@LTT I agree the wattage will be enough, I do wonder it it will need 2x native 12vHP or something else. I hope it will be 600w or less and dual cable, but I would not be overly surprised if it ends up being 800w.
@LTT My guess is there will be even fewer Founders models next generation. I hope that is the case with the pricing, I do hope that there is enough residual value in the 5090 that I can grab a 6090.
The other factor might be power draw, I have a 1,500w PSU but if the 6090 goes over 600w and needs 2 12vHP native, or some totally new connectors I might need a new PSU (not that really matters as far as cost is concerned), the one thing making me think they will keep it under 600w is that even the RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell cards are still 600w so I expect with a smaller node and new architecture, staying under 600w and the 40% performance increase should be possible.
I bought a 5090 for £2,049 not long after release, the same card is now £3,399 and not in stock anywhere. I am hoping costs will have come down by the time the 6090 is released, but I am still expecting it to cost £3,000-3,500, so I may well have to drop down a tier next time if the upgrade is going to be worth it. The estimations of the uplift to the 6090 make it look like it will look like it could be a really interesting proposition, but even for a 40% increase in RT performance I will probably not go above £3k.
A disc drive makes sense at least for legacy games, but the fact that more than 80% of game sales are now digital and more than two thirds of people never buy physical it should be an add-on rather than built in. In reality the option should be that will work with any external drive, but there should be a first party option as well.
Have they confirmed the TDP modes of the chipsets in the handhelds yet, and do you think they will go full 35w in the Predator? Do you think Acer will be kind enough to send DF a Predator Atlas 8 to review?
@Vyns I got the CORSAIR VENGEANCE DDR5 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5 6000MHz CL30 kit in Jan 2025 for £179.99 before things went crazy as well. The same kit is now £1,006.47, which I just obnoxious.
@wsjudd I never used to care until I tried a friend's mechanical keyboard and then have never been able to go back. I had another one before the Razer one that was much cheaper and still lasted a decade. I will replace these when they start having issues, I and others who I know who I have converted have always found mechanical keyboards seem to last for a long time, so whilst there is an upfront cost they do work out cheaper overall.
I have a Razer BlackWidow Ultimate Stealth 2014 Elite Mechanical Keyboard at home for gaming and it is brilliant, I bought it for £125 back in 2014 and despite heavy use for twelve years it is still going strong. At work I have a Cherry KC 200 MX with MX2A Silent RED Switches and I only use that for work but it is still lovely to use. I only occasionally have to type on a non-mechanical keyboard these days, I have a few others connected to different computers in the office, or when using a laptop keyboard and they are nowhere near as nice to type on.
When I do have to replace the home keyboard I will be interested in Hall effect or TMR keyboards, but I want to make sure they are as good or better than a good mechanical keyboard first.
I only play first party games on Nintendo consoles so they will be aimed at the hardware anyway. If it is on PC I play it there as a preference, PS5 Pro for exclusives as well. It would have been interesting if it was a bit more powerful because it might have added creativity to game design by giving them more to play with.
Sticking to first party games, one or more of TLOU3, God of War 3, Spiderman 3, Horizon 3, Killzone, Resistance, Infamous, Wipeout, Syphon Filter, even more going back to PS1 and PS2 games that could have sequels or reboots. Or, if I get what I really want to see, all of the above announced, one a quarter being pumped out for the next few years, plus some new smaller experimental games of the likes that we had dozens of in the PS1 and PS2 era (similar to Astrobot).
I think it is a mistake because of the long term loss of revenue, it makes sense for it to be a time delayed release, it might also tie in with cross gen upgrades for the next console version. I have a PS5 Pro and a PC so it does not really matter to me and on a few games I have double dipped because the PC version looked quite a bit better, but I did wait for the PC version to be on sale. I do think long term it will result in a loss of revenue, but it is hard to tell if it is needed for brand preservation.
@themightyant In synthetic benchmarks, or CPU bottlenecked competitive shooters running potato settings at 720p and 360FPS it might bump the 0.1% lows slightly by going from CL36 to CL30. In the real world, normal graphics, no human will be able to tell the difference. The same between 6000MT and 8000MT, the reality is for almost everyone there will be no observable difference and that is even if there is a measurable difference on a real world gaming benchmark.
It will run on Series as native INT8, the base PS5 does not have INT8, so it would have to run FP16 which is heavier to run. The Deck is full RDNA2 so will run when that version comes out, as will the Machine when that is released which is potentially a bit of a game changer for Valve, especially if they can inject it via Proton where FSR was not previously enabled.
@AlessioCoco if the X gets a version it will certainly provide better image quality than FSR3 on the base PS5. I do not know how performant the X is with INT8 and how much it impacts the rest of the SOC so it will be interesting to see. The PS5 would need to use FP16, but that is 2-3 times heavier than INT8 so I do wonder if that will be viable. I wonder if Rich could see what happens with the FP16 version running on the Linux PS5?
@wsjudd This should be a really interesting comparison, full fat on RDNA 4, INT8 on RDNA 2, 3 and 4 should give some really interesting (if geeky) results. I guess it also means it should run on PS5 and Series consoles which could be good for base consoles currently stuck on older FSR versions.
I think this is huge. It means all their handheld APUs are covered, it means 7000 series users do not get abandoned and FSR 4 is so much better than FSR 3 that this should not have taken this long and should have been road mapped from the start.
@Darren1967 Switch 2 has 9-9.3GB available for devs (depends if video chat is active or not), the Series S has 8GB available for games. The Switch 2 likely uses bespoke edited texture levels rather than having the option for a texture pack, which is quite old school really.
I think Arc has been really interesting as a project, if I was budget constrained then I would probably have gone with Arc over the lower end Nvidia or AMD offerings, they seem to offer great price Vs performance. I really hope that even though big Battlemage got killed off ant it looks like Celestial has as well, that Druid still sees a desktop release. Their latest laptop chips seem really good performance per watt in their laptop and iGPU offerings.
One thing I always wonder with these kinds of ports os how long one can play for before the device thermally throttles itself, both in terms of the SOC and the battery heat side. Is it possible to play for an hour without issue or is it great for the first fifteen minutes then starts to degrade after that?
I was hoping that Steam would at least add a qualifying criteria like they said they did for the Deck and said they would for the Machine and Frame, must have had an account for a period of time and minimum spend to discourage the straight up scalpers, it seemed to stop the worst of it when they did that for the Deck.
@FatalRecall In a developer interview about the Switch 2 version, you wonder why they did not ask about the Series versions? From when they mentioned it in one of the Directs there seemed nothing remarkable about the X version and the S version had the expected cutbacks that were obvious as to what had been done. The Switch 2 is a far different beast, much less power, DLSS upscaling, a far weaker CPU.
PS5 > Series X - straight port
Series X > Series S - cut settings
PS5 > Switch 2 - complex project involving different technology, strategic choices etc.
There is very little technically interesting in comparing PS5 and Series, Oliver and Tom do sometimes lead on the Series version when it is multiplatform, I guess because that is because it might be their preferred console/controller. DF generally lead with the game though, rather than making a bit thing of the platform.
Series Content does not do great because it has much lower market share, PS5 has 73-75% market share, PS5 is selling around 1.4 million units a month, Series is selling around 170k units across both (65% S vs 35% X). Many are also Games Pass only subscribers.
@Vyns Interesting as that is well after they were showing out of stock and I checked again when I posted the above, which was at 18:09, so only shortly before you ordered yours. Maybe they released a few small batches rather than just one lump?
@wsjudd Good to know they had at least one then. I do not need one at the moment, but am interested in seeing how well it works and there are some games I want to play on PC that are better with a controller so I will keep an eye for more stock. When you have had it for a month or two it would be really good to have an extended review. I have always preferred the PS controllers to Xbox so it will be interesting to have an alternative on PC as I have never really got DualSense perfect with PC (I may try thr Pi trick from the article at some point).
The problem with these types of controllers is the cost, I am fairly happy to spend money where it offers a benefit even if that might be somewhat marginal (5090 and PS5 Pro for example) but I cannot see the utility of these controllers even having used them. By far the best controller I have used is the Switch 2 Pro controller, the ergonomics, feel, buttons etc. are brilliant, far better than an Xbox Elite controller which I like less than the Dualsense which is my favourite after the S2 Pro controller.
@themightyant I agree, add the slot, but put a couple of NVME slots inside the device as well. Anyone with a Series storage card can plug it in with their existing games on and anyone not will pop in M.2 drives when they need more space.
I feel like this really needs to be £250 or less to make sense, but I suspect it will be closer to £500, which is a hell of a lot for what is at this point a legacy product.
Ah, that's tough, I had a 4790k PC that I built in 2014 that lasted me (with upgrades) until I built a 12700k in 2021 and then moved to AMD last year, but the 4790k just moved over I reused the case and PSU, but after that I decided the case did not really fit (still had a optical drive in it) and the PSU was too small for the new PC I was building and even having to buy the new case, PSU, fans etc. does add a chunk of additional cost when things cannot be reused which is annoying.
You might be able to keep a look out for some deals on pre-builts, there do seem to have been some good offers out there over the last few weeks.
BTF seems like it is ok for certain builds, especially anything small, but for me a big case cable management and hiding them is pretty easy and offers much greater flexibility. It is not for me at the moment, but I can see it's utility for SFF PCs.
I know they are not for everyone but I really enjoyed the Metro games and Exodus was a great way to shake up the formula, I remember the RT Enhanced Edition feeling so much more real because of how grounded the lighting made it. I am really looking forward to this when it come out.
I am currently running a local AI/LLM on a Strix Halo mini PC, it would be interesting to see how this compares, especially going forward when I want to add more capabilities, I wonder if this will similarly end up in mini PCs.
@themightyant How much of a new PC do you need, if you can get away with just a GPU upgrade that would be my aim for this year, there are still some reasonable deals on 5070Ti and downwards, if you need a new CPU and hence motherboard and RAM then that becomes a bit painful.
The 8TB of storage is also a nightmare at the moment, there seem to be no good deals, I paid £206.92 each for three Samsung 990 Evo Plus 4TB NVMEs in Jan 2025, they are now £419 each and the 64GB (2x32GB) of DDR5 I paid £179.99 for in Feb 2025 is now £976.31 which is absolutely insane.
I got lucky, I built my current PC in early 2025 and there is nothing to actually upgrade at the moment even if I was willing to pay silly prices. I recently sold off some old parts and I had a couple of 32GB RAM kits that sold on ebay for more than I bought them for in 2023 which is crazy. I feel sorry for anyone trying to build a PC at the moment.
I have three 4TB NVME drives in my PC, any more and it would bifurcate the GPU lanes and 8TB drives were crazy expensive even before this all kicked off. One is OS, programs, and document storage, one is purely games and the other is for when I am running projects, the drive for UE5 stuff, AI models, video editing etc. 512GB with Windows and a few programs installed would be getting pretty full and software and especially games seem to have hugely bloated over the last five years, as it does not materially impact performance I do not think many devs are bothered about optimising storage usage.
@dccorona It has to be both, businesses cannot afford to sell at a loss, people will not buy if the price does not work for them.
Realistically a $400-500 console for next gen is unrealistic, it is unrealistic for this generation now so there is no way with more expensive components that will happen. I did not say that people who will not pay more than that are being unreasonable, it is entirely their choice if they choose to buy a more expensive console, but it is unreasonable to expect a specific price point.
The whole business model was historically based around software subsidising hardware, but that model ended this generation and in many ways ended in the PS4 generation, the rise of forever games where people do not buy more games made that model no longer viable. There is not really a way to pivot that model to keep it viable as it has always been, there is not enough subsidy to cover the hardware cost and make a profit. The companies are pivoting their business model though, they are selling hardware at cost or with marginal profit and then making the profit on software and accessories. Consumers should expect that prices will reflect cost, that is the rational position, their choice is whether that represents a value proposition to them or not.
Apple have done that, but by essentially offering a much lower powered version when compared to their main hardware, then iPhone 17e is the phone equivalent of a Series S, cut down and cut back hardware, CPUs that failed binning for a GPU core (so they increase usable yield), seemingly lower clocks, cheaper screen etc. The Neo is basically that model on steroids, it uses a tablet SOC and huge cutbacks compared to even the Air, let alone the Pro. Comparing the Neo to the Air or Pro is like comparing an Ka to a Focus to a GT40 because they are all cars made by the same company, but very different hardware capabilities. As the DF team have said a few times, there is a cheaper alternative to the PS6, which is the PS5, cross gen is going to be very long, likely we will even have a three gen cross gen, with PS4, PS5 and PS6 all getting the same games for a while.
The Series S/X model was not an inherently bad idea, but they did make mistakes with the cutbacks, the RAM issue comes up again and again and if they had kept the RAM the same that would have made things much easier for devs, but MS had lost this generation before it started after losing the PS4 generation and now MS are pushing for the top end of console with Helix, they they have abandoned that concept altogether.
If people do not think that the new consoles represent value for money for them then that is a perfectly reasonable choice. The flip side of that is that is it is not reasonable to complain that a company will not sell them something at a loss.
I posted this on the Patreon. The PS6 pricing is really complicated because I feel that people have actually lost sight of what consoles cost at launch. Ignoring the Pro consoles the average over the last seven generations has been an inflation adjusted launch price of £586, however game prices have more than halved over the same period even with the rising pound/dollar price, the inflation adjusted price of PS1 games would be £96.50/$127.60. A decent PC in the 90s or early 2000s was more than a month's net average income, often twice that and was unable to play the newest games in a year due to GPU changes in the 90s. Now a little over a month's net average salary will get someone pre built with a 9800X3D and an RTX 5080 and that would last many years of AAA gaming. Are many of those who are getting older falling into the trap of not understanding inflation, in the same way the old man down the pub complains he used to be able to go for a night out for 15p, or in my head a pint should still be £2.50 not £7.00?
I know prices historically come down over a generation, but we also all understand the reasons why that has not happened this time and why it will be an issue going forward. For me personally, I bought a PS5 Pro, I have a good PC, I would probably at the moment pay up to £1k for a PS6, but that does depend what it offers at the time.
@Darren1967 It is a backwards compatability option for the game so it uses the same code on PS5, on Series the dev can set different limits, or resolution boost can also be a factor for non aware games.
@exclamationpoint
If you are a Patreon supporter you could submit a question for the Q&A and see if the team have any more insight?
Personally I will be waiting for it to get discounted then playing it as I already have a fairly big backlog and I have an Nvidia GPU anyway, but from the videos if path tracing is coming to RDNA 4 I would wait.
@exclamationpoint I cannot remember, but I remember reading that it was tied to Nvidia at launch for two reasons, Nvidia sent a tech team to help them and that to get it working they want full fat Redstone, Ray Regeneration and the new Radiance Cache update first (which means RDNA 4 only). It might have been rumour, it might have been speculation or it might have been totally genuine.
@MemuAccount From looking at the output from the one game it is available in now, it is not better or worse than PC upscalers, but DLSS is simply better than anything else on the market in an incredibly consistent way. It seems PSSR2 beats FSR4 in some situations and not others even within the same game, Xess (either native on Intel or running on other GPUS) was better than FSR3 but generally FSR4 is better, other in engine versions differ, from excellent to awful.
If one can run DLSS then that win, almost always also beating native and only really being beaten by DLAA, or something heavily supersampled (KCD2 will run at 16k and downsample to 4k, looks amazing, but unplayably slow).
PSSR2 is optimised for TV viewing distances rather than monitor viewing differences so they will have made different design choices based on where it compromises on output. Until we can see see side by side comparisons it will be hard to tell for sure, roll on the March update!
The standing mat is an interesting one as I have not thought about it much before as whilst I tend to wear trainers most of the time I am rarely standing for 8-10 hours a day, do they make any difference over having comfortable well fitting footwear?
I am interested in the Machine from a tech perspective but will not be getting one as I already have a better PC so I have no need. I also have no interest in buying the Deck, again interesting tech but I only play games at home on TV or monitor and not on the go so it does not fit for me (my Switch 2 only gets used docked as well). However the Controller looks a great option for when playing with it sent to my living room TV or when some games need a controller either way. The Frame for me though is close to a day one purchase if there is availability. I have been wanting to get a VR headset for a while and all the current offerings seem to have too many weaknesses in different areas and the Frame seems to deal with all of those so I will finally get into VR and also want to use it to go back and enjoy some games in stereoscopic 3D that are old school 3D as well.
The next XBox I just cannot see the point in, it will be more expensive than a PS5/6, much more, but offer nothing over a PC where all it's games will be available anyway and with none of the Playstation exclusives. I just cannot see what the purpose of the next Xbox existing is.
I have been looking at getting a standing desk for a while now as I am getting some minor back problems. Last year I decided I had to do something about my health and fitness so I joined a gym, lost 40KG and still working at keeping fit and healthy, but this also lead me to be aware of other health niggles. Having been a desk worker for 20+ years, and a gamer for 30+ years, in my early 40s I have weak core muscles and especially lower back, as well as not great desk posture so this year is about fixing my back and core strength whilst maintaining my newfound fitness. I have been looking at standing desks for a while and struggling to find one I actually like, four legs seems essential for stability, at work I have two 33 inch monitors, plus laptop and other bits so four legs is essential rather than the two column designs of most as with that weight on most two legs models wobble, I also want adjustable as I will still want to sit down sometimes. These look really great and the cable management add ons also look useful as I know people with sit stand desks where the cables snag and pull. Thanks for this, will properly assess and it may be my next office purchase.
@ramu-chan You can claim you dislike a trope of laziness, but that is a straw man, I did not say that devs were lazy, I pointed out that most if not all of the issues are solvable with additional work. I suspect that the vast majority of devs themselves would rather put the extra work in to make a game performant, but they are likely constrained by publishers and accountants, as long as a game is "good enough" then most publishers will want it shipped, they worry far less about polish than the development team would.
UE5 is a tool, turn everything on and do not optimise and it will run like garbage, but so will nearly every engine. Power budgets have to be managed, things need to be optimised and tailored to specific levels of available hardware power.
A low level of traversal stutter is pretty much inevitable in large maps on UE5 unless they are simple, but with careful optimisation they can be reduced to one or two frames on high end kit, and a handful on mid range PCs and console, whilst also only happing periodically, in parts of a game where they do not cause issues. That is however very different to shader compilation stutter which is something that devs can entirely solve themselves with proper shader collection passes and pre-compilation burns. Other issues with UE5 are somewhere in the middle, the feature might work if you turn several on, but turning everything on without optimisation will bring even powerful systems to their knees, or turning some of them on but with something with very poor optimisation will do the same.
Clair Obscure runs great, with few issues, on average hardware, Black Myth Wukong runs poorly on almost anything, some of that relates to design, but a huge amount is related to optimisation, BMW is vastly better now than it was at launch.
@LawrenceMurray In essence software Lumen will run on everything, but hardware Lumen only runs well on console if the whole game is well optimised or on a high end PC, there is a reason even Fortnite uses software Lumen on console, the additional CPU and GPU overhead is not worth the improvement in lighting. Less of an issue at 30/40fps but at 60 it is too big a hit to performance. In theory the dev can just tick the box and let the engine take care of it, but it usually requires quite a bit of work as it traces against actual geometry rather than the SDF that software Lumen uses, that means that geometry culling is more important, light leaks need to be checked for and it can absolutely tank performance in what seems like random locations even if it seems to work fine in other places. I have been playing around with a few very simple projects before I move onto a more complicated one I have in mind on software Lumen performance is just a certain level, turn on hardware and without other optimisations it can destroy performance. Looking at the level design and clutter in HoL2 there is no way that will play nice with hardware Lumen without them putting in a huge amount of additional work, which probably is not worth it from a financial standpoint. If they wanted to improve things on high end PCs they could just push out the distance further, for software Lumen, at the cost of a bigger hit to CPU.
@SodaPop8456 UE5 has been a bit of a failure in general performance terms, whilst I agree there is a lot Epic could do (and seem to have done in 5.7) most of the issues fall on the shoulders of developers. There are great UE5 games with no performance issues, the devs put in the work, others did the bare minimum and that is why they have problems. The main one seems to be incomplete shader passes which is something a dev can solve, Valve have solved it in the Deck for verified games and Intel are doing it with their shader butler program, but devs should be doing this by default.
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Re: Next-Gen GPU Rumour Round-Up: AMD RDNA 5 and Nvidia 60-Series Delayed Until Mid-2027 or 2028, but RTX 50 Super Coming Sooner
@LTT I agree the wattage will be enough, I do wonder it it will need 2x native 12vHP or something else. I hope it will be 600w or less and dual cable, but I would not be overly surprised if it ends up being 800w.
Re: Next-Gen GPU Rumour Round-Up: AMD RDNA 5 and Nvidia 60-Series Delayed Until Mid-2027 or 2028, but RTX 50 Super Coming Sooner
@LTT My guess is there will be even fewer Founders models next generation. I hope that is the case with the pricing, I do hope that there is enough residual value in the 5090 that I can grab a 6090.
The other factor might be power draw, I have a 1,500w PSU but if the 6090 goes over 600w and needs 2 12vHP native, or some totally new connectors I might need a new PSU (not that really matters as far as cost is concerned), the one thing making me think they will keep it under 600w is that even the RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell cards are still 600w so I expect with a smaller node and new architecture, staying under 600w and the 40% performance increase should be possible.
Re: Next-Gen GPU Rumour Round-Up: AMD RDNA 5 and Nvidia 60-Series Delayed Until Mid-2027 or 2028, but RTX 50 Super Coming Sooner
I bought a 5090 for £2,049 not long after release, the same card is now £3,399 and not in stock anywhere. I am hoping costs will have come down by the time the 6090 is released, but I am still expecting it to cost £3,000-3,500, so I may well have to drop down a tier next time if the upgrade is going to be worth it. The estimations of the uplift to the 6090 make it look like it will look like it could be a really interesting proposition, but even for a 40% increase in RT performance I will probably not go above £3k.
Re: Should Xbox Project Helix Offer a Disc-to-Digital Game Transfer Option?
A disc drive makes sense at least for legacy games, but the fact that more than 80% of game sales are now digital and more than two thirds of people never buy physical it should be an add-on rather than built in. In reality the option should be that will work with any external drive, but there should be a first party option as well.
Re: Intel's Arc G3 goes official: Acer Predator Atlas 8 and OneXPlayer 3 PC gaming handhelds look powerful, expensive
Have they confirmed the TDP modes of the chipsets in the handhelds yet, and do you think they will go full 35w in the Predator? Do you think Acer will be kind enough to send DF a Predator Atlas 8 to review?
Re: "Because RAM Isn't Expensive Enough" – Corsair Reveals Limited Edition Shugo DDR5
@Vyns I got the CORSAIR VENGEANCE DDR5 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5 6000MHz CL30 kit in Jan 2025 for £179.99 before things went crazy as well. The same kit is now £1,006.47, which I just obnoxious.
Re: Review: Asus ROG Azoth 96 HE Is An Incredible Keyboard, But Not For £350
@wsjudd I never used to care until I tried a friend's mechanical keyboard and then have never been able to go back. I had another one before the Razer one that was much cheaper and still lasted a decade. I will replace these when they start having issues, I and others who I know who I have converted have always found mechanical keyboards seem to last for a long time, so whilst there is an upfront cost they do work out cheaper overall.
Re: Review: Asus ROG Azoth 96 HE Is An Incredible Keyboard, But Not For £350
I have a Razer BlackWidow Ultimate Stealth 2014 Elite Mechanical Keyboard at home for gaming and it is brilliant, I bought it for £125 back in 2014 and despite heavy use for twelve years it is still going strong. At work I have a Cherry KC 200 MX with MX2A Silent RED Switches and I only use that for work but it is still lovely to use. I only occasionally have to type on a non-mechanical keyboard these days, I have a few others connected to different computers in the office, or when using a laptop keyboard and they are nowhere near as nice to type on.
When I do have to replace the home keyboard I will be interested in Hall effect or TMR keyboards, but I want to make sure they are as good or better than a good mechanical keyboard first.
Re: Is Switch 2 Powerful Enough To Last Into the 2030s With PS6 and Project Helix Coming Soon?
I only play first party games on Nintendo consoles so they will be aimed at the hardware anyway. If it is on PC I play it there as a preference, PS5 Pro for exclusives as well. It would have been interesting if it was a bit more powerful because it might have added creativity to game design by giving them more to play with.
Re: PSA – Valve's Steam Controller Puck Could Try to Charge Your Metal Watch Strap, to Dramatic Effect
Who knew shorting something electrical was a bad idea...
Re: PlayStation State of Play on 2nd June: What Are You Hoping for at the 60+ Minute Show?
Sticking to first party games, one or more of TLOU3, God of War 3, Spiderman 3, Horizon 3, Killzone, Resistance, Infamous, Wipeout, Syphon Filter, even more going back to PS1 and PS2 games that could have sequels or reboots. Or, if I get what I really want to see, all of the above announced, one a quarter being pumped out for the next few years, plus some new smaller experimental games of the likes that we had dozens of in the PS1 and PS2 era (similar to Astrobot).
Re: Should Sony Reconsider Killing Future Single-Player PlayStation Ports to PC?
I think it is a mistake because of the long term loss of revenue, it makes sense for it to be a time delayed release, it might also tie in with cross gen upgrades for the next console version. I have a PS5 Pro and a PC so it does not really matter to me and on a few games I have double dipped because the PC version looked quite a bit better, but I did wait for the PC version to be on sale. I do think long term it will result in a loss of revenue, but it is hard to tell if it is needed for brand preservation.
Re: Asus Enters the RAM Market with "ROG Mode" 48GB DDR5-6000 CL26 Kit
@themightyant In synthetic benchmarks, or CPU bottlenecked competitive shooters running potato settings at 720p and 360FPS it might bump the 0.1% lows slightly by going from CL36 to CL30. In the real world, normal graphics, no human will be able to tell the difference. The same between 6000MT and 8000MT, the reality is for almost everyone there will be no observable difference and that is even if there is a measurable difference on a real world gaming benchmark.
Re: AMD FSR 4.1 Now Coming to Older Radeon 7000 GPUs in July After Radeon 9000 Debut, With Radeon 6000 Support Coming in 2027
It will run on Series as native INT8, the base PS5 does not have INT8, so it would have to run FP16 which is heavier to run. The Deck is full RDNA2 so will run when that version comes out, as will the Machine when that is released which is potentially a bit of a game changer for Valve, especially if they can inject it via Proton where FSR was not previously enabled.
Re: AMD FSR 4.1 Now Coming to Older Radeon 7000 GPUs in July After Radeon 9000 Debut, With Radeon 6000 Support Coming in 2027
@AlessioCoco if the X gets a version it will certainly provide better image quality than FSR3 on the base PS5. I do not know how performant the X is with INT8 and how much it impacts the rest of the SOC so it will be interesting to see. The PS5 would need to use FP16, but that is 2-3 times heavier than INT8 so I do wonder if that will be viable. I wonder if Rich could see what happens with the FP16 version running on the Linux PS5?
Re: AMD FSR 4.1 Now Coming to Older Radeon 7000 GPUs in July After Radeon 9000 Debut, With Radeon 6000 Support Coming in 2027
@wsjudd This should be a really interesting comparison, full fat on RDNA 4, INT8 on RDNA 2, 3 and 4 should give some really interesting (if geeky) results. I guess it also means it should run on PS5 and Series consoles which could be good for base consoles currently stuck on older FSR versions.
Re: AMD FSR 4.1 Now Coming to Older Radeon 7000 GPUs in July After Radeon 9000 Debut, With Radeon 6000 Support Coming in 2027
I think this is huge. It means all their handheld APUs are covered, it means 7000 series users do not get abandoned and FSR 4 is so much better than FSR 3 that this should not have taken this long and should have been road mapped from the start.
Re: Review: Indiana Jones and The Great Circle Arrives Surprisingly Intact on Switch 2
@Darren1967 Switch 2 has 9-9.3GB available for devs (depends if video chat is active or not), the Series S has 8GB available for games. The Switch 2 likely uses bespoke edited texture levels rather than having the option for a texture pack, which is quite old school really.
Re: Arc Pro B70 Benchmarks Show The "Big Battlemage" Arc B770 Graphics Card We Never Got
I think Arc has been really interesting as a project, if I was budget constrained then I would probably have gone with Arc over the lower end Nvidia or AMD offerings, they seem to offer great price Vs performance. I really hope that even though big Battlemage got killed off ant it looks like Celestial has as well, that Druid still sees a desktop release. Their latest laptop chips seem really good performance per watt in their laptop and iGPU offerings.
Re: Review: Control on iPhone 17 Pro: Ray Tracing, Frame-Gen, Upscaling - This Has Everything
One thing I always wonder with these kinds of ports os how long one can play for before the device thermally throttles itself, both in terms of the SOC and the battery heat side. Is it possible to play for an hour without issue or is it great for the first fifteen minutes then starts to degrade after that?
Re: Steam Controller Reservations Open May 8th As Valve Implements Anti-Scalping Measures
@Granadico I agree, it seems really odd, especially as they already said that they will do it for the Machine and Frame.
Re: "We're Working on Getting More in Stock": Valve's Steam Controller Sold Out in Minutes but More Units Are Coming
I was hoping that Steam would at least add a qualifying criteria like they said they did for the Deck and said they would for the Machine and Frame, must have had an account for a period of time and minimum spend to discourage the straight up scalpers, it seemed to stop the worst of it when they did that for the Deck.
Re: "This was the crucial factor": How Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Arrived on Switch 2
@FatalRecall In a developer interview about the Switch 2 version, you wonder why they did not ask about the Series versions? From when they mentioned it in one of the Directs there seemed nothing remarkable about the X version and the S version had the expected cutbacks that were obvious as to what had been done. The Switch 2 is a far different beast, much less power, DLSS upscaling, a far weaker CPU.
PS5 > Series X - straight port
Series X > Series S - cut settings
PS5 > Switch 2 - complex project involving different technology, strategic choices etc.
There is very little technically interesting in comparing PS5 and Series, Oliver and Tom do sometimes lead on the Series version when it is multiplatform, I guess because that is because it might be their preferred console/controller. DF generally lead with the game though, rather than making a bit thing of the platform.
Series Content does not do great because it has much lower market share, PS5 has 73-75% market share, PS5 is selling around 1.4 million units a month, Series is selling around 170k units across both (65% S vs 35% X). Many are also Games Pass only subscribers.
Re: "We're Working on Getting More in Stock": Valve's Steam Controller Sold Out in Minutes but More Units Are Coming
@Vyns Interesting as that is well after they were showing out of stock and I checked again when I posted the above, which was at 18:09, so only shortly before you ordered yours. Maybe they released a few small batches rather than just one lump?
Re: "We're Working on Getting More in Stock": Valve's Steam Controller Sold Out in Minutes but More Units Are Coming
@wsjudd Good to know they had at least one then. I do not need one at the moment, but am interested in seeing how well it works and there are some games I want to play on PC that are better with a controller so I will keep an eye for more stock. When you have had it for a month or two it would be really good to have an extended review. I have always preferred the PS controllers to Xbox so it will be interesting to have an alternative on PC as I have never really got DualSense perfect with PC (I may try thr Pi trick from the article at some point).
Re: "We're Working on Getting More in Stock": Valve's Steam Controller Sold Out in Minutes but More Units Are Coming
I am not even sure it went in stock in the UK, it went from not live to sold out instantly at the time it was supposed to go live.
Re: Review: Asus ROG Raikiri 2 Xbox Wireless Controller - A Better Elite Alternative
The problem with these types of controllers is the cost, I am fairly happy to spend money where it offers a benefit even if that might be somewhat marginal (5090 and PS5 Pro for example) but I cannot see the utility of these controllers even having used them. By far the best controller I have used is the Switch 2 Pro controller, the ergonomics, feel, buttons etc. are brilliant, far better than an Xbox Elite controller which I like less than the Dualsense which is my favourite after the S2 Pro controller.
Re: Fight Soaring SSD Prices by Turning Your Xbox Series X/S Game Card Into PC Storage
@themightyant I agree, add the slot, but put a couple of NVME slots inside the device as well. Anyone with a Series storage card can plug it in with their existing games on and anyone not will pop in M.2 drives when they need more space.
Re: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10-year AM4 Anniversary Edition Rumoured, Enabling Cheaper Systems In AI Price Boom
I feel like this really needs to be £250 or less to make sense, but I suspect it will be closer to £500, which is a hell of a lot for what is at this point a legacy product.
Re: The Best Time to Build a Gaming PC Was a Year Ago, but the Second-Best Time Is Now
Ah, that's tough, I had a 4790k PC that I built in 2014 that lasted me (with upgrades) until I built a 12700k in 2021 and then moved to AMD last year, but the 4790k just moved over I reused the case and PSU, but after that I decided the case did not really fit (still had a optical drive in it) and the PSU was too small for the new PC I was building and even having to buy the new case, PSU, fans etc. does add a chunk of additional cost when things cannot be reused which is annoying.
You might be able to keep a look out for some deals on pre-builts, there do seem to have been some good offers out there over the last few weeks.
Re: This New Motherboard Feature Makes Building Your Own Gaming PC Effortless
BTF seems like it is ok for certain builds, especially anything small, but for me a big case cable management and hiding them is pretty easy and offers much greater flexibility. It is not for me at the moment, but I can see it's utility for SFF PCs.
Re: Metro 2039 Tech First Look: What We Learned From 15 Minutes of Footage
I know they are not for everyone but I really enjoyed the Metro games and Exodus was a great way to shake up the formula, I remember the RT Enhanced Edition feeling so much more real because of how grounded the lighting made it. I am really looking forward to this when it come out.
Re: Nvidia Is Making Laptops Now: N1/N1X Leak Shows a 128GB Monster Derived From Their DGX Spark Desktop AI Workhorse
I am currently running a local AI/LLM on a Strix Halo mini PC, it would be interesting to see how this compares, especially going forward when I want to add more capabilities, I wonder if this will similarly end up in mini PCs.
Re: The Best Time to Build a Gaming PC Was a Year Ago, but the Second-Best Time Is Now
@themightyant How much of a new PC do you need, if you can get away with just a GPU upgrade that would be my aim for this year, there are still some reasonable deals on 5070Ti and downwards, if you need a new CPU and hence motherboard and RAM then that becomes a bit painful.
The 8TB of storage is also a nightmare at the moment, there seem to be no good deals, I paid £206.92 each for three Samsung 990 Evo Plus 4TB NVMEs in Jan 2025, they are now £419 each and the 64GB (2x32GB) of DDR5 I paid £179.99 for in Feb 2025 is now £976.31 which is absolutely insane.
Re: The Best Time to Build a Gaming PC Was a Year Ago, but the Second-Best Time Is Now
Good to see you back Will!
I got lucky, I built my current PC in early 2025 and there is nothing to actually upgrade at the moment even if I was willing to pay silly prices. I recently sold off some old parts and I had a couple of 32GB RAM kits that sold on ebay for more than I bought them for in 2023 which is crazy. I feel sorry for anyone trying to build a PC at the moment.
Re: Lexar: Gamers Are Willing to Sacrifice RAM, but 512GB SSDs Are a Step Too Far
I have three 4TB NVME drives in my PC, any more and it would bifurcate the GPU lanes and 8TB drives were crazy expensive even before this all kicked off. One is OS, programs, and document storage, one is purely games and the other is for when I am running projects, the drive for UE5 stuff, AI models, video editing etc. 512GB with Windows and a few programs installed would be getting pretty full and software and especially games seem to have hugely bloated over the last five years, as it does not materially impact performance I do not think many devs are bothered about optimising storage usage.
Re: How Much Would You Pay For PlayStation 6?
@dccorona It has to be both, businesses cannot afford to sell at a loss, people will not buy if the price does not work for them.
Realistically a $400-500 console for next gen is unrealistic, it is unrealistic for this generation now so there is no way with more expensive components that will happen. I did not say that people who will not pay more than that are being unreasonable, it is entirely their choice if they choose to buy a more expensive console, but it is unreasonable to expect a specific price point.
The whole business model was historically based around software subsidising hardware, but that model ended this generation and in many ways ended in the PS4 generation, the rise of forever games where people do not buy more games made that model no longer viable. There is not really a way to pivot that model to keep it viable as it has always been, there is not enough subsidy to cover the hardware cost and make a profit. The companies are pivoting their business model though, they are selling hardware at cost or with marginal profit and then making the profit on software and accessories. Consumers should expect that prices will reflect cost, that is the rational position, their choice is whether that represents a value proposition to them or not.
Apple have done that, but by essentially offering a much lower powered version when compared to their main hardware, then iPhone 17e is the phone equivalent of a Series S, cut down and cut back hardware, CPUs that failed binning for a GPU core (so they increase usable yield), seemingly lower clocks, cheaper screen etc. The Neo is basically that model on steroids, it uses a tablet SOC and huge cutbacks compared to even the Air, let alone the Pro. Comparing the Neo to the Air or Pro is like comparing an Ka to a Focus to a GT40 because they are all cars made by the same company, but very different hardware capabilities. As the DF team have said a few times, there is a cheaper alternative to the PS6, which is the PS5, cross gen is going to be very long, likely we will even have a three gen cross gen, with PS4, PS5 and PS6 all getting the same games for a while.
The Series S/X model was not an inherently bad idea, but they did make mistakes with the cutbacks, the RAM issue comes up again and again and if they had kept the RAM the same that would have made things much easier for devs, but MS had lost this generation before it started after losing the PS4 generation and now MS are pushing for the top end of console with Helix, they they have abandoned that concept altogether.
If people do not think that the new consoles represent value for money for them then that is a perfectly reasonable choice. The flip side of that is that is it is not reasonable to complain that a company will not sell them something at a loss.
Re: How Much Would You Pay For PlayStation 6?
I posted this on the Patreon. The PS6 pricing is really complicated because I feel that people have actually lost sight of what consoles cost at launch. Ignoring the Pro consoles the average over the last seven generations has been an inflation adjusted launch price of £586, however game prices have more than halved over the same period even with the rising pound/dollar price, the inflation adjusted price of PS1 games would be £96.50/$127.60. A decent PC in the 90s or early 2000s was more than a month's net average income, often twice that and was unable to play the newest games in a year due to GPU changes in the 90s. Now a little over a month's net average salary will get someone pre built with a 9800X3D and an RTX 5080 and that would last many years of AAA gaming. Are many of those who are getting older falling into the trap of not understanding inflation, in the same way the old man down the pub complains he used to be able to go for a night out for 15p, or in my head a pint should still be £2.50 not £7.00?
I know prices historically come down over a generation, but we also all understand the reasons why that has not happened this time and why it will be an issue going forward. For me personally, I bought a PS5 Pro, I have a good PC, I would probably at the moment pay up to £1k for a PS6, but that does depend what it offers at the time.
Re: Assassin's Creed Unity's 4K 60fps Patch Isn't 4K - But The Upgrade Is Still Worth It
@Darren1967
It is a backwards compatability option for the game so it uses the same code on PS5, on Series the dev can set different limits, or resolution boost can also be a factor for non aware games.
Re: Review: Resident Evil Requiem PC: The Good, The Bad And The Optimised Settings
@exclamationpoint
Download the videos from Patreon and watch them, they are far better than the even the top end of what YouTube offers.
Re: Review: Resident Evil Requiem PC: The Good, The Bad And The Optimised Settings
@exclamationpoint
If you are a Patreon supporter you could submit a question for the Q&A and see if the team have any more insight?
Personally I will be waiting for it to get discounted then playing it as I already have a fairly big backlog and I have an Nvidia GPU anyway, but from the videos if path tracing is coming to RDNA 4 I would wait.
Re: Review: Resident Evil Requiem PC: The Good, The Bad And The Optimised Settings
@exclamationpoint
I cannot remember, but I remember reading that it was tied to Nvidia at launch for two reasons, Nvidia sent a tech team to help them and that to get it working they want full fat Redstone, Ray Regeneration and the new Radiance Cache update first (which means RDNA 4 only). It might have been rumour, it might have been speculation or it might have been totally genuine.
Re: Review: Resident Evil Requiem PC: The Good, The Bad And The Optimised Settings
@AndreasWright Apparently path tracing is coming to AMD and Intel GPUs at some point, it just was not ready at launch.
Re: It's Official: Resident Evil Requiem Uses Sony's Brand-New PSSR Upscaler
@MemuAccount
From looking at the output from the one game it is available in now, it is not better or worse than PC upscalers, but DLSS is simply better than anything else on the market in an incredibly consistent way. It seems PSSR2 beats FSR4 in some situations and not others even within the same game, Xess (either native on Intel or running on other GPUS) was better than FSR3 but generally FSR4 is better, other in engine versions differ, from excellent to awful.
If one can run DLSS then that win, almost always also beating native and only really being beaten by DLAA, or something heavily supersampled (KCD2 will run at 16k and downsample to 4k, looks amazing, but unplayably slow).
PSSR2 is optimised for TV viewing distances rather than monitor viewing differences so they will have made different design choices based on where it compromises on output. Until we can see see side by side comparisons it will be hard to tell for sure, roll on the March update!
Re: Flexispot E7 Plus Review: Recovering From Injury With A Standing Desk
The standing mat is an interesting one as I have not thought about it much before as whilst I tend to wear trainers most of the time I am rarely standing for 8-10 hours a day, do they make any difference over having comfortable well fitting footwear?
Re: If There's Still No Price For Steam Machine, How Viable Is A 2027 Next-Gen Xbox?
I am interested in the Machine from a tech perspective but will not be getting one as I already have a better PC so I have no need. I also have no interest in buying the Deck, again interesting tech but I only play games at home on TV or monitor and not on the go so it does not fit for me (my Switch 2 only gets used docked as well). However the Controller looks a great option for when playing with it sent to my living room TV or when some games need a controller either way. The Frame for me though is close to a day one purchase if there is availability. I have been wanting to get a VR headset for a while and all the current offerings seem to have too many weaknesses in different areas and the Frame seems to deal with all of those so I will finally get into VR and also want to use it to go back and enjoy some games in stereoscopic 3D that are old school 3D as well.
The next XBox I just cannot see the point in, it will be more expensive than a PS5/6, much more, but offer nothing over a PC where all it's games will be available anyway and with none of the Playstation exclusives. I just cannot see what the purpose of the next Xbox existing is.
Re: Flexispot E7 Plus Review: Recovering From Injury With A Standing Desk
I have been looking at getting a standing desk for a while now as I am getting some minor back problems. Last year I decided I had to do something about my health and fitness so I joined a gym, lost 40KG and still working at keeping fit and healthy, but this also lead me to be aware of other health niggles. Having been a desk worker for 20+ years, and a gamer for 30+ years, in my early 40s I have weak core muscles and especially lower back, as well as not great desk posture so this year is about fixing my back and core strength whilst maintaining my newfound fitness.
I have been looking at standing desks for a while and struggling to find one I actually like, four legs seems essential for stability, at work I have two 33 inch monitors, plus laptop and other bits so four legs is essential rather than the two column designs of most as with that weight on most two legs models wobble, I also want adjustable as I will still want to sit down sometimes. These look really great and the cable management add ons also look useful as I know people with sit stand desks where the cables snag and pull. Thanks for this, will properly assess and it may be my next office purchase.
Re: Review: High on Life 2 reignites the Unreal Engine 5 image quality/performance debate
@ramu-chan
You can claim you dislike a trope of laziness, but that is a straw man, I did not say that devs were lazy, I pointed out that most if not all of the issues are solvable with additional work. I suspect that the vast majority of devs themselves would rather put the extra work in to make a game performant, but they are likely constrained by publishers and accountants, as long as a game is "good enough" then most publishers will want it shipped, they worry far less about polish than the development team would.
UE5 is a tool, turn everything on and do not optimise and it will run like garbage, but so will nearly every engine. Power budgets have to be managed, things need to be optimised and tailored to specific levels of available hardware power.
A low level of traversal stutter is pretty much inevitable in large maps on UE5 unless they are simple, but with careful optimisation they can be reduced to one or two frames on high end kit, and a handful on mid range PCs and console, whilst also only happing periodically, in parts of a game where they do not cause issues. That is however very different to shader compilation stutter which is something that devs can entirely solve themselves with proper shader collection passes and pre-compilation burns. Other issues with UE5 are somewhere in the middle, the feature might work if you turn several on, but turning everything on without optimisation will bring even powerful systems to their knees, or turning some of them on but with something with very poor optimisation will do the same.
Clair Obscure runs great, with few issues, on average hardware, Black Myth Wukong runs poorly on almost anything, some of that relates to design, but a huge amount is related to optimisation, BMW is vastly better now than it was at launch.
Re: Review: High on Life 2 reignites the Unreal Engine 5 image quality/performance debate
@LawrenceMurray
In essence software Lumen will run on everything, but hardware Lumen only runs well on console if the whole game is well optimised or on a high end PC, there is a reason even Fortnite uses software Lumen on console, the additional CPU and GPU overhead is not worth the improvement in lighting. Less of an issue at 30/40fps but at 60 it is too big a hit to performance.
In theory the dev can just tick the box and let the engine take care of it, but it usually requires quite a bit of work as it traces against actual geometry rather than the SDF that software Lumen uses, that means that geometry culling is more important, light leaks need to be checked for and it can absolutely tank performance in what seems like random locations even if it seems to work fine in other places.
I have been playing around with a few very simple projects before I move onto a more complicated one I have in mind on software Lumen performance is just a certain level, turn on hardware and without other optimisations it can destroy performance. Looking at the level design and clutter in HoL2 there is no way that will play nice with hardware Lumen without them putting in a huge amount of additional work, which probably is not worth it from a financial standpoint.
If they wanted to improve things on high end PCs they could just push out the distance further, for software Lumen, at the cost of a bigger hit to CPU.
Re: Review: High on Life 2 reignites the Unreal Engine 5 image quality/performance debate
@SodaPop8456
UE5 has been a bit of a failure in general performance terms, whilst I agree there is a lot Epic could do (and seem to have done in 5.7) most of the issues fall on the shoulders of developers. There are great UE5 games with no performance issues, the devs put in the work, others did the bare minimum and that is why they have problems. The main one seems to be incomplete shader passes which is something a dev can solve, Valve have solved it in the Deck for verified games and Intel are doing it with their shader butler program, but devs should be doing this by default.