Coming This Week on Digital Foundry (Week 13, 2023) (Patreon)

Well hello there! It's Rich here with the minutes for this week's DF #content meeting, as well as a nice, snuggly image of Dogital Foundry just to add some measure of cuteness to the beginning of the working week. Here's what we discussed and what you should expect over the next days/week.

* John is working on two separate DF Retro projects, beginning with a shorter piece on a fascinating 1992 arcade machine. Any more and we move into spoiler territory, but this is going to be a good one! After that, work resumes - and completes - on a larger DF Retro project, examining Road Rash on all systems.

* Oliver has just completed his look at Far Cry 5's 60fps update, which also includes some interesting updates on the existing last-gen versions of the game which we never knew about! Regardless, I've just finished reviewing the first draft and it's great stuff - expect early access on that one first for Retro and Premium tiers. Beyond that, he's looking to report on the gigantic leaps in AI asset creation seen in recent weeks.

* Tom is hard at work on a closer look at Elden Ring's RT update. Some PS5 performance numbers are out there right now on Premium/Retro tiers but suffice it to say that we'll be looking at Series X and PS5 too. When Elden Ring is complete, we're circling back to The Witcher 3's 4.02 update which is well worth a look at as there are some excellent improvements here.

* Alex is powering on with his analysis of Resident Evil 4 on PC. We're going to keep this one brief bearing in mind the weight of RE4 content we've already delivered, but we'll be delivering optimised settings, shining a light on the allegedly staggering VRAM requirements and more. Beyond that, it's a deep dive into The Last of Us Part 1 on PC (which we've still yet to see, by the way).

* Will is in line to review the Ryzen 7 7800X, but is also the lucky recipient of very early access to Counter-Strike 2, so expect a Eurogamer article on that and if the limited content available works for a video (there is only one map, for example), we'll consider that for next week. 

* Rich (ie me) continues to struggle with admin and meetings, but I still want to look at RTX 4000 laptops, and I want to source a 3050 laptop to see to what extent I can power down the GPU to provide some level of expectation management on what a Switch 2 could conceivably look like from a graphics perspective. There's also a lot of prep work to do for the inevitable RTX 4070 we should expect to see soon.

No idea when I'll find time to complete a major project again right now, which is a source of profound disappointment, but I'm also highly intrigued by the application of DLSS 3 frame generation on the least capable RTX 4000 GPU of them all - the laptop 35W RTX 4050. Assuming a fixed millisecond cost for frame-gen, it stands to reason that the lower the base frame-rate, the higher the proportionate return from DLSS 3 - but also, the more impactful latency can be and the more noticeable artefacts will be. However, this should be couched against other factors: the cost of the GPU, and the latency from other systems hosting the same game - the consoles. I guess the first order of business would be getting a 4050 laptop!

Speaking about firmer plans, we want to do another PSVR2 'let's play' video, this time based on Pavlov. Just how many PSVR2 capture/green-screen set-ups can we put together?! We're aiming for three in this multiplayer game. Anything else you feel we should be looking at? Do let us know 'in the comments below' as they say but in the meantime, have a great week!