Coming This Week on Digital Foundry (Week 17, 2023) (Patreon)

Hi everyone, it's Rich at the keyboard here and I'm happy to share our plans in the wake of the #content meeting this morning. John is still on vacation, but we have a big bunch of stuff heading your way.

On another note, I've been having some excellent conversations on Discord recently, specifically on the topic of 'simulating' in a ballpark way what a Nintendo Switch 2 based on Nvidia's Ampere architecture may achieve. The original plan was to downclock an RTX 3050 laptop, but in the meantime, we've found more suitable hardware for the exercise and I'm reasonably confident we can squeeze clocks and power consumption lower than I previously expected. A special thanks to supporter Fidler_2K for doing a lot of research on this, much appreciated!

Anyway, here's what the staff are up to this week:

* Alex will be looking at Jedi Survivor on PC. We've still yet to receive code, but he's taking the time today to get what he needs from the first game, highlighting its issues with a view to seeing if they're fixed in the sequel. 

* Oliver has just handed in his tech review for Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores and it's on early access now for Premium and Retro supporters! After this, he is intent on working on a deeper tech review for Jedi Survivor, while continuing to work on the next episode in his 'too big for Steam Deck?' series.

* Tom is spending some time capturing the Street Fighter 6 beta, before transitioning to the Jedi Survivor console head-to-head #content. Just bear in mind that we don't have the game yet - unlike other outlets - so while we'll try our best to get something out on launch day, that's not a given right now.

* Rich (ie me) continues to work on the AyaNeo Air Plus review, which is coming along well, all things considered. There's also background research going on in a number of areas. 

* Will is looking to add to his CPU benchmark database by looking at the Core i5 13400F this week. At some point we'll be looking to use this data for video purposes!

We'll also be unveiling our new PC contributor this week, who is helping us to expand our range of PC game coverage. The idea here is that there are some games that don't require Alex's deep dive testing, but where there are easy wins in terms of optimised settings through a combination of performance testing and console comparisons. 

So let's put it this way - if we find that there are a few settings that have dramatic impacts on performance, we can compare the quality differences ourselves, but also examine the console version to see the trade that the developers made and to see if those compromises pan out on PC too. Dead Island 2 - which is a reasonable PC port, by the way - is our first test of this and it'll likely go up on early access soon.

So, it's a week dominated by Jedi Survivor... which we don't have yet. But we're still aiming to get five videos out this week, kicking off with the DF Direct today and perhaps with a DF Retro treat on Sunday, depending on how things roll across the week. Anything else we should be looking at? Do let us know!