MattGPT

@Darren1967 I suspect it will not crash, it will just mean that games do not progress as much graphically for a few years, there is no reason why the majority could not sit on PS5 level graphics for a few more years, or that PC gamers really need an RTX 6000 series card etc. I suspect it will just delay the upgrade cycle, devs will get better at optimising and people might even spend more on games rather than spending that money on a new console or PC part upgrades.

@Pesky_wabbit Storage is nuts, I paid £259 each for 3 x Samsung 990 EVP Plus 4TB drives in March last year, those same drives are now £499 and £179 for 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5 6000Mhz CL30, that same RAM kit is now £999.99 if one can find it in stock anywhere. It makes the GPU rises seem tame.

I have never before built a PC and seen the entire thing increase in value over the following year, it is now worth £3k more than when I built it in March 2025, which is insane.

@DrUnK_PuNk I have a similar issue, OLED TV, monitor laptop etc. I find other displays not great even just for normal work now. I have a PS5 Pro which I am happy with as well, and a decent Gaming PC so I do like high FPS, but the one thing I find is far more important is consistency in both FPS and frame times, on console when sat at sofa-to-tv distance I am happy enough with a rock solid, well timed 30 or 40fps, I would take that over a 55-60fps when the game does not have VRR, though VRR mostly solves that issue for me.

Weirdly I also find I have issues with fast moving images via YouTube, when John was reviewing Doom: The Dark Ages I found the fast paced gameplay via YouTube really uncomfortable in a way I cannot really describe, but playing it myself on PC was totally fine, as was watching the download of the video from the Patreon.

To me it seems that Nintendo had a couple of misses both in handheld and docked with the Switch 2, for me as I almost only play docked the omission of VRR in docked is that, but I doubt they will fix that as it means completely changing the chip they chose to stick in the dock, which they seem to have done because it was $8 cheaper than then one that could handle VRR.

@DrUnK_PuNk I bought a Switch 2 at release for two reasons, I rarely if ever play handheld so the screen was not a dealbreaker and I only expect hardware costs to increase (and my niece and nephew wanted my Switch 1), but it had mostly sat with little use. MKW was interesting, but feels quite empty to me and less easy to pick up and play with kids than MK8D. MP4 started off great, it looks beautiful (they have tailored the art to the tech very well), it plays well, the gameplay is solid, but the story starts off average, the latter third of the game below par and the ending almost made me wish I had not bothered playing the game.

When I have played it I would estimate that 80% of that time has been replaying Switch 1 games or games I never got round to on the Switch 1, it irons out nearly all framerate issues (though not always frame pacing), the DRS windows stay at the top of their range which makes a noticeable difference and some of the upgrades have been great as well. It feels a little PS5 esque in that respect, there were a few great games at the start of the PS5, but especially with the lockdown I finished those very quickly and then spent a lot of time playing PS4 games which the PS5 fixed almost entirely.

All that being said I did pre-order Starfox which is something I very rarely do and from the look of John's review it will certainly give a few hours of very solid enjoyment.

@Comiga I suspect a fairly big chunk of DF supporters will be in the "Not until PC release" camp more than anything, that seems to be the general sentiment amongst a lot of people, even those with PS5/Pro, if they have a high end gaming rig as well.

I was expecting £89/99, though I will not be preordering.

@Eruanno European/UK prices also include VAT (19-25%), where as US prices do not, so that has a fairly big impact.

@Titntin If a £4k PC is making that much noise, have you tried changing the fan profiles, fan setup (more inflow), changing fans (120mm > 140mm seems to make a difference to me) and/or undervolting? My 9800X3D/5090 makes no more noise than my PS5 Pro in normal gaming, it only really gets louder if I run a stress test and it sits under the desk anyway so I do not hear it. I have 3x 140mm/30mm deep fans drawing in and then 3x 120mm/30mm fans through the AIO and one of the same on the back. If I used standard 120mm 25mm fans on the front I would have to run around 600-1,000 RPM faster for the same airflow, which is noticeably louder.

I agree that Valve has been hit by this mess, but so has everyone, though to different levels as Valve have much smaller buying power than Sony, or major PC builders. From watching Rich's video it does seem that they slightly under specified this, a slight increase in performance would have made the value proposition better and likely not have increased the price hugely. I like the Machine from an engineering viewpoint, I really like Steam OS, I think that Valve are doing great things in allowing gaming to move away from Windows, I just wonder if the Machine misses mark somewhat.

A 2x16GB kit (because one wants paired modules) is likely to be £250-350, plus maybe selling a single 16GB stick would get £100 back, so a £150-250 cost just does not make sense, no one rational would make that upgrade, they would just buy a pre-built with better specs for that money.

@matmartin Rich does a comparison in the video, it does have a minor impact, but it appears minimal in many real world scenarios.

I think the form factor is interesting from an engineering side, especially as from the video where Rich dismantles it, it looks like half to two thirds of the volume is the heat pipe, heat sink and fan.

I admire the effort some people put into SFF PCs, especially those who go with full water cooling as well, but for me it always makes things fiddly. I like a full case, plenty of space, good airflow. At some point if I have the time and money I would love to build a full custom water cooled system to keep things really quiet, but it is a lot of work and expense for something that does not have any real impact on performance (1-5% max if it prevents thermal throttling).

One thing that could be an interesting (if entirely pointless) would be FPL, Frames Per Litre, my 9800X3D/5090 build is in a full size tower, runs quite quietly as it has an AIO and plenty of fans running slower to keep the noise levels down. If both were run at the same resolution and settings, how many frames would each generate per litre of volume.

When the PS5 is down to £479 with a controller (obviously), in this week's Prime sale, the Machine seems like a truly awful deal at twice the price.

Edit to add: the price differential between the 512GB model and the 2TB model is £270, the retail price difference between a 512GB NVME and a 2TB NVME is around £160. I know Valve are trying to make a profit, but it does seem to be a bit much to mark up that much when the device is already overpriced.

I have the Cherry KC200 MX with the MX2A Silent switches as my work keyboard and it is lovely to use (I do not game on it) and the metal back means no flex at all.
One thing I do not really understand is the trend for keyboards without numpads as it makes real work much harder and with non-dtandard layouts of other keys beyond they Qwerty basics as it means I cannot type from muscle memory. Any ideas why do many of them do this on "gaming" keyboards?

@themightyant From the basics it does seem like it should be much more performant, the workloads should scale across more cores much better, data will not need to be shuffled around within parts of the engine as much because it is all integrated rather than lots of bits bolted together, but that is just from the blog and some very high level bits published, they are putting a GitHub up in the next few weeks which should contain a lot more detail, although that will be way over my head!

@MemuAccount it will be scalable, so demanding at the top end. Turn it up to max and it will likely strain a 5090.

@Someguyperson I have said a few times a DF hardware survey could give some interesting results. Not just GPU, but CPU, Resolution, VRR, HDR etc. for consoles as well as PC. I would suspect there is a much higher usage of PS5 Pro, VRR/HDR/OLED/HRR displays, higher end CPUs and GPUs than in general, likely miles ahead of the Steam survey.

@Ed64 a lot of Steam users are on laptops, they will be using a standard home desktops, 5.6% or users are on Intel integrated graphics, that is more than all the RTX xx80 and xx90 (plus their Ti/super variants) combined, who will likely be on higher end CPUs. AMD CPUs are great for gaming, but for general usage Intel and AMD are roughly on par and for high end compute consumer Intel CPUs generally have more cores and are a better option, even if Threadripper is amazing for workstations.

FSR4 is going to be important, but the real fight will come next generation, what does RDNA5/UDNA bring in terms of performance gains, price and how much of an overhead does FSR4 carry on those cards. FSR4 is good, but it is frustrating that it is not as universally included by developers as DLSS is. That will likely change when the PS6 (and to a far lesser extent Helix) roll out and devs will be using it by default on the consoles.

@GSX6502 Moving to a newer process would have considerably increased costs. Ampere can go down to Samsung 5n from 8n, that would likely cut power consumption by 30-40% but the chips would likely cost 50% more than current chips. The big issue with the Switch 2 battery life is not the process, it is the battery size, the Deck OLED has a 50Wh battery vs the S2's 19.5Wh, if Nintendo made the battery bigger (and in line with most other modern handhelds) they could more than double the battery life of the console. A die shrink could save a bit of power, accounting for everything else in the system a die shrink could cut total system power usage in portable by 15-20%, who whilst not insignificant it is also not that significant compared to the option of adding a decent size battery.

Is "the choices we have made" a reflection of the hardware in Helix? Helix is rumoured to have 48GB of GDDR7 and 2TB of storage, PS5 is 30-40GB and 1TB (although expandable with M.2 drives), so their choice has been to lock themselves into 50-80% more RAM cost and double the storage cost for next gen, that means that they are going to be significantly more expensive than their direct competitor, the extra baseline cost is going to add £250-300 to the Helix just on a materials cost.

@SodaPop8456 The Xenoblade games are great and playing on Switch 2 should hopefully tidy up the muddy low resolution and give better framerates, they are really goof games. My only issue is I have already played them all three times.

Nintendo's presentation was pretty flat for me and not a lot that I really wanted. I will probably end up buying Ocarina but I would much rather they release the HD versions of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. I really like the Xenoblade games but I have played through them all three times so the playing again is not a high priority, I will absolutely buy the new one though.

What I cannot understand is why there is no announcement of a new 3D Mario game, no new Smash Bros, no new Zelda (just a remake), something like a new Starfox Adventures would be great, a new Earthbound, no Pikmin 5, no new Luigi's Mansion, it just feels like most of Nintendo's first party franchise seem to be dormant.

Nintendo designed and finalised the Switch 2 in 2022 then sat on it for three years, they should have spent that time creating games for it and setting out a proper release path of major first party releases, instead it looks like they did pretty much nothing and still have almost no plan.

@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.

Who knew shorting something electrical was a bad idea...

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?

@Granadico I agree, it seems really odd, especially as they already said that they will do it for the Machine and Frame.

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).

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.

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.