Welcome to the 39th edition of Digital Foundry Direct Weekly – the regular show where the team downs tools for a couple of hours to discuss the latest gaming and technology news, share details on their projects and field questions from backers of the Digital Foundry Supporter Program. This week’s offering kicks off with reaction to a new video from Wired with Mark Cerny discussing how the PlayStation 5 was built. It’s an interesting talk, albeit one that’s very similar indeed to the now iconic Road to PlayStation 5 albeit with the benefit of a year’s worth of game titles that better demonstrate and emphasise the PS5’s features. It’s also a timely reminder of how Sony turned things around after the complications of PlayStation 3 – to double-down on communicating with developers and giving easier access to the hardware’s potential.
Despite covering off most of the bullet-points from the older talk once again, there are still some interesting nuggets of new information and integrated I/O is a great case in point. Cerny points out that Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales on PS5 has much the same storage footprint as the PS4 version, despite a wealth of new asset data. In many other cases, PS5 versions of PS4 titles are much, much smaller. It serves to stress that the SSD is not the be all and end all of the PS5’s storage solution, hardware decompression blocks make a genuine difference to throughput and Cerny calls it ‘invisible compression’, effectively allowing developers access to highly compressed data with no visible impact to performance in unpacking it. There’s more to come with PS5 and variable refresh rate support – VRR – is coming in 2022, based on the SDK roadmaps we’ve seen.
00:00:00 Introductions00:01:22 Mark Cerny on PS5 with Wired00:13:03 Hitman 3 gets DXR reflections in 202200:19:50 Xbox 20th Anniversary Museum00:32:20 No More FPS Boost?00:40:19 Square Enix’s “big” remake is supposedly Chrono Cross00:49:31 Crazy Frog returns00:50:37 DF Content Discussion: Bright Memory Infinite00:56:34 DF Content Discussion: Evercade vs livestream00:59:39 DF Content Discussion: Black Friday deals01:04:50 DF Content Discussion: DF After Dark01:06:33 DF Supporter Q1: With Xbox’s backwards compatibility updates and the GTA “remaster” debacle, do you think remasters are even necessary?01:13:16 DF Supporter Q2: In your opinions, will reduced power draw and battery limitations prevent the production of more powerful portable devices?01:17:19 DF Supporter Q3: With Intel’s XeSS being somewhat GPU agnostic, do you have any thoughts about the technology being implemented in PS5/X Series consoles?01:21:17 DF Supporter Q4: “Hi DF, would like to know your thoughts on the on-demand texture streaming used in Call of Duty: Vanguard.”01:24:40 DF Supporter Q5: I am personally not fond of “open world” games. However, I have come to like “wide linear” games. What are your opinions on this?01:36:13 DF Supporter Q6: Did you ever cover the demo scene or are you planning on it?01:39:41 DF Supporter Q7: You often say that the DF Supporter Program changed a lot for the whole team. Can you go more into details?
Beyond the Sony discussion we also share our thoughts on Hitman 3’s 2022 announcements, including ray traced reflections and VR support, before we discuss our thoughts on Microsoft’s excellent Xbox 20th Anniversary Museum, which not only charts the history of Xbox over two decades but also has a special section that mines your Xbox Live data to place you into the timeline. It’s brilliant stuff and often throws up some fascinating data! However, this is not as fascinating as Audi’s purchase of an Xbox 360 after Xbox One launched – remember when Don Mattrick told us that Microsoft had a product for those who couldn’t get online? Looks like at least one person bought into this remarkable vision!