Coming This Week on Digital Foundry (Week 16, 2023) (Patreon)

Hello there and welcome, it's Rich here with your latest DF news update. John is currently on vacation but all other members of staff were present for this morning's #content meeting and I begin with the news that we've decided to remove the TLOU Part 1 conversation from DF Direct Weekly #107, owing to Naughty Dog releasing a patch for the game subsequent to filming. However, the existing version will remain unchanged for DF supporters. 

There is talk that texture streaming has improved, but the CPU requirement is still colossal, so we're probably going to wait until the patch barrage subsides until we look at it again - video views and 'easy money' revenue be damned! Seriously, looking at the game seems difficult when any content we put out runs the risk of going out of date as soon as we publish... or even before. This situation has proven that once again. 

Lots going on this week, so let's get straight to it. 

* Alex is going deep with a Tech Focus on path tracing and its application in triple-A games. How did we move from path tracing from Quake 2 to Portal all the way to Cyberpunk 2077 so quickly? 

* Tom is finishing up work on Advance Wars 1+2 Reboot Camp for Nintendo Switch and will then be moving on to Dead Island 2.  We'll do our best to get launch day coverage on that, though if there are any day one patch shenanigans, we may need to be a little late. 

* Oliver has just completed his work on Ghostwire: Tokyo for Xbox consoles and that'll be going out on early access to Premium/Retro supporters today. He's working on his next 'Too Big For Steam Deck?' video, testing the most challenging titles of 2023 while we wait for the arrival of Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores review code.

* Rich (ie me) is hoping to deliver a review on the AyaNeo Air Plus - an improbably small PC handheld running the Ryzen 7 6800U APU. There's also background GPU benchmarking taking place - and a hunt for the elusive, missing RTX 2060. Where did it go? 

* Will is finishing up work on his piece on those ubiquitous RTX 3060 gaming laptops that are always on sale - just how potent is this GPU at various power levels? And can it run Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive based on the tricks and tips learnt during the creation of our latest performance video?

Although John is not with us right now, he did complete work on his Ikusagami (also known as Demon Chaos in PAL regions) video, the PS2 game capable of rendering 65,000 enemies on-screen simultaneously at 60fps. We'll be getting that out to Retro supporters as soon as we can. 

I'll end with a bit of an announcement. We're committed to expanding our PC coverage and to that end, we have found a new contributor who is taking on the onerous task of handling the PC version of Dead Island 2. It's early days here, there's likely to be some time needed to get up to speed but this is the first phase of delivering on our commitment to increase our PC output.

Do let us know of anything else you'd like us to take a look at but in the meantime, I hope you all have a fantastic week!