Using a combination of a Microsoft Store discount code and the current discounted prices on CDKeys for Microsoft gift cards, you can net yourself substantial savings on both of Microsoft's current gen consoles. We've saw this deal several months ago, but it's pleasant to see it again, and allows you to save a fair bit on both consoles.

The principle for redeeming both of these discounts is the same - as opposed to paying for the Series X or Series S by means of a card or PayPal, you can load up Microsoft gift cards onto your account to give you a balance equal to, or as close to the amount of the console's purchase price with the respective discount code, and pay for them that way. If you'd be paying by more normal methods, the Series X would be £321.75 and the Series S would be £178.49. However, the way of getting them cheaper is through current discounts from CDKeys on Microsoft gift cards.

To break this down further - for the Series X discount, you'd need enough gift cards to have £330 on your Microsoft account balance which works out to:

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Ever since its reveal in 2020, Black Myth: Wukong has been an alluring project. Developer Game Science has been surprisingly open in comparison to other AAA studios and the game's apparent ambitions have been reinforced with each and every press release: a hero-focused action game retelling the story of Journey to the West, and a graphical tour de force using the latest Unreal Engine features. In fact, on PC Wukong uses the Nvidia branch of UE5 to enable full ray tracing, promising an even more impressive presentation. With the full game in hand, it's time to see if Game Science has fulfilled the graphical promise of that first trailer, how the RT features work on PC, and what optimised settings can be used to deliver a smooth experience on a range of hardware. Enough monkey business then, let's get right into it.

From the moment the game starts up, it's clear that Game Science has delivered a level of graphical fidelity that surpasses that of the initial trailer. The dazzling intro to the game dazzles, with titanic mythical beings looming over you and an entire area replete with unique volumetric rendering that's unfortunately rare in the modern age.

With each and every dash, staff swipe and bit of movement, the main character and his nemesis distort and move the physical volume of fog that they find themselves in. Beyond Housemarque's Returnal and some legacy PhysX titles, real physicalised particles like this are rare, and Game Science made sure to use this GPU-intensive effect effectively to add a mystical flourish to game moments and character entrances.

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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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Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is one of Digital Foundry's most eagerly anticipated games, effectively hitting the beats that made the first series entry so enjoyable. The grand scale of the environments, the dense swarms of tyranids, the absolute carnage of combat - it's all back in Space Marine 2, enhanced by the impressive technical capabilities of the Swarm engine. Focus Entertainment recently shared a preview build of the PC version of the game, and we're eager to share our impressions with you. We're liking what we see - but Space Marine 2 pushes hardware, which poses interesting challenges to the current generation of consoles, especially on the CPU side.

Saber Interactive has taken on development duties for this game, and our first impression is that it's done a fantastic job of capturing the Warhammer 40,000 aesthetic: colossal, heroic figures, massive-scale gothic architecture stretching out into the far distance and an enviable wealth of animated detail in the immediate area. The sense of density is only heightened once you get your first taste of combat: dozens of tyranids rushing you, while hundreds (possibly even thousands more) can sometimes be seen massing in the background.

Density in detail at close range also impresses, though it's not quite to the same extremes as Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. That said, as third-person game up against a first-person experience, that's not actually a bad thing. It works exceptionally well. The emphasis on detail also means that something has to give elsewhere: Space Marine 2 doesn't seem to be using cutting-edge lighting or global illumination technology, but you do get accomplished versions of mature technologies like shadow maps, screen-space reflections and screen-space ambient occlusion, while the GI solution (which does seem pre-calculated or 'baked') does give a good impression of light bounce. The quality of the physically-based materials also works well.

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For many, scaling Mount Everest has stood as the ultimate challenge of one's strength and endurance. An achievement of a lifetime. For long-time Doom players, however, there is an equivalent: NUTS.WAD. Legend has it that NUTS.WAD descended upon Doom players in the year 2001: a map from the future in which players are dropped into a single map with more than 10,000 enemies and a handful of power-ups. And now - for the first time ever - it's playable on a games console.

I'm half-joking, of course, but the ability to load in any Doom mod is just one great feature found in the latest version of Doom and Doom 2. Helmed by Nightdive in cooperation with id Software and Machine Games, this new version is worth looking at as it is the most feature rich, best-performing version of Doom on consoles. It's available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series consoles, Switch and even last-gen PS4 and Xbox hardware. The game was transitioned over to Nightdive's KEX engine and brings with it a vast array of enhancements - 120fps support on consoles, 16-player multiplayer including co-op, and a new soundtrack from the legendary Andrew Hulshult.

But it was the mod support that was my first destination and with it, the chance to see how Nightdive's work would cope with the NUTS.WAD challenge. This pushes beyond the limits of what Doom engine was intended to handle and now we can test it on console and the results are interesting. Before we go on, it's worth stressing that all current-gen machines can handle 4K gaming at 120fps - and yes, that includes Series S. The engine is optimised and fast - all the included content and every map I tested runs like greased lightning. I wanted to raise this caveat because the challenge of NUTS.WAD is so extreme and cruel that I don't want people to get the wrong idea. The fact that you can run NUTS.WAD at all is cause for celebration!

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A week ago we looked at the slightly underwhelming AMD Ryzen 9600X and 9700X, which were marked by modest gaming performance increases in some titles, more significantly better content creation grunt and slightly better thermals. Now it's time to look at the second half of AMD's Zen 5 quartet, the £459/$499 Ryzen 9 9900X and £609/$649 Ryzen 9 9950X. These are powerful 12-core and 16-core parts that ought to be more of interest to content creators than gamers, so do they make a better case for Ryzen 9000? And does either one manage to exceed the top-level gaming performance of the 7800X3D?

Unfortunately, after four days of frantic benchmarking and troubleshooting, I'm not sure AMD has succeeded on either of these points. Our Ryzen 9900X and 9950X testing has been marked by confusingly poor gaming performance, including performance regressions versus the 7900X and 7950X, alongside a few examples of genuine uplifts that nonetheless don't go far enough to making these CPUs worth recommending.

This review does at least mark the debut of two improvements to our benchmarking suite compared to last week's reviews, which itself marked the introduction of an entirely new automated benchmarking system for Digital Foundry - and therefore only included a more limited selection of games than we've offered in the past.

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Early editions of the original Xbox One console running on dated firmware are failing to download the latest updates, essentially making the 2013-era systems unusable.

That's according to our sister site Eurogamer's Digital Foundry team, which tried to update and use three separate Xbox One consoles. According to its own testing, all three failed to update, as "systems operating on older firmware revisions error out when connected to Xbox Live."

Even though all three had been updated since the 2013 launch – one was running a 2018 dashboard, and two others a dashboard from 2017 – none of them were able to download the latest firmware, either online or via an offline USB.

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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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Apple's iPad series of tablet computers had a huge impact on the computing landscape. The combination of a large-format touchscreen and the fluidity of Apple's software made for a really compelling device for web browsing, playing games, watching videos, and reading books. At the same time, iPads haven't quite displaced traditional computers for a lot of more traditional productivity-focused use cases, and haven't dethroned more dedicated devices like game consoles either.

That's where the latest generation of iPad Pros comes in. The 2024 iPad Pro packs a stunning "tandem OLED" display capable of up to 1600 nits peak brightness, along with the brand-new M4 processor which promises enough juice for sophisticated apps and console-level games. It's by far the most capable iPad yet, and the best positioned to shore up any weaknesses prior iPads might have had. So how does the M4 iPad Pro fare as a general purpose computer? And does it turn in satisfactory results when put up against the recent crop of demanding iPad console ports?

The M4 iPad Pro's form factor is exceptional - it's remarkable just how thin and light it is. I purchased the 11-inch mode and it feels like it's just barely there. It comes in about half a kilogram in weight, and is a mere 5.3mm thick - way thinner than my iPhone 15 Pro and substantially thinner than any other prior iPad. The actual utility of that thinness is perhaps a bit more questionable though - I can't really say that a thicker tablet has much of an impact on its day-to-day use. The second item of note is the OLED display, which is a first for any larger-screened Apple device. It offers perfect black levels, great off-axis viewing, and 120Hz support for silky smooth animation. It also features great brightness levels - about a thousand nits for a full white screen in SDR and HDR and 1600 nits for HDR highlights. I'd say those figures are better than the best OLED TVs on the market today, which can hit similar peak brightness but take a huge brightness hit with more uniformly bright content.

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Marvel Rivals is the second new hero shooter to arrive in beta form this month, following on from Sony's Concord as another team-based multiplayer affair. This time though, it's a full cross-platform release, with Xbox Series X and Series S joining PS5 and PC. Rivals also goes further in using the Unreal Engine 5 feature set, with Lumen global illumination and reflections, and features a third-person perspective of the titular heroes and villains that sets it apart from the likes of Overwatch. Early impressions suggest a more deeply ambitious game, but one that also comes with more profound technical challenges in its current form.

We've tested every platform to see how they compare, paying special attention to PS5, Series X and Series S to see how closely they manage to hold to the target 60fps - and in the case of the Series S, how much they sacrifice to get there with more modest hardware. Beyond that, how do these platforms hold up to the game running maxed out on PC, with Lumen GI and reflections set to ultra, and what technical gremlins lurk behind that beta badge?

Before we answer these questions, it's worth looking at the state of play right now. After all, this is a beta in flux, with 21 characters and four map variants on offer during our testing. Developers NetEase Games are no strangers to genre giant Overwatch, having worked on creating versions of the title and other Blizzard releases for the Chinese market, and that comes across in the presentation: slick, snappy and broadly similar.

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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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Low profile mechanical keyboards are a popular choice for anyone that prefers the short, snappy feel of a great laptop keyboard but wants something a little more capable, durable and customisable. While full-height mechanicals were the first to go mainstream, low-profile alternatives are becoming increasingly common, and there's an exciting arms race resulting in some truly impressive designs.

Today we're looking at three such keyboards: a refined gaming-focused board from industry giants Logitech, a fancy typists' offering from Chinese boutique brand iQunix and a weird, stylish and unmistakenly early Apple keyboard from London one-man-brand Electronic Materials Office.

Despite being nominally part of the same category, these keyboards couldn't be more different in terms of their intended use cases - and that has lead to fascinating differences in design. Here are reviews of the G515 Lightspeed TKL, Magi65 Pro and Altar 1.

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Apple's iPad series of tablet computers had a huge impact on the computing landscape. The combination of a large-format touchscreen and the fluidity of Apple's software made for a really compelling device for web browsing, playing games, watching videos, and reading books. At the same time, iPads haven't quite displaced traditional computers for a lot of more traditional productivity-focused use cases, and haven't dethroned more dedicated devices like game consoles either.

That's where the latest generation of iPad Pros comes in. The 2024 iPad Pro packs a stunning "tandem OLED" display capable of up to 1600 nits peak brightness, along with the brand-new M4 processor which promises enough juice for sophisticated apps and console-level games. It's by far the most capable iPad yet, and the best positioned to shore up any weaknesses prior iPads might have had. So how does the M4 iPad Pro fare as a general purpose computer? And does it turn in satisfactory results when put up against the recent crop of demanding iPad console ports?

The M4 iPad Pro's form factor is exceptional - it's remarkable just how thin and light it is. I purchased the 11-inch mode and it feels like it's just barely there. It comes in about half a kilogram in weight, and is a mere 5.3mm thick - way thinner than my iPhone 15 Pro and substantially thinner than any other prior iPad. The actual utility of that thinness is perhaps a bit more questionable though - I can't really say that a thicker tablet has much of an impact on its day-to-day use. The second item of note is the OLED display, which is a first for any larger-screened Apple device. It offers perfect black levels, great off-axis viewing, and 120Hz support for silky smooth animation. It also features great brightness levels - about a thousand nits for a full white screen in SDR and HDR and 1600 nits for HDR highlights. I'd say those figures are better than the best OLED TVs on the market today, which can hit similar peak brightness but take a huge brightness hit with more uniformly bright content.

Read more

Marvel Rivals is the second new hero shooter to arrive in beta form this month, following on from Sony's Concord as another team-based multiplayer affair. This time though, it's a full cross-platform release, with Xbox Series X and Series S joining PS5 and PC. Rivals also goes further in using the Unreal Engine 5 feature set, with Lumen global illumination and reflections, and features a third-person perspective of the titular heroes and villains that sets it apart from the likes of Overwatch. Early impressions suggest a more deeply ambitious game, but one that also comes with more profound technical challenges in its current form.

We've tested every platform to see how they compare, paying special attention to PS5, Series X and Series S to see how closely they manage to hold to the target 60fps - and in the case of the Series S, how much they sacrifice to get there with more modest hardware. Beyond that, how do these platforms hold up to the game running maxed out on PC, with Lumen GI and reflections set to ultra, and what technical gremlins lurk behind that beta badge?

Before we answer these questions, it's worth looking at the state of play right now. After all, this is a beta in flux, with 21 characters and four map variants on offer during our testing. Developers NetEase Games are no strangers to genre giant Overwatch, having worked on creating versions of the title and other Blizzard releases for the Chinese market, and that comes across in the presentation: slick, snappy and broadly similar.

Read more

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.

Read more

Low profile mechanical keyboards are a popular choice for anyone that prefers the short, snappy feel of a great laptop keyboard but wants something a little more capable, durable and customisable. While full-height mechanicals were the first to go mainstream, low-profile alternatives are becoming increasingly common, and there's an exciting arms race resulting in some truly impressive designs.

Today we're looking at three such keyboards: a refined gaming-focused board from industry giants Logitech, a fancy typists' offering from Chinese boutique brand iQunix and a weird, stylish and unmistakenly early Apple keyboard from London one-man-brand Electronic Materials Office.

Despite being nominally part of the same category, these keyboards couldn't be more different in terms of their intended use cases - and that has lead to fascinating differences in design. Here are reviews of the G515 Lightspeed TKL, Magi65 Pro and Altar 1.

Read more

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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Doom: The Dark Ages is our first look at the latest version of the legendary id Tech engine, as the series seemingly moves from the relatively constrained battlescapes and glory kills of Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal to something on an altogether grander scale for current-gen consoles and PC only. While the trailer contains less than two minutes of actual gameplay footage, there's still plenty to glean about The Dark Ages and its tech from what id has revealed thus far.

The first thing I noticed in the trailer was something I didn't expect for a Doom game: volumetric clouds. They're featured prominently in many shots of the trailer, with the most obvious shots being the intro shot of the burning citadel floating in the sky. Here, the clouds wreathing the structure show clear evidence of local self-shadowing, lighting from the sun and light transmission, visible on the clouds' fringed edges.

Later on, as the Doom Slayer is shot down planet-side, the clouds part around him - though it's likely that this is a VDB animation playback of some sort, rather than a physicalised volumetric simulation given the performance implications. Nonetheless, you can actually spot volumetric clouds throughout the trailer, often above mountains in the distance, and they sometimes seem to show evidence of movement and evolution - interesting stuff.

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Whisper it quietly, but Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater looks like the most exciting Konami project in years. The trailer shown at this year's Xbox Games Showcase contains just over two minutes of tightly edited in-engine footage, but it answers a lot of questions about the direction of the project - with more details provided in an interview between Solid Snake voice actor David Hayter and producer Noriaki Okamura. At its heart, Delta looks to offer extensive reworks to visuals, controls and camera, using Unreal Engine 5, alongside slavishly faithful recreation of the level design and cutscene direction of the PS2 original.

Of course, we've seen Metal Gear Solid 3 polished up in Bluepoint's excellent HD Collection back on PS3 and Xbox 360 - a build that's also been re-used in the recent Master Collection to mixed reviews. But this remake, Metal Gear Solid Delta, is a more ambitious beast. It's shaping up to be a genuine effort to give series fans the best way to play the game. The big question is this: how does the footage we have so far compare to the original via the HD Collection? What's changed, and what stays intact?

While Metal Gear Solid Delta's release date is still unannounced, we do know it's set for release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Steam - and with that being the case, there's no telling what platform we're precisely seeing in the trailer. It could be a mixture of formats, though the smart money is on an early PC build. Practically every shot I've pixel counted shows a crisp native 4K image, a true 3840x2160 with dynamic resolution scaling deployed only rarely. Next there's the frame-rate situation. Oddly enough, the trailer is only presented on YouTube as a 30fps encode, but hopefully that is a limitation of the capture - we'd expect to see a full 60fps in the final product, as we got with the HD Collection before it.

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Despite an early warning that no Switch 2 news would be forthcoming in their June briefing, Nintendo Direct was still a satisfying summer showcase with plenty of exciting titles. We ran our own Digital Foundry Direct special looking at the announcements, with John Linneman and Oliver Mackenzie highlighting some of the most anticipated games - including new Metroid, Zelda and Lego titles.

While the video version of that Direct is available to watch below, I thought it might be interesting to talk about my personal highlight from the show, and perhaps more critically, how the announcements we've seen today might factor into an eventual Switch 2 launch line-up.

Starting off then, I was blown away by the Lego game: Lego Horizon Adventures. The original Horizon games - Zero Dawn and Forbidden West - have an unimpeachable setting, and it's fascinating to see this translated into a world of coloured bricks. Most importantly, there's been surprisingly little lost compared to the full-fat Unreal Engine 5 version of the game for PS5 and PC. High-quality Lumen RT reflections become SSR and pristine virtual shadow maps become traditional shadow maps, but the visual character of the game remains - despite the cutbacks necessary to get to even 30fps on Switch versus 60fps elsewhere.

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The art of the reveal is a difficult thing - and in our current industry, most publishers prefer trailers packed with pre-rendered CGI or snippets captured across the game. Yet, I've always preferred a different approach: a linear series of events showcasing what's possible in the game. This style was memorably used to reveal Metal Gear Solid 2, along with titles like Halo 2, Doom 3, The Last of Us and Killzone: Shadow Fall. It's designed to showcase the gameplay vision of a title contained within a single location - a way to help the player understand what sort of game the developer is building. With the reboot of Perfect Dark, finally shown during this year's Xbox showcase, I was thrilled to see a return to this format.

There's little doubt that the lead-up to Perfect Dark has been fraught with challenges. First named six years ago in a simple teaser, the studio went radio-silent afterwards, with rumors suggesting it was in a rough state. With this new trailer, however, it finally feels like we have a vision for what the team wants to achieve. This is still very much a vertical slice - it wouldn't be surprising to learn that little else of the game's campaign has been built yet - but this trailer gives me hope that they're on the right track.

Creating a new entry in the Perfect Dark series is perhaps not as simple as it may seem. On the face of it, the original Perfect Dark is a type of shooter that largely doesn't really exist any longer. It's mission- and objective-driven, filled with gadgets and other unique scenarios, but the central mechanics, level design and flow are very much of the era. There is one contemporary game, known as Agent 64, which perfectly builds on this style of play - the demo is excellent and a fun throwback - but that's not necessarily what you'd want from a full reboot.

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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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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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Chillblast has just announced a new range of pre-built gaming PCs that aim to provide good all-round specs, beefy performance and fantastic aesthetics for what are generally decent prices. Named Edge, this range of three new PCs hits the mid-range, upper-mid-range and absolute top end of the market in generally compelling packages that you may well want to consider.

For most people, the Karve (from £1,449.95) is likely to be a good choice, pairing a six core & 12 thread AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, a derivative of one of our favourite budget CPUs with an RTX 4060 Ti to offer a system that should muster 1080p HFR gaming, and push into 1440p. Elsewhere, this PC also doesn't skimp on components with a 240mm AIO for cooling the 5600X, as well as offering a 2TB Crucial P3 Plus inside for storage, which is an excellent PCIe 4.0 SSD in a good capacity, 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, and an 80+ Gold-rated Corsair RMe 750W PSU for powering the system. The 4060 Ti inside is also vertically mounted for better aesthetics, which goes hand in hand with the white case that the Karve comes in.

Going up the price ladder, the Vantage (from £2,029.99) swaps to using a Hyte Y60 case, which is in-keeping with the trendier angle Chillblast is going for with these new PCs, and packs in Intel's marvellous i5-14600K CPU with 14 cores and 20 threads. This is a CPU that, in our testing, offers strong performance in content creation workloads, and while it isn't as impressive as AMD's -X3D chips for gaming, it's still more than competent. This is paired with an RTX 4070 Super, which is the best of Nvidia's Super refresh of cards, and offers fantastic results at 1440p with RT on demanding titles such as Cyberpunk 2077, as we noted in our review. The Vantage uses the same Crucial P3 Plus 2TB NVMe drive, adds in 32GB of DDR5-5600 CL40 RAM, and opts to up the PSU to an 850W 80+ Gold Corsair RMe option. The 14600K is cooled by a 360mm AIO this time, while the 4070 Super is also vertically mounted, too.

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Four years after its initial PS4 release, Sucker Punch's Ghost of Tsushima arrives on PC, ported by Nixxes Software. Initial impressions of the port were favourable, but having now spent around a week with the game we're able to give you a much more nuanced appraisal of the conversion, suggest some optimised settings and offer up those all-important PS5 comparisons.

This may be a new engine for Nixxes to deal with, but the overall framework of the game has much in common with its prior ports - which is generally a very positive thing. It means you get a settings menu that lets you tweak as you like, your changes reflected in the background in real-time - no restarts required! And as usual for Nixxes, there's support for dynamic resolution scaling and all major upscaling technologies, along with both FSR 3 and DLSS 3 frame generation (though the new FSR 3.1 spatial upscaling upgrades are not included). Nixxes has also liberated FSR 3 frame-gen from requiring FSR 2 spatial upscaling, which is a welcome change.

In terms of the quality of the upscalers, we see the usual hierarchy, though DLSS has some issues in this title with depth of field effects, with some off-putting jitter. This manifests itself with XeSS but to a lesser extent, while it's not a problem at all with FSR. It would be nice to see this remedied in due course.

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Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 is a carefully paced cinematic game - almost like the logical conclusion of those early 90s FMV experiments. I mean that in the best way and I'm fascinated by its existence - in an era where it feels as if publishers are pushing to fill their games with arguably too many features, Hellblade 2 is a tight, pure experience more so than a typical video game. The focus is so tight, in fact, that some may be put off by the lack of interactivity, but let's be clear - it's his singular focus that allows it to shine, becoming its own thing that you won't soon forget. It's a masterpiece in audio-visual design from developer Ninja Theory and an astonishing demonstration of Unreal Engine 5's core technologies.

As a story-focused game, characters and character rendering play a significant role in the presentation. However, while the pre-release media largely focused on Senua herself, Hellblade 2 features a surprisingly large number of other humans. It's without doubt one of the games defining visual features - the character rendering in Hellblade 2 sets new standards, delivering sequences that, at times, almost resemble actual filmed scenes with real actors. This is one of the first examples of a game that stands up against the promise of the UE5 demo The Matrix Awakens. The scenes feel very natural and realistic in a way that manages to somewhat sidestep the uncanny valley almost completely.

When the camera zooms in for a close-up, the level of detail is such that it left me guessing whether I was looking at real-time graphics or a pre-rendered cutscene. Thankfully, with Photo Mode being available at any time, you can easily confirm that they are, in fact, real-time.Of course, it's really the animation you experience while playing that impressed me the most. The expressions visible while engaged in combat or simply exploring really help bring the characters to life.

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I'm in a bit of an odd position when it comes to the idea of building a computer for gaming. Having written about computer hardware for years, I'd like to think I've got a good handle on what the best components are for the job. However, I've never actually built a PC, despite wanting to for years. After years of using an older HP Envy machine with quite dated components, I decided it was time for a change, and that I wanted a do-it-all gaming PC that would last me as long as this previous option has.

A combination of excitement and inexperience meant I ended up going a tad overkill - and that became an eye-opening experience, given it instilled a lot more fear into to me get things right. Building a high-spec rig as your first ever isn't the easiest, given the overarching thought of cost in your mind when building, and how any mistake could be a costly one.

Still, I feel I learned a lot along the way, as theory ran up against reality, and I hope you find my chronicle useful - or at least interesting! Scroll along to read the piece from front to back, or use the links below to jump ahead to the build, benchmarks and final learnings.

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Bethesda's Starfield was generally a well-regarded RPG, but the game's 30fps target on consoles was the subject of some controversy. The game's massive scope arguably justified that 30fps refresh rate, with only high-end PCs capable of hitting 60fps and higher, but now Bethesda has changed course and opened the floodgates on Xbox Series X consoles following significant optimisation work. Players can now independently select performance and visuals modes at arbitrary frame-rates. How exactly do these new combinations fare, and is 60fps really a possibility after it was explicitly ruled out before?

Starfield presents players with a pretty dazzling array of options at first glance. We have two key modes - visuals and performance - along with display targets for 30fps, 40fps, 60fps, and uncapped frame-rates, with different availability depending on your display type and system settings. Plus, there's an on/off toggle for v-sync, allowing for lower input lag at the expense of screen tearing.

Let's start by untangling the visuals and performance modes. Beyond making for different-looking procedurally generated terrain, there's consistently more ground clutter in the visuals mode with more shrubs, small rocks, grass and other incidental details, especially at a distance. I also noticed that some distant objects use lower LODs in the performance mode at a distance, and some texture mips are higher resolution in the visuals mode. More significantly, the visuals mode uses higher resolution cubemaps for refections, providing a noticeable improvement to detail and clarity. Neither mode gives especially convincing results with a flat reflective at point-blank range, but undulating water or rougher metals can look quite passable.

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Fallout's next-gen upgrade came out of the starting blocks with serious issues on all platforms, but a patch for PlayStation and Xbox systems on May 13th promises to fix the most glaring problems. We've tested the game on PS5, Series X and Series S to see what's changed with the new update, and there is plenty to praise here - though some problems still remain. Crucially, Bethesda has at least provided a working graphics mode selector on Xbox Series X and S - a clearly labelled switch between 'visuals' mode and 'performance' mode that replaces the broken on/off performance toggle we saw before. These modes run with what the developer calls standard settings (on performance mode) or ultra settings (on visuals mode), and each deploys dynamic resolution scale to varying degrees too. That same visuals/performance labeling is applied to the PlayStation 5 version today as well, though these modes at least worked as intended in the previous patch.

There's an extra bonus here. Every current-gen console also gains the ability to independently set their target frame-rate via a new in-game option. We have 30fps and 60fps modes available on standard 60Hz displays - while an additional 40fps display mode becomes available when running with a 120Hz screen connected. Essentially, you can now choose an arbitrary frame-rate target regardless of your graphics mode, and so, we can now even target visuals mode at 60fps. In effect this might make sense when running the game on future PlayStation or Xbox hardware, for example, or to maximise frame-rates in the game's least demanding areas at the expense of frame-rate stability elsewhere. With two graphics modes and three frame-rate options, then, we certainly have a lot more flexibility.

The big question remains though: beyond fixing the obviously broken graphics modes on Xbox, does the May 13th update solve the hitches and performance issues we identified with Fallout 4's current-gen console upgrade? How do all the consoles compare now with the top visuals mode selected? And finally, is it actually possible to run the visuals mode at 60fps, or is there still a need for those lower 40 and 30fps options to get a stable reading?

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Let's great straight to it - Penny's Big Breakaway is one of the best platform games I have ever played. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with this game to the point that even months on from its original release date, I still think about and play it regularly. It's the kind of game where within the first few minutes, you instantly know you'll be playing and replaying for years to come. Developed by Evening Star - the team behind Sonic Mania - what we're looking at here is a game that fully understands Sonic's momentum-based platforming on a level that is rarely observed, translated into 3D in a way that not even Sonic Team has truly managed.

In a sense, Penny's Big Breakaway is a game that feels as if it were built in 1995 during the rise of 3D graphics by time travellers from the modern era, bringing with them today's modern knowledge and know-how. It's a perfect blend of old-school sensibility and innovation: a rare treat in today's gaming industry. It's also a game built entirely using in-house, from-the-ground-up technology. This is not a Unity or Unreal project, it's entirely bespoke, running at native 4K at a full 120 frames per second on everything from Xbox Series S upwards - another rarity.

At its core, Penny's is a 3D platforming game. You play through a series of stages all based on different themes, you jump, you run and aim for the goal - with a twist - the Yo-Yo. Yo-Yo is Penny's personal multi-tool - harnessing its power, players can attack, fly and speed across the map - it's fast, it's original and it's fun. It's also the key to the game's momentum system: tap the Yo-Yo button and Penny hops on board, riding the Yo-Yo like a Razor scooter around the map. Even better, Evening Star has implemented a simple combo system allowing you to chain together moves as if you were playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater - the Yo-Yo basically works like a manual in that game chaining together combos along the way. The thing is, like Sonic, while the controls feel simple enough, there is a lot of depth there and, as you play, you'll find yourself adapting, slowly mastering the controls while executing increasingly lengthy combos.

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Unreal Engine 5 has reached a new milestone release, version 5.4. Alongside technology that sets the groundwork for future iterations of the engine, developer Epic Games is promising substantial performance improvements with better CPU utilisation, potentially solving a common bugbear we've seen on PC and consoles this generation. Of course, the new release also includes visual improvements, including to the Nanite geometry system and Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) upscaling. We've tested this latest engine revision to see how everything works and to get a sense of the kind of performance improvements that might be possible in the new version.

As stunning as it was, the first Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5.0 demo back in 2021 already exhibited the core performance issues that Epic is looking to address with 5.4. Moving through the Matrix demo city at speed on PlayStation 5 was enough to cause precipitous performance drops, as the engine grapples with loading in new areas. This is just a demo, of course, not a shipping game, but the sub-30fps readouts and frame-time stutters coupled with dynamic resolution scaling suggested a severe CPU limitation on console hardware. This was confirmed with the City Sample demo on PC in 2022, where simple CPU and GPU utilisation metrics show severe CPU bottlenecking even on powerful modern CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Logically, this makes sense. A lot of the most prominent UE5 features have significant CPU components, like MetaHuman, open world streaming, hardware ray tracing and Nanite, and therefore place a heavy demand on CPU performance. More critically, you tend to be limited by single-thread performance, so higher core count CPUs aren't able to meaningfully scale by spreading the load across multiple cores and threads. Given that both budget PCs and consoles tend to have core counts in the six to eight range and an increasing number of Unreal Engine 5 games are coming to market, that's a lot of untapped performance potential.

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PC component and peripherals business Corsair has announced plans to acquire Endor AG, the parent company of sim racing brand Fanatec. The move comes a month after Fanatec announced a new CEO amidst widespread condemnation from the sim racing community over botched product launches, shipping delays and customer service failings, which have soured the reputation of a company that produces otherwise well-regarded sim racing gear, from wheels and direct drive wheelbases to pedals and other accessories.

There's clear logic behind the move, as Corsair doesn't currently have a sim racing brand in their (extremely wide) ecosystem, unlike rivals Logitech who launched their first direct drive wheelbase last year and Turtle Beach who did the same earlier this year. Corsair is also extremely proficient when it comes to the logistics of actually producing and selling its products worldwide, something that Fanatec has struggled with historically and has come to a head over the past six months.

As well as Fanatec having only EU and US stores, leaving UK buyers to face significant import duties and long shipping times, the firm also faced controversy over its policy of charging up-front for orders which may not be fulfilled for months. Black Friday discounts in November 2023 in particular resulted in a huge amount of interest, with the Fanatec website toppling over for much of the day, but many customers of the sale reported not receiving their orders well into 2024 and support queries going unanswered.

Read more

Final Fantasy 14 has finally arrived on Xbox Series X/S consoles more than a decade after the MMO's relaunch in 2013, joining players on PC and two generations of PlayStation consoles. With an ever-expanding free trial and plenty of positive buzz, how does the game fare on Microsoft's current-gen consoles ahead of a big graphical update scheduled for July, and what's the score with the recently updated PS5 version?

Let's start with that relatively more mature PS5 version as the basis for our comparisons, given that the game has been available on Sony's current-gen platform since 2021 - and had some baffling performance issues even then. The PS5 version ran at a comfortable 60fps at 1440p, but suffered from distracting and regular frame-rate dips during traversal, even in basic areas, away from other players or when set to a 1080p output. This was fixed a year later, but the game still ran with a frame-rate in the 30s and 40s at 4K.

Now, the PS5 version finally seems (mostly) playable at that native 4K. Frame-rates seem to have improved by ~10fps in most scenarios, which is enough to (usually) stay within the PS5's 48Hz-60Hz VRR window and therefore avoid judder. The PS4 version also benefits from these optimisations, and the 'high draw quality' toggle is now a viable option when it tanked performance heavily before. A locked 60fps still isn't on the table on PS4, with plenty of judder evident, but at least things have improved somewhat.

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

Unreal Engine 5 has reached a new milestone release, version 5.4. Alongside technology that sets the groundwork for future iterations of the engine, developer Epic Games is promising substantial performance improvements with better CPU utilisation, potentially solving a common bugbear we've seen on PC and consoles this generation. Of course, the new release also includes visual improvements, including to the Nanite geometry system and Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) upscaling. We've tested this latest engine revision to see how everything works and to get a sense of the kind of performance improvements that might be possible in the new version.

As stunning as it was, the first Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5.0 demo back in 2021 already exhibited the core performance issues that Epic is looking to address with 5.4. Moving through the Matrix demo city at speed on PlayStation 5 was enough to cause precipitous performance drops, as the engine grapples with loading in new areas. This is just a demo, of course, not a shipping game, but the sub-30fps readouts and frame-time stutters coupled with dynamic resolution scaling suggested a severe CPU limitation on console hardware. This was confirmed with the City Sample demo on PC in 2022, where simple CPU and GPU utilisation metrics show severe CPU bottlenecking even on powerful modern CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Logically, this makes sense. A lot of the most prominent UE5 features have significant CPU components, like MetaHuman, open world streaming, hardware ray tracing and Nanite, and therefore place a heavy demand on CPU performance. More critically, you tend to be limited by single-thread performance, so higher core count CPUs aren't able to meaningfully scale by spreading the load across multiple cores and threads. Given that both budget PCs and consoles tend to have core counts in the six to eight range and an increasing number of Unreal Engine 5 games are coming to market, that's a lot of untapped performance potential.

Read more

PC component and peripherals business Corsair has announced plans to acquire Endor AG, the parent company of sim racing brand Fanatec. The move comes a month after Fanatec announced a new CEO amidst widespread condemnation from the sim racing community over botched product launches, shipping delays and customer service failings, which have soured the reputation of a company that produces otherwise well-regarded sim racing gear, from wheels and direct drive wheelbases to pedals and other accessories.

There's clear logic behind the move, as Corsair doesn't currently have a sim racing brand in their (extremely wide) ecosystem, unlike rivals Logitech who launched their first direct drive wheelbase last year and Turtle Beach who did the same earlier this year. Corsair is also extremely proficient when it comes to the logistics of actually producing and selling its products worldwide, something that Fanatec has struggled with historically and has come to a head over the past six months.

As well as Fanatec having only EU and US stores, leaving UK buyers to face significant import duties and long shipping times, the firm also faced controversy over its policy of charging up-front for orders which may not be fulfilled for months. Black Friday discounts in November 2023 in particular resulted in a huge amount of interest, with the Fanatec website toppling over for much of the day, but many customers of the sale reported not receiving their orders well into 2024 and support queries going unanswered.

Read more

Final Fantasy 14 has finally arrived on Xbox Series X/S consoles more than a decade after the MMO's relaunch in 2013, joining players on PC and two generations of PlayStation consoles. With an ever-expanding free trial and plenty of positive buzz, how does the game fare on Microsoft's current-gen consoles ahead of a big graphical update scheduled for July, and what's the score with the recently updated PS5 version?

Let's start with that relatively more mature PS5 version as the basis for our comparisons, given that the game has been available on Sony's current-gen platform since 2021 - and had some baffling performance issues even then. The PS5 version ran at a comfortable 60fps at 1440p, but suffered from distracting and regular frame-rate dips during traversal, even in basic areas, away from other players or when set to a 1080p output. This was fixed a year later, but the game still ran with a frame-rate in the 30s and 40s at 4K.

Now, the PS5 version finally seems (mostly) playable at that native 4K. Frame-rates seem to have improved by ~10fps in most scenarios, which is enough to (usually) stay within the PS5's 48Hz-60Hz VRR window and therefore avoid judder. The PS4 version also benefits from these optimisations, and the 'high draw quality' toggle is now a viable option when it tanked performance heavily before. A locked 60fps still isn't on the table on PS4, with plenty of judder evident, but at least things have improved somewhat.

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

In the wake of the massive success of the Fallout TV series, Fallout 4 has received a free next-gen upgrade for PC, PS5 and Series X/S that aims to bring the nine-year-old game up to modern standards. The prospect of native PS5 and Series games is tantalising but unfortunately the update arrives with a number of issues - and even at its best the result is somewhat underwhelming.

The patch notes mention two main graphics modes on console: a dynamic 4K 60fps performance mode running at 'standard' settings and a 4K 30fps quality mode running at PC's ultra preset. The game itself presents this as a performance mode on/off toggle in reality, where the off setting is effectively the quality mode referred to in the notes. Beyond these two basic options, Bethesda also adds additional modes for those outputting the game at 1440p and/or 120Hz from your console system menu. As well as these new options, the patch notes mention bug fixes, new quests, new weapons and, on PC, official 21:9 ultrawide support.

To summarise the PC situation in brief, it's a disappointment on a number of levels. For a start, the new ultrawide display support is seriously lacking polish, with select elements of the UI stretched from 16:9 rather than offering a native 21:9 presentation. Worse still, I've noticed visual bugs in the UI at points, such as while naming your character or setting your SPECIAL stats - it looks wrong and needs a fix.

Read more

Unreal Engine 5 has reached a new milestone release, version 5.4. Alongside technology that sets the groundwork for future iterations of the engine, developer Epic Games is promising substantial performance improvements with better CPU utilisation, potentially solving a common bugbear we've seen on PC and consoles this generation. Of course, the new release also includes visual improvements, including to the Nanite geometry system and Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) upscaling. We've tested this latest engine revision to see how everything works and to get a sense of the kind of performance improvements that might be possible in the new version.

As stunning as it was, the first Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5.0 demo back in 2021 already exhibited the core performance issues that Epic is looking to address with 5.4. Moving through the Matrix demo city at speed on PlayStation 5 was enough to cause precipitous performance drops, as the engine grapples with loading in new areas. This is just a demo, of course, not a shipping game, but the sub-30fps readouts and frame-time stutters coupled with dynamic resolution scaling suggested a severe CPU limitation on console hardware. This was confirmed with the City Sample demo on PC in 2022, where simple CPU and GPU utilisation metrics show severe CPU bottlenecking even on powerful modern CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Logically, this makes sense. A lot of the most prominent UE5 features have significant CPU components, like MetaHuman, open world streaming, hardware ray tracing and Nanite, and therefore place a heavy demand on CPU performance. More critically, you tend to be limited by single-thread performance, so higher core count CPUs aren't able to meaningfully scale by spreading the load across multiple cores and threads. Given that both budget PCs and consoles tend to have core counts in the six to eight range and an increasing number of Unreal Engine 5 games are coming to market, that's a lot of untapped performance potential.

Read more

PC component and peripherals business Corsair has announced plans to acquire Endor AG, the parent company of sim racing brand Fanatec. The move comes a month after Fanatec announced a new CEO amidst widespread condemnation from the sim racing community over botched product launches, shipping delays and customer service failings, which have soured the reputation of a company that produces otherwise well-regarded sim racing gear, from wheels and direct drive wheelbases to pedals and other accessories.

There's clear logic behind the move, as Corsair doesn't currently have a sim racing brand in their (extremely wide) ecosystem, unlike rivals Logitech who launched their first direct drive wheelbase last year and Turtle Beach who did the same earlier this year. Corsair is also extremely proficient when it comes to the logistics of actually producing and selling its products worldwide, something that Fanatec has struggled with historically and has come to a head over the past six months.

As well as Fanatec having only EU and US stores, leaving UK buyers to face significant import duties and long shipping times, the firm also faced controversy over its policy of charging up-front for orders which may not be fulfilled for months. Black Friday discounts in November 2023 in particular resulted in a huge amount of interest, with the Fanatec website toppling over for much of the day, but many customers of the sale reported not receiving their orders well into 2024 and support queries going unanswered.

Read more

Final Fantasy 14 has finally arrived on Xbox Series X/S consoles more than a decade after the MMO's relaunch in 2013, joining players on PC and two generations of PlayStation consoles. With an ever-expanding free trial and plenty of positive buzz, how does the game fare on Microsoft's current-gen consoles ahead of a big graphical update scheduled for July, and what's the score with the recently updated PS5 version?

Let's start with that relatively more mature PS5 version as the basis for our comparisons, given that the game has been available on Sony's current-gen platform since 2021 - and had some baffling performance issues even then. The PS5 version ran at a comfortable 60fps at 1440p, but suffered from distracting and regular frame-rate dips during traversal, even in basic areas, away from other players or when set to a 1080p output. This was fixed a year later, but the game still ran with a frame-rate in the 30s and 40s at 4K.

Now, the PS5 version finally seems (mostly) playable at that native 4K. Frame-rates seem to have improved by ~10fps in most scenarios, which is enough to (usually) stay within the PS5's 48Hz-60Hz VRR window and therefore avoid judder. The PS4 version also benefits from these optimisations, and the 'high draw quality' toggle is now a viable option when it tanked performance heavily before. A locked 60fps still isn't on the table on PS4, with plenty of judder evident, but at least things have improved somewhat.

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

In the wake of the massive success of the Fallout TV series, Fallout 4 has received a free next-gen upgrade for PC, PS5 and Series X/S that aims to bring the nine-year-old game up to modern standards. The prospect of native PS5 and Series games is tantalising but unfortunately the update arrives with a number of issues - and even at its best the result is somewhat underwhelming.

The patch notes mention two main graphics modes on console: a dynamic 4K 60fps performance mode running at 'standard' settings and a 4K 30fps quality mode running at PC's ultra preset. The game itself presents this as a performance mode on/off toggle in reality, where the off setting is effectively the quality mode referred to in the notes. Beyond these two basic options, Bethesda also adds additional modes for those outputting the game at 1440p and/or 120Hz from your console system menu. As well as these new options, the patch notes mention bug fixes, new quests, new weapons and, on PC, official 21:9 ultrawide support.

To summarise the PC situation in brief, it's a disappointment on a number of levels. For a start, the new ultrawide display support is seriously lacking polish, with select elements of the UI stretched from 16:9 rather than offering a native 21:9 presentation. Worse still, I've noticed visual bugs in the UI at points, such as while naming your character or setting your SPECIAL stats - it looks wrong and needs a fix.

Read more

SteelSeries' Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is more than a good gaming headset for all consoles plus PC - it's our current top pick overall, beating out names like Corsair and Logitech, thanks to its combination of sound quality, comfort and convenience. This week SteelSeries announced a hardware revision to that DF-favourite design, with a tweak to the placement of the internal mics needed for the headset's ANC functionality, as well as a new white colourway.

SteelSeries were kind enough to send out the new iteration of the headset in that new white colour, and it's clear on close inspection that this is a relatively minor hardware revision. One of the few downsides to the original design were that the ANC nubbins inside the earcup could touch the ears of some people in an annoying and potentially uncomfortable way, and it's this issue that the new revision is designed to address.

You could work around the original problem with third-party ear pads with thicker designs, such as these great-looking options from Wicked Cushions, but it's good to see that SteelSeries has taken the feedback on board and hopefully eliminated the issue for good on all Nova Pro headsets going forward. I didn't find the ANC mic touched my ear on the original model, but it's clear even from a surface inspection that the new design is a little less prominent and therefore unlikely to cause irritation.

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What is an enthusiast-grade mechanical keyboard? It depends on what you're into - it might be a super-fast gaming board for esports, an ultra low-profile work keyboard equally adept for Mac or Windows, or even a full-fat custom keyboard with unique switches and a compact form factor. Today we've got examples of all three, giving you an idea of what sorts of keyboards are out there and which you might prefer.

Here are three reviews then: the low-profile Mistel AirOne, the rapid trigger Meletrix BOOG75 and the custom-built Keychron Q1 Pro with MX Purple switches designed by Cherry and British keyboard maker Glarses. All are fascinating options in their own right, showing the breadth of the enthusiast keyboard market in spring 2024.

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Valve's Steam Deck is a highly capable piece of kit, often reaching parity with last-gen consoles at ~720p, while more demanding current-gen efforts can prove quite playable as well - even including some of the top-end Unreal Engine 5 titles. The RDNA2 graphics hardware inside the Deck is even capable of ray tracing, though this support has largely been dormant in SteamOS. That's started to change over the last year, with first Vulkan and then DXR-enabled titles running under Proton with RT enabled - and RT performance has seen big boosts as well.

Today we're taking a look at the state of play when it comes to RT on Steam Deck, looking at some of the best-looking PC titles to see whether they can be playable with RT engaged. Can we get good frame-rates even with demanding ray tracing settings? And how does the Valve's handheld compare in performance terms against the more powerful ROG Ally?

The most obvious place to start is with the Steam Deck is some of the easier ray tracing workloads available - and I think Doom Eternal is a good first choice. The game runs well with minimal settings tweakery: 720p resolution, medium settings and RT toggled on. Relative to the non-RT version of the game, we get solid (if somewhat low-res and slightly ghostly) reflections on glossy surfaces, with very different material properties when RT is enabled. This makes for a transformative difference in scenes with glossy materials, though an aggressive roughness cutoff means that semi-gloss materials are largely bereft of RT treatment.

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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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Path tracing? In Dragon's Dogma 2? The game shipped with ray-traced global illumination but a path tracer sits within Capcom's code - exposed thanks to a new mod for the PC version of the game. Graphics Suite Alpha, made by developer EXXXCellent, is available on Nexus Mods and includes path-traced lighting, shadows and reflections, all running in real-time. So, how does it look, how well does it run - and why exactly is it there in the first place?

To install the mod, you'll also need the most recent REFramework tool from Github, extract that into the Dragon's Dogma 2 install directory, then add in the mod's Lua script to the autorun folder. Go in-game, and you should have access to a bunch of additional options at the bottom of the REFramework overlay related to RT and path tracing.

With PT enabled, you'll see significantly more material and lighting detail versus the standard ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) with the option to use a per-pixel or four-samples-per-pixel level of granularity - each with a corresponding performance cost, of course. The standard RTGI has significantly less information to work with - one sample for every four pixels, so it has a lot more compromises compared to the 'ground truth' of path tracing.

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Last week, I took to Eurogamer to announce a Warehouse Sale for Digital Foundry merchandise, and this week we have development: new 'Bespoke' merch has hit the DF Store, featuring a fan-made design that really tickled us given our collective predilection for uttering this phrase.

As well as the long-rumoured Bespoke tee, which comes in a double-sided blue/purple gradient design on a black shirt, you can also pick up a nifty metal pin (pictured above). Finally, the Bespoke Collection also includes a sticker pack, with a DF Approved seal of quality, a DF Retro PVM design and two #stutterstruggle frame-time graphs - including one blank design to chart your very own traversal or shader compilation stutters.

We've been working on these designs for the past three months or so - and significantly longer in the case of the PVM design - so it's great to finally see them go on (virtual) store shelves. I think they've turned out wonderfully, having had the chance to test out some of the early samples, and I'm particularly happy that the excellent Bespoke design by community member Dacvak now has the chance to be appreciated by a wider audience.

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