Almost two hours of tech chat and Q+A.
Another week, another weekly – specifically, DF Direct Weekly – the discussion show that sees the Digital Foundry team down tools for a couple of hours on a Thursday morning to discuss the latest gaming tech news. However, perhaps predictably, there wasn’t actually much in the way of new things to talk about in the wake of this year’s ‘E3’ – but regardless, somehow we still managed to produce the longest Direct we’ve made yet!
Heading up the list of topics this week is AMD’s FSR – FidelityFX Super Resolution. It’s been interesting to see the reaction to AMD’s smart upscaler, but what is it really? How does it fit into the timeline of image reconstruction techniques we’ve seen deployed in full force, pretty much since PlayStation 4 Pro shipped in November 2016? If it’s not comparable to the existing temporal super-sampling techniques, what does it add to the mix of reconstruction and upscaling techniques already out there?
In the week of Sonic’s 30th anniversary, the team share their earliest and most memorable Sonic moments, there’s discussion on the status of Intellivision Amico, plus we revisit the problems of the PAL era of gaming – as it seems that the recent Alex Kidd remake seems to have been based on a PAL version of the original game… and 50Hz content displayed on a 60Hz screen just doesn’t really work. Beyond that, we talk about our recent and upcoming projects – including a look at Lego Builders and Nvidia’s revised DLSS 2.2.
DF Direct Weekly, this time perpetrated by Rich Leadbetter, Audi Sorlie, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia.
For those interested in specific segments, here are some time codes for you:
- 00:00:00 Introductions
- 00:01:15 AMD FSR Controversy and Reaction
- 00:32:00 Sonic 30th Anniversary & Sonic Memories
- 00:48:28 Jonathan Frakes joins PUBG
- 00:53:41 Myst VR coming Q3 to Mac and PC
- 00:56:47 Intellivision Amico Concerns
- 01:10:26 Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX has Issues
- 01:17:29 DF Content of the Week
- 01:34:15 Supporter Q1: Did John fix his Dolby Atmos lag?
- 01:36:55 Supporter Q2: Will Vulkan ever become the standard API?
- 01:39:28 Supporter Q3: Could ray tracing give in-game tactical advantage?
- 01:40:31 Supporter Q4: How is Digital Foundry viewed from inside developer studios?
Supporter Q+A? Once again we return to the quagmire that is HDMI 2.1 support on existing AV receivers and how efforts to bypass their problems result in lag from Xbox consoles. Ray tracing? It’s slowly becoming a standard element in the make-up of the latest video games but could it actually offer up an advantage over non-supported hardware in competitive games? We also share our stories on our relationships with developers and our efforts to help make games better by supplying technical feedback to game-makers before a title releases.
Digital Foundry Direct Weekly is published every Monday, with Supporters on our Patreon able to submit their questions and watch/listen to the show early every Saturday. Join us!
