targeted by the devs?

Anonymous

Why do devs tend to limit dynamic resolution bounds so much? Why not just set it at 4k - 1080p and let the system do it's thing? In Quake 2 RTX you can set your own dynamic res range- say, 50% of full res, and your fps target and it just works, no faffing with other settings to get an absolutely solid frame rate. I was crusing around at 120fps in a fully path traced game and it looked great! Why don't devs just change the fps target for DRS and VRS for their performance modes and leave it like that. I assume that could be easier than making bespoke settings for shadows etc for each mode and for each console. In Horizon 4 as an example, I had to restart the whole game to change the graphics mode. Why not just instate DRS and target it at 60fps. Surely a whole game restart wouldn't be necessary to change the target fps number. Feel free to condense the question for Q&amp;A, thanks if you read this, kiss kiss.

Anonymous
>>73330232

Since you can evenly divide 120 into 60 and 30 I don't think the TV itself would create frame pacing issues. To my knowledge Dark Souls and Bloodborne were problematic because of the game code, not the display. You can definitely have inconsistent frame pacing with games targeting 60 and 120fps but again that's usually a problem with the game, not the display. Also most modern displays that can display 120hz or over will also support variable refresh rate, which changes the display's refresh rate to match the output of the console or PC. This solves some of the problems of an inconsistent frame rate, that being said a lot of display's VRR system only works down to 48hz/fps, so they wouldn't affect games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne that output 30/29fps. Hope that isn't too muddled, haha.

Anonymous
>>73326029

There seems to be diminishing returns in the games industry in general at the moment. Games are taking exponentially more time and money to add smaller amounts of content and polish... Just my observation though.

Anonymous
>>73335333

I adore playing games through my 5.1 setup on my PS4 Pro, for what that anecdote is worth…

Anonymous

Is Keanu real or CGI in the Matrix Awakens trailer?

Jonathan Thomassen

Why do you use sixtieths of a second in your videos when, for instance, measuring loading time It bothers me an unreasonable amount... Perhaps an imperial unit for fractions of a second I wasn't aware of?

Anonymous

How useful is dynamic resolution scaling? I ask because the new Deep Forest trailer for GT7 still sees some fps drops and or judder, and was wondering if DRS could prevent this from happening.

Anonymous

Why do companies still use their own engines? Halo infinite is a good game but it isnt the game that it should have been, at least partly because of the technical issues they had with their proprietary technology. Perhaps unreal isn't the best engine for open world games, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that it would have been easier to overcome that hurdle than the hurdles that their current tech forced them to

Anonymous

When will we get the next big leap for rendering foliage? Nanite is very good for rendering millions of polygons of continous surfaces like rocks for examples, but it's pretty bad at rendering trees, because of the overdraw and other technical stuff. Do you think in this generation of games trees will only use mainstream way of rendering with alpha textures or nanite or technology similar to it will be used to render trees in more polygon-based way? When will we see a realistic forest without vertex based movement of transparent textures?

Anonymous

One thing I was missing from your discussion of the Matrix Awakens demo was the huge amount of flickering objects present throughout. Do you think you could briefly comment on that?