This week's DF Direct 'drops' a little early owing to a somewhat busy and congested week for us, and our usual two-hour-long chat show begins with a look at the Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool - and the fact that (when we filmed, at least), the developer had not shown any video footage of the PlayStation 5 version in action. Reviewers were told not to expect PS5 code pre-launch. However, yesterday, a short snippet of gameplay captured from the console did appear online, so we scrambled to take a look at it and append some thoughts about it to our show.

Let's talk about the footage itself, hailing from PlayStation China (though we picked it up from the developer's feed, which linked to IGN China instead). First of all, there are clear issues with the quality of the footage. The appearance of developer IP addresses in the top-right may suggest that the PS5's system level video recording system was used, which was then re-processed by YouTube's systems, creating a very muddy picture, heavy on compression artefacts. Even so, we can see that the game is targeting 60fps, albeit with some heavy hits to frame-rate when screen-filling effects present on-screen. Black Myth: Wukong as presented here doesn't have any screen-tearing.

Beyond that, it is difficult to tell you much more about the game when we have no context on how the clip was captured and what settings (assuming the console version has settings) it was using. To be honest, the murkiness of the footage has left me with more questions than answers - especially after carrying out performance analysis on the clip. It's not easy to gauge frame-rate from lossy video, but we've done it in the past with streaming services and the technique is pretty straightforward and boils down to manually scrolling through the clip frame by frame and marking up duplicates. In the process, we got to see how the game looks from one frame to the next and there's some evidence here to suggest that AMD FSR 3 frame generation is being used in this footage.

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It's another packed edition of DF Direct this week, with our latest thoughts on Star Wars Outlaws, impressions on Nobody Wants To Die and the Visions of Mana demo plus a look at how ray tracing is being introduced into the next wave of EA Sports titles. However, the focus for this piece is on the release of a new technical preview for AMD's Fluid Motion Frames technology - AFMF 2. This is the Radeon team's second attempt at driver-level frame generation and if you have the means, I highly recommend checking it out.

First of all, it's worth getting all of the caveats out of the way: driver-level frame generation can never hope to match the quality of Nvidia DLSS 3 frame-gen or AMD's FSR 3 alternative. These technologies have deep-level integration into game engines that allows for much higher levels of fidelity from generated frames. AFMF is essentially FSR 3 without the additional information given up by the game, so in effect, it works in a similar way to smooth motion interpolation in TVs. The game frame is rendered, then another is held, and then AFMF interpolates an 'in-betweener' image to sandwich between the two.

With only screen-space information to work from, AFMF has to make a lot of guesses in only a very short amount of time, so more artefacts and errors will present themselves. However, similar to other frame generation techniques, generated frames are effectively strobing between standard rendered frames. The higher the base frame-rate, the faster the strobing effect and the less noticeable the artefacts will be. AMD typically says that 60fps is a good base-level frame-rate for FSR 3, so it stands to reason that AFMF would require a higher base fps level to better hide its inadequacies.

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UPDATE 30/07/24 5:07pm: Microsoft's Jason Ronald confirms that the issue impacting Xbox One consoles unable to update has been resolved via a server-side fix: "For players who were having issues updating their Xbox One consoles still running an OS build from November 2018 or earlier, this has been resolved. Thanks to the team @DigitalFoundry for notifying us about this issue. Game on!" This is great news and people buying used Xbox One consoles that haven't been updated in a while should have no problem using their hardware.

Original Story: It started with reports on NeoGAF that extremely rare 'new/old' stock of original Xbox One consoles - the so-called 'VCR' or 'set-top box' model - were unable to function owing to the lack of a system software update for the hardware. Used consoles sold on eBay and factory-reset also have the same issue. Based on our own testing from Xbox One consoles brought out of storage, systems operating on older firmware revisions error out when connected to Xbox Live. We've informed Microsoft, we're confident the problem will be fixed, but the situation raises awkward questions about the future prospects of console hardware reliant on an internet connection to fully function.

Let's be clear about what we're talking about. As far as we're aware, the problem does not impact 2016's Xbox One S hardware revision. We're talking about the launch model, the set-top box edition. And it doesn't apply to all consoles - if every single Xbox One 'VCR' out there couldn't get online, I'm sure we would have heard about it sooner. It seems to be Xbox One hardware that is running older firmware that has the biggest risk of not being able to update. Two of our consoles are running 2017 dashboards, the other a 2018 revision. None of them can update - not from the internet, nor from USB via the downloadable offline installer.

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UPDATE 30/07/24 5:07pm: Microsoft's Jason Ronald confirms that the issue impacting Xbox One consoles unable to update has been resolved via a server-side fix: "For players who were having issues updating their Xbox One consoles still running an OS build from November 2018 or earlier, this has been resolved. Thanks to the team @DigitalFoundry for notifying us about this issue. Game on!" This is great news and people buying used Xbox One consoles that haven't been updated in a while should have no problem using their hardware.

Original Story: It started with reports on NeoGAF that extremely rare 'new/old' stock of original Xbox One consoles - the so-called 'VCR' or 'set-top box' model - were unable to function owing to the lack of a system software update for the hardware. Used consoles sold on eBay and factory-reset also have the same issue. Based on our own testing from Xbox One consoles brought out of storage, systems operating on older firmware revisions error out when connected to Xbox Live. We've informed Microsoft, we're confident the problem will be fixed, but the situation raises awkward questions about the future prospects of console hardware reliant on an internet connection to fully function.

Let's be clear about what we're talking about. As far as we're aware, the problem does not impact 2016's Xbox One S hardware revision. We're talking about the launch model, the set-top box edition. And it doesn't apply to all consoles - if every single Xbox One 'VCR' out there couldn't get online, I'm sure we would have heard about it sooner. It seems to be Xbox One hardware that is running older firmware that has the biggest risk of not being able to update. Two of our consoles are running 2017 dashboards, the other a 2018 revision. None of them can update - not from the internet, nor from USB via the downloadable offline installer.

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In this week's DF Direct, I spend a bit of time looking into the Starfield modding scene - more specifically checking out mods that aim to bring a performance mode to the Xbox Series S version of the game. As we've already covered, Bethesda did a creditable job in bringing performance options to the Xbox Series X rendition of the game, but the junior Xbox didn't get the same treatment. We pointed out that this was a shame at the time, and the mods appear to suggest that Series S could have benefited likewise.

Going back to the 'stock' game, it's essentially a match for the Series X version, albeit with very slight cuts to visual features. The big difference comes from the resolution. It runs at a reconstructed 1440p, using 900p as the base internal resolution. Bethesda maintains consistency by running at a capped 30 frames per second, the game rarely dipping beneath. The first mod for Series S I tried simply turns off v-sync, which also removes that frame-rate limit. So in essence, we're looking at something similar to Series X's 60fps mode running in the visuals preset (the difference being you'll need to put up with eye-rending screen-tearing on a non-VRR display).

It's quite interesting to see that - similar to Series X - this mode sees the game careen between GPU and CPU limits. Dense cityscapes with plenty of NPCs are where the CPU is the limit - and a run around Jemison or especially Akila will see the CPU limit brought to the fore. However, in most of the other game content, it's the GPU that is the primary factor in limiting performance and here, the limits can change dramatically - anything from the mid 30s to the high 50s in my testing. It may actually go higher than that in some content: if you set the console to 120Hz output, a 60fps cap is no issue - the console will happily move beyond that.

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This week's DF Direct Weekly is what you might call a 'come down' episode. After the highs of the Sony State of Play, Summer Games Fest and the best Xbox Showcase in years, we take things a little more slowly - though we do spend a fair amount of time looking at Ubisoft Forward. While the gaming content gets plenty of commentary, it's actually the quality of the live streaming presentation itself that we really take issue with. Why did it look so bad?

For years now, digital showcases have had a problem: the state of live streaming technology on YouTube. Low bit-rates, low resolutions, inconsistent frame-rates, terrible macroblocking. It got to the point where we'd need to watch the content twice - first to get the news via the live stream, then secondly to check out the individually uploaded trailers which looked an order of magnitude better from a quality perspective. The good news is that things are improving. Streaming 4K at 60fps with decent bit-rate is now possible. We saw it with the Xbox Showcase. Even Summer Games Fest streamed at 4K, even though it looked like nearest neighbour upscaling of 1080p content. In both cases, we're seeing genuine improvement over their 2023 presentations.

However, Ubisoft Forward was a retrograde step. In fact, it featured just about every poor practice we've seen when it comes to live streaming new games. The first time I watched it I was shocked and when we consider the amount of money it takes to make a game like Star Wars Outlaws or Assassin's Creed Shadows, the concept that these titles should look so bad during a major live streaming event is almost inconceivable, so what happened and how can things improve?

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It's one of the most baffling mysteries of the current generation era. So many PS4 and Xbox One titles have received remasters or 60fps upgrades and yet one game stands alone… Red Dead Redemption 2. Tthere's no real reason why developer Rockstar couldn't deliver a mightily enhanced version of the game for PS5 and Series X, with the PC version combined with console-equivalent hardware giving us some insights on what quality and performance modes could actually look like.

Right now though, today's consoles are limited to backwards compatibility versions of the existing last-gen version. What that means is that PlayStation 5 runs with a lacklustre 4K checkerboard rendition of the game, locked to 30fps. The situation improves somewhat on Xbox Series X, which runs at a native 4K - again at 30fps. However, both of these experiences are basically interchangeable with gameplay on PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. This game deserves better.

First of all, I want to highlight the work of modder Illusion, who has released a frame-rate unlock mod for Red Dead Redemptio n2 that - alas - only works on exploited PlayStation 5 consoles. By removing the Sony system call to limit to 30fps, the game 'just works' at 60fps. PS5 has more than enough horsepower to double frame-rate at checkerboard 4K - and in fact, thanks to another Illusion mod, v-sync can be disabled and the frame-rate completely unlocked. Run Red Dead 2 in its 1080p mode (accessible via the console front-end) and we can see that even in the most CPU intensive areas, we're always above 60fps.

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Frame generation technology has arrived on consoles, amplifying frame-rates and potentially transforming experiences. We shared initial thoughts earlier this week via DF Direct, but we've gone further now - testing out Immortals of Aveum's FSR 3 frame-gen implementation across all supported consoles. In all cases, the promise of a high frame-rate experience for 120Hz screens has been delivered - and what's fascinating is that it's Xbox Series S that gets closest to delivering 120 frames per second.

Before we go on, let's circle back and cover the basics. AMD's brand of frame generation tech is similar in principle to Nvidia's pioneering work with DLSS 3, the difference being that there's no hardware tie-in here - AMD does it all with software whereas Nvidia demands the use of RTX 40-series cards. Either way, two frames are generated in succession and then a third - an interpolated frame - is sandwiched between the two and so it goes on. What you're getting is like a concertina effect of standard generated frames and interpolated frames, strobing at high speed.

In a very best case scenario, you can effectively double frame-rate but more typically the gain is lower. Frame generation isn't 'free' - there's a computational cost. The GPU needs to process the interpolated frame and that takes time. In a purely CPU-limited scenario, you may see cases where there are spare GPU cycles, allowing you to basically double output frame-rate but that's not the case here in Immortals of Aveum. In the recent DF Direct, we showed some clips of Series X Aveum and this particular cutscene from the beginning of chapter three - a proper stress point - shows the vast improvement in frame-rate. Across the board, it's a 72.3 percent boost.

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Another week, another episode of DF Direct Weekly (hence the name) and this episode was actually split into two recording sessions. Normal filming occured on Friday morning, but at around 3pm, Ascendant Studios in association with Enduring Games, finally released its AMD FSR 3 frame generation upgrade for Immortals of Aveum. Initial testing from myself and John Linneman confirmed that it's in, it's working and it's well worth talking about, so I put together some data and assets and we added a second part to the Direct. And here it is!

As a proof of concept for console frame generation, Immortals of Aveum is compelling, but let's first deal with the basic details. Similar to Nvidia DLSS 3 frame-gen, AMD's take works on buffering up an extra frame, on top of the one last rendered, then inserts an interpolated frame between them. In a best case scenario - basically when you're CPU-limited with GPU cycles to spare - you'll double the frame-rate from the host system, so a 60fps game becomes a 120fps game. However, when you're GPU-limited - as is almost certainly the case with Aveum - gains will be lower.

The plus points are obvious though. In the case of Immortals of Aveum, which tends to run at between 40fps to 60fps, the experience moves beyond the 60fps limit and into HFR (high frame-rate) territory, making the game more compelling for those with 120Hz displays. However, there are minus points. Interpolated frames - particularly those sandwiched between two very different frames - will lack the fidelity of standard frames. Also, the process of buffering up an extra frame adds latency... and that will be the time taken to generate the extra frame along with the time taken to calculate the interpolated frame.

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A new week and a fresh Monday brings with it the hopefully welcome prospect of a new episode of DF Direct Weekly - and this week, the team sit down to discuss topics as diverse as Starfield's planned performance upgrade for Xbox Series X, the latest Switch 2 rumours, more path tracing in Capcom RE Engine titles and some new information on the PlayStation 5 Pro's GPU - such as a max clock speed of 2.35GHz.

It's the PS5 Pro graphics details I'm going to concentrate on today because the information casts an interesting new light on the upcoming console - and may deliver clarity on some of the question marks surrounding GPU performance and backwards compatibility with the existing PS5. Leaked specifications, derived from Sony's developer portal, suggest that the PS5 Pro has 30 WGP (Work Group Processors) delivering 33.5 teraflops of performance. This is up against the standard model with 18 WGP offering up an equivalent 10.23 teraflops.

On the surface level, that's an extra 227 percent of performance, except that the same Sony documents suggest only an extra 45 percent of actual game throughput. Part of the explanation comes from the RDNA 3 architecture with its dual-issue FP32 support, which doubles the amount of instructions processed, but which does not typically double game performance.

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A new week and a fresh Monday brings with it the hopefully welcome prospect of a new episode of DF Direct Weekly - and this week, the team sit down to discuss topics as diverse as Starfield's planned performance upgrade for Xbox Series X, the latest Switch 2 rumours, more path tracing in Capcom RE Engine titles and some new information on the PlayStation 5 Pro's GPU - such as a max clock speed of 2.35GHz.

It's the PS5 Pro graphics details I'm going to concentrate on today because the information casts an interesting new light on the upcoming console - and may deliver clarity on some of the question marks surrounding GPU performance and backwards compatibility with the existing PS5. Leaked specifications, derived from Sony's developer portal, suggest that the PS5 Pro has 30 WGP (Work Group Processors) delivering 33.5 teraflops of performance. This is up against the standard model with 18 WGP offering up an equivalent 10.23 teraflops.

On the surface level, that's an extra 227 percent of performance, except that the same Sony documents suggest only an extra 45 percent of actual game throughput. Part of the explanation comes from the RDNA 3 architecture with its dual-issue FP32 support, which doubles the amount of instructions processed, but which does not typically double game performance.

Read more

A new week and a fresh Monday brings with it the hopefully welcome prospect of a new episode of DF Direct Weekly - and this week, the team sit down to discuss topics as diverse as Starfield's planned performance upgrade for Xbox Series X, the latest Switch 2 rumours, more path tracing in Capcom RE Engine titles and some new information on the PlayStation 5 Pro's GPU - such as a max clock speed of 2.35GHz.

It's the PS5 Pro graphics details I'm going to concentrate on today because the information casts an interesting new light on the upcoming console - and may deliver clarity on some of the question marks surrounding GPU performance and backwards compatibility with the existing PS5. Leaked specifications, derived from Sony's developer portal, suggest that the PS5 Pro has 30 WGP (Work Group Processors) delivering 33.5 teraflops of performance. This is up against the standard model with 18 WGP offering up an equivalent 10.23 teraflops.

On the surface level, that's an extra 227 percent of performance, except that the same Sony documents suggest only an extra 45 percent of actual game throughput. Part of the explanation comes from the RDNA 3 architecture with its dual-issue FP32 support, which doubles the amount of instructions processed, but which does not typically double game performance.

Read more

You could call this week's DF Direct an assemblage of patch tests as they arrived thick and fast for a range of titles, in varying degrees of scale. The addition of a 40fps 'favour quality' mode in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora strikes an excellent balance between resolution and visual features for Xbox Series X and PS5, while Lords of the Fallen's 1.5 update finally addressed the long-standing '0fps' problem we reported on back in the day. However, by far the highest profile addition is the 'next-gen' update for Fallout 4 - and it's swiftly unfolding into a bit of a saga.

A few weeks back in DF Direct, we outlined some of the existing issues in the PC version that really needed addressing - the ability to scale the game above 60fps and fixing the weapons debris option that crashes literally any RTX graphics card. Neither of those problems are tackled and plenty more issues are coming to light, calling into question what the point is for PC users. Even the much-vaunted ultra-wide support has problems.

In the world of consoles, there has been significantly more effort put into modernising Fallout 4 for today's hardware. Prior to last Thursday, the best you could get was the Xbox One X version running under back-compat for Series X, along with an FPS Boost 60fps variant that did indeed run at a higher frame-rate, but busted visual quality down to Xbox One S level. Not good. Meanwhile, a '720p60' mod that allowed for 4K60 on Series X appeared to have vanished. So, how do things fare with the new patch?

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In something of a surprise launch, AMD has made its RX 7900 GRE available as a full retail product in order to tackle the challenge represented by Nvidia's successful RTX 4070 Super. Previously available in the Chinese region and selectively to the OEM market elsewhere, the idea is very straightforward. Similar to the well-received RX 7800 XT, AMD readily admits that it lacks the same level of ray tracing performance of its closest Nvidia counterpart, but makes up for it in spades elsewhere. RX 7900 GRE has 16GB of framebuffer memory where the 4070 Super has just 12GB, paired with a 256-bit interface where the Nvidia card has a 192-bit bus. It's also significantly faster in rasterisation.

In effect, AMD is delivering excellent value for users who still aren't fully buying into the ray tracing dream, or aren't enamoured with Nvidia's ever-growing feature set. Clearly, we believe that those features have a great deal of value, but the point is that if you disagree and if you want a fast card with all the memory you'll need for the foreseeable future, AMD is delivering what Nvidia does not - and it's doing it for less money. It's that simple.

First up, let's consider what the RX 7900 GRE actually is. The name itself is curious, hailing from its Chinese market origins, where GRE stands for Golden Rabbit Edition to mark 2023 in the Chinese zodiac. It's a baffling choice for any other market and doesn't really slot in convincingly into the existing brand, but then again, some might say that any three letters are as good as any other.

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In this week's DF Direct Weekly, the Digital Foundry Team shares their thoughts on the Xbox business update podcast and attempts to fathom strategy from the PlayStation team in the wake of some ominous announcements that resulted in a 10 percentage point dip in Sony's share price. The bottom line looks stark and very straightforward: the audience for PlayStation and Xbox consoles is not increasing gen-on-gen, while the costs of making games to service that audience is increasing dramatically. Something has to change.

Let's deal with the Xbox business update first. My take on this is that Phil Spencer and his team really want to take a multi-platform strategy forward, and it's the obvious, logical solution to addressing the problem of the limit in total addressable audience. Not only that, with its ownership of Minecraft and now Activision-Blizzard-King, it's already one of the largest multi-platform publishers in the market. I can well imagine that the likes of Satya Nadella can't quite fathom why Microsoft is limiting its audience in the name of a legacy console model that seemingly isn't working for Xbox any more.

However, the pitfalls are obvious. Why buy an Xbox console if you can buy a PlayStation and get access to the next games from both platform holders? This concept of exclusivity as 'specialness' clearly resounds with the console audience, and I would imagine that the Xbox team spent a great deal of time honing its message for the business update because if the rumours were left unchecked, we could have been looking at another PR disaster on the level of the Xbox One debacle from 2013. On a more practical level, Microsoft does need to continue to make its consoles attractive, even in the wake of its 'every screen is an Xbox' messaging. A mechanism to make console sales attractive is required because - in the face of a less than stellar response from Game Pass PC - a home platform is required on which to focus its drive for subscriptions.

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In this week's DF Direct Weekly, the Digital Foundry Team shares their thoughts on the Xbox business update podcast and attempts to fathom strategy from the PlayStation team in the wake of some ominous announcements that resulted in a 10 percentage point dip in Sony's share price. The bottom line looks stark and very straightforward: the audience for PlayStation and Xbox consoles is not increasing gen-on-gen, while the costs of making games to service that audience is increasing dramatically. Something has to change.

Let's deal with the Xbox business update first. My take on this is that Phil Spencer and his team really want to take a multi-platform strategy forward, and it's the obvious, logical solution to addressing the problem of the limit in total addressable audience. Not only that, with its ownership of Minecraft and now Activision-Blizzard-King, it's already one of the largest multi-platform publishers in the market. I can well imagine that the likes of Satya Nadella can't quite fathom why Microsoft is limiting its audience in the name of a legacy console model that seemingly isn't working for Xbox any more.

However, the pitfalls are obvious. Why buy an Xbox console if you can buy a PlayStation and get access to the next games from both platform holders? This concept of exclusivity as 'specialness' clearly resounds with the console audience, and I would imagine that the Xbox team spent a great deal of time honing its message for the business update because if the rumours were left unchecked, we could have been looking at another PR disaster on the level of the Xbox One debacle from 2013. On a more practical level, Microsoft does need to continue to make its consoles attractive, even in the wake of its 'every screen is an Xbox' messaging. A mechanism to make console sales attractive is required because - in the face of a less than stellar response from Game Pass PC - a home platform is required on which to focus its drive for subscriptions.

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