Cloud Gaming and Future Hardware

Don't be acrobat, your team's home base, collaborate within a shared PDF space. You've got your docs, your plans, your specs, and then invite the crew to build what's next. They talk up the teamwork. They think that this design could be a contender When somebody wonders What's the next step? AI helps you finish the rest Bolts are tight. Now your plans refined Run a smooth business when you're all alive. Do that with Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat . Well, hello there and welcome back to this the DF Direct QA show. Uh some great questions to get through this week, but uh discussing it all with me. First of all, Oliver McKenzie. Hello. Yes, Rich. Always a pleasure to be with you here this Monday morning to record this Q A show for you guys. Mm-hmm. Lovely. And uh Alex Batalia, hello, you're sitting down. Yes, I'm equipped with a new chair, a sciatic nerve pillow, and I guess an attitude. I'm ready. Well, like knuckles. Yes. Yes. No, I'm more of a shadow kind of guy. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Uh well it's great to have you here. And uh although you know the treadmill it it kinda works for you. I'll be switching up on and off, believe me. Then I can't just do one or the other. So you'll see me on both. Okay. Trampoline? One day, yeah. I don't know if the neighbors below will like me with that one, but fair enough. Um, okay, well let's crack on with our first question, but first of all, uh a shout out to the DF Supporter programme. Um basically if you want to get involved in DF Direct, if you want early access to DF Direct, if you wanna contribute to the QA show, please do consider supporting the team. Right, first question. This one's coming from Dajarco in brackets Dan. I've noticed with a few recent and upcoming games, developers boasting about quote unquote increased internal resolutions on PS5 Pro. I immediately think to myself, surely we want the opposite. Now it's packing a decent upscaler. Why does this keep happening? Could somebody make it stop? Um as Capcom and uh our Capcom and rem edy, the only ones using PSSR correctly to drop the internal resolution. Alex, interesting question here because it is essentially all about quantity of pixels versus quality of pixels and the new PSSR kind of straddles the line between delivering kind of uh both, you know, a reduction in pixels, which means you can put more GPU power into each pixel and the upscaler's doing a pretty good job. Yeah, so uh the what Dan is referencing here is the fact that with a scalar like PSSR two or FSR four or DLSS four, um you don't need a lot of internal resolution to get good anti-aliasing and upscale on most rasterized screen elements. And as a result, you don't need like previous upscalers like FSR or TS, sometimes TSR, depending upon the game. You know, maybe you'd be looking for like 1440p and above, or like old TAAUs, you'd want to be higher than that at 4K, maybe even to get a 4K approximation, that looks great. So you don't need such great internal resolution. Games that are boosting something like 1440p internal and then using PSSR on top of it, it's arguably wasting a bit of resolution there and performance that could be used for other things like uh increasing ray tracing samples, turning on one extra ray tracing effect, et cetera. Um and so I'd agree with Dan there . To a limit, I would argue that um the like when I play with DLSS on PC, for the most part, I actually try and impose a kind of performance limit there. I say like I really want to just be using what is performance mode at 4K for the most part. I could of course go under and I'd still get great um edge and quality and detail and most surfaces, but as soon as you get less than one fourth the quality uh of internal resolution there, since other effects are scaling with resolution as well, you start getting knock-ons that I'd say are less than positive. And they become more and more obvious over time. So if you have stuff like post-processing that doesn't scale with the output resolution or some other internal effect or ray tracing which doesn't, which it shouldn't probably, uh then you can start seeing stuff like certain edges that are affected only by ray tracing, or certain in-surface detail that is affected by ray tracing starts looking really low res and maybe sparkly and other things. So I think Remedy gets off with it pretty well here in their game, uh, in the performance mode, which is targeting 60 FPS, but I'd say Capcom actually has a little bit more issues at its lower internal resolution there, mainly due to the the what happens to the quality of ray trace reflections in a game like Prakbana. So I'd say there are limits. Uh and um it's cool that it works at all, uh unlike it wouldn't work with FSR, but I'd still think you'd maybe want to balance that a little differently personally. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm inclined to agree. Um, Oliver, you've basically tested anything and everything on the PlayStation 5 professional PSSR related. Uh what do you make of this? Well, I don't think there's one correct or incorrect way to do this because if you've got nothing else to do with the extra GPU power on PS5 Pro, outside of implementing PSSR, maybe you tweak one or two settings, but you're kind of going into placebo level settings adjustments when you're going going into things like you know adjusting shadow resolution slightly or adjusting the SSR resolve slightly. I kind of feel like just bumping up internal resolution is one obvious area you could go, perhaps the obvious area where you could go. And I think this uh person is is referencing the fact that um I believe for Saros Sony is advertising that it has an increased internal resolution on PS5 Pro. Of course they aren't specifying what that is. We'll have to find out ourselves when we take a look at that game, but yeah, I just feel like this is just one of those areas where you can easily deploy GPU power. So it makes sense that you'd put GPU power there. But at the same time, I am in complete agreement that you know these more aggressive upscale factors like 864 P to 4K, which is what we're seeing in Pragmata and Alanoik 2. That can look very, very good, especially at normal viewing distance with uh PSSR. It's awfully good, I think. And uh, I don't really think in a lot of titles, especially rasterized titles, primarily raster ized titles that don't have super noisy ray tracing or uh ray tracing that again is dependent on hand or resolution to resolve and look correct. Um, I kind of think that it's fine to just do a sixty-fourp in many cases to four K. I mean it's gonna depend on the game, but like what we see in Alanoik 2 is remarkably clean, clear, good texture detail, great stability, no ghosting, really, no like all the visual gremlins we complain about usually aren't really there. So why not just go with the more aggressive upscale? To me, though, I think with PSSR you you don't want to just like dial in a low resolution arbitrarily or even take a high frame rates or whatever. I think you want to target like a fixed refresh like let's say 60 fps and then dial in additional meaningful effects and while dialing down resolution, like adding additional ray tracing into the mix. I think that's what squares the circle, kind of squares the circle and makes it make sense. But if you don't have anything else to do, I don't really begrudge people for just bumping up internal res. Because what else are you going to do if you don't have like meaningful effects to stack on top of that, right? Fair enough. Yeah so my general thoughts on this fairly straightforward. I'm all in on like lower resolutions if it frees up more GPU resources for better quality visuals, right? And especially raid facing. Um, I do think though there is an issue with um obviously we don't have ray vegeneration on the PlayStation 5 Pro, we don't have ray uh re reconstruction. And um I think that's sort of like a key component. That's the next thing I'd like to see added. Uh but at the same time, I'm a bit concerned that ray regeneration on the AMD side doesn't seem to be like a holistic solution that includes upscaling. Meanwhile, on the PC side of things, we don't seem to have had much movement recently with ray reconstruction in terms of like new models for that. And um we've also got the bizarre situation of like uh games only allowing Rav generate sorry ravi construction on um path tracing games. Like that's not that's not what it's supposed to be for exclusively, right? I think you'll agree there, Alex. I mean if if if a game supports ray um uh ray uh reconstruction, why would you restrict it just to path tracing when it can do an excellent job on on ray tracing as well? Doesn't make sense to me. Yeah, for that I I agree with you. And I think one of the f few reasons why it is the case is just the extra QA time and the, you know, like uh you need to have like a certain setup for it to work well and then you'd have to essentially add an extra mode for it and all the work that would mean. So I think it is about saving time at work, which is money. Yeah. But you know, I'd say get used to those eight sixty four Ps, even moving into next gen. Oh, definitely. Especially if there is some sort of like ray regeneration on the next you know, PlayStation console. It's almost certainly gonna happen. Yeah. Okay, uh let's move on to the next question. Uh this one comes from some guy person. After Nintendo was able to add in the quote unquote handheld boost feature, it got me thinking about other potential improvements could uh Nintendo could make for Switch 2. Do you think Nintendo could potentially force older games into a one hundred and twenty hertz container and potentially cut latency by eight milliseconds? Would there potentially be a way to add VR to games that implement Nintendo's API for VSync? Or are those APIs compiled into the game code as opposed to system functions provided by the Switch operating system itself . So, Oliver, I think the handheld boost mode, I think we can sort of universally agree that it was something that we actually asked for. The concept of being able to run last gen uh um uh uh games in portable in their dot configuration. So I think that's a really good move, but it's also something that I kind of never thought Nintendo would do. So I guess there is sort of uh potential for using Switch 2 features on Switch 1 games, perhaps more aggressively. What do you think? Yeah, I mean definitely the handheld boost mode thing is something that like you mentioned, it's very uncharacteristic of Nintendo to offer those kind of specialty enhancement features. We're used to seeing that from Sony a little bit more, maybe from other vendors. Not so much from Nintendo. Certainly Nintendo's backwards compatibility has generally been hardware-based in the past, for them to go down this software-based solution and actually offer meaningful performance upgrades, and then on top of that, offer the uh boost mode functionality is just a great thing. Um, I'd love to see 120 hertz output in older Switch games. I think that would be really cool. I think it could cut latency by quite a lot, actually. I think that would be pretty neat. Um there are some issues potentially though. Like I mean, it is 1440p output, and obviously a lot of Switch 1 games are uh upgraded to 4k I you know that would not be an ideal situation necessarily to just force those games into uh 120 hertz containers in general I think pairing the uh frame rate if preparing the update of the game and the refresh rate of the panel is probably a good idea for many sets for a variety of reasons, but I think that would be cool. For VRR, um I think that'd be a bit more complex. Maybe Alex can speak to that. But in general, I think that uh going down this route of adding additional enhancements to older Switch software is pretty cool. I do wonder if 120Hz in particular might be going a little bit into the weeds, considering that Nintendo does not even support 120 Hertz very well on the console to begin with though. Yeah, fair enough. Uh Alex, switch to your favorite piece of gaming hardware ever. W what do you make of this question? Well, just uh just to clarify a handful of things. Uh it would reduce latency by a lot more than eight milliseconds. You have to think like with V Sync, triple buffered V Sync, like there's gonna be like front buffer, back buffer, back buffer, and you're talking about reducing all of those by half. Uh you could be looking at like the game's input latency being one half of what it currently is, which would be a huge amount, more than eight milliseconds, uh for certain. But there's some complications to that. One, Nintendo's own games very rarely are actually triple buffered. They are pretty much always double buffered for some reason, probably for eight input latency concerns. Also because maybe Nintendo doesn't actually have games that run on Delta Time. Maybe they actually are uh forced tick games where they run at sixty or they run at 30, and there's different profiles for those, but in-between frame rates um uh need to run the game at half speed in order to actually have the game run at full speed, if you know what I mean. Uh there's no in-betweens there. I think a lot of Nintendo games are like that actually. Um so but for third party games, that is definitely not the case. Uh so I think that there is some use in the the third party realm for those kind of things for sure. Regarding VRR, that is more of a panel uh thing and a driver side thing. The game itself is going to be putting out stuff assuming vSync is going to be on. In which case , I think it arguably could be done on on this on on the software side from Nintendo. It's just a matter of whether they would want to do it. And uh in that case, yeah. I mean, because when you run uh VR on PC, uh you can also run it with V Sync. Uh that's just one of the aspects of VR. I think it's fully doable. Um, but Oliver's point about the fact that the games are 4K versus 1440p, which is the only way to get VR really, uh in that on that Nintendo uh uh docked uh um pro . And that is 120 Hertz, yeah. 120 Hertz uh uh without the handheld. Uh in the doc profile, that that complicates things a lot more. If it was just we supported HMI two point one, I think it'd be a slightly different story, and this would be much less of a complex thing because the games are outputting at certain resolutions, and then the console has to do like two two-way scaling, maybe, or you know, it's like this this is getting bit too bit too complex for a niche thing that Nintendo would have to support. My only thing I'd like to add is um well when you've got a system where you actually are in control of the panel, that opens up some intriguing possibilities because everybody will have the same panel, certainly in the current production run, we understand. So there is some sort of latitude there for doing some interesting things. The thing is that they shipped with a VRR solution that doesn't support low FOI rate compensation, which is slight baffling. Yeah, it is. Um so it kind of suggests that it's it's kind of not a priority for them, but maybe it will be at some point. In the meantime, you've actually had Ubisoft step up and say, hey, you can do a software version of low-fe ight compensation. Here's how. Which is kind of like great on the one hand, it's ingenious, but you kind of want the platform holder to be like using its hardware bit more effectively. Anyway, let's move on. Got a question here from Darkworld 99. Hi guys, seeing how good Pico performs in Death Stranding 2 and Horizon Forbidden West that even rivals DLSS solution solutions, is it fair to say that maybe we don't really need that much DLSS or FSR or XESS in order to get a good upscaler? Not to dismiss all of what DLSS and others have done, but being too dependent on vendor solutions has its downsid es, like the time uh DLSS version was broken for a while, giving some regressions in ghosting and image quality. I think devs should take some of what Gorilla is doing and maybe have a small team of engineers trying to develop in-house solutions where they can control the pipeline and the output and not wait for the vent for vendor X to fix an issue that's causing their game to look bad. I know that in the current industry economics is hard, but an investment is worth but is an investment worth to do . Hope to see much more in-depth video of Pico in the future from you guys. Cheers. Um Alex, uh, well, you know, this is kind of like Gorilla know what they're doing, and they have their own bespoke completely c ustom engine and um that combination has produced some really impressive stuff. And it you know, that's that's kind of like a sort of unicorn style scenario . Yeah. Uh I I one we haven't actually done a like a pico image quality review um in the aspect of like we have to see how it scales at like four X res and nine X res, like the super hardcore scaling factors to actually give a sense of those things. Uh scaling from like 1440p up to 4K is even like when we went to those FSR three scenarios. What you're looking there at then that case is like stuff like how soft the output is and where do image quality regressions, usually in the face of like in in terms of ghosting, show up the most. And there you're looking at like flavors differences, a little bit more so than how quality is the upscaler. Because games, different games are going to have different regressions that depending upon where they actually have motion vectors. So it's it's not, we haven't done an image quality review of Pico to say the least. Um that would be an interesting thing to do with infinite time and infinite money. Um but looking at the infinite money sounds good. Yeah why not? Uh infinite time , you know, I don't know about that actually when I say that. Um, but looking at stuff like should a developer make their own image quality upscaler? And I would say hell no. Dude, um by the time uh PSS like they made Pico in the time period when PSSR 1 was kind of bad. I think under different pressures and scenarios, they would have just said, actually wait, let's use PSSR too. Right? You know, um maybe they would have made that decision. Because someone taking all that engineering time and infrastructure and implementation time and doing it for you and then you drag and dropping it in as much as possible, that is way easier than doing what Gorilla probably had to do to make Pico . And that it was probably a big engineering investment time. And it should definitely not be expected for everyone else. But I do agree with the fact that it is uh we less definitely need uh the scalers to be less vendor speci fic, especially now. Uh we have stuff like it's now changed its name. It's no longer called cooperative vectors. I forget the name what Microsoft called it, but you can basically do machine learning within direct decks at the moment, um on all the vendors' cards that support it. And at this point in time, I humbly submit that DLSS, XESS, and FSR should just run on that instead of whatever proprietary junk they're doing right now. And that would be great, because then people would just choose what they like the best. I would vastly prefer that situation. And then you wouldn't have to wait for vendor X to fish and fix an issue, you would just run a different upscaler like DLSS on an AMD card. I think that would that's the best future. And I would like to push for that now more than developers make your own super expensive upscaling solu tion. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to see it happen. It's kind of like almost a utopian-style vision for the future of upscaling the way it has become sort of uh segmented. Um but if there is a solution to unify it, then you know maybe it is just a broad direction of travel. We'll eventually, eventually get there. Uh Oliver, what do you make of all of this? Well, I would just say that Sony is in a position as a platform holder to dictate this and they think that the universal solution is better than everyone else everyone going and rolling their own picos. You know we've seen this from uh studios like um Insomniac rolling their own um temporal injection solution. Different kinds of players obviously rolling their own TAAs, but I think over time what what we've seen uh in um we've seen in game development just in general and also within Sony, is that we are moving towards more homogeneous solutions. You see titles like Ghost of Iote using FSR3, using kind of these commodity solutions. And I think PSSR is just a very bespoke commodity solution, so to speak, that everyone can use and they've decided that's a good investment for their platform. So I think, you know, it's hard to argue with results and it's hard to argue with their logic there that devoting some time within AMD, within Sony, to creating a really high quality upscale that can be used for a wide range of titles is just simply much more efficient than trying to roll a bunch of bespoke, customized the engine solutions in a bunch of different games like Pico, even though Pico does seem to be quite good. I'd be interested to see if Pico actually holds up that well at like 1080p to 4K or like 864P to 4K, though, because all we've seen so far in our own testing and in uh our own testing of PS5 Pro titles and um and our recent testing on PC has been basically 1440p to 4K, which not much of an upscale. Like it's it's not that impressive to achieve a really good looking image. I mean, it is impressive. It is impressive. It does look really, really good, but I mean, don't get me wrong there, but it's not um an enormous accomplishment relative to the kinds of upscaling scenarios that we're kind of seeing more and more often on PS5 Pro where you really do want that kind of two by two upscale or even two point five by two point five upscale e onach access that is uh much more important so yeah I think it just it's hard to generalize from Pico which does seem to be a a very very competent very good looking anti-alasing and upscaling solution created by some very talented engineers. It's hard to extrapolate that to Studios Dark Gorilla, in my opinion. Yeah, I mean I tried it on um 1440p DRS to 60 and uh it looked pretty good. I went I'm not gonna say I've done an in-depth uh comparison to DLSS, but I think the other thing to bear in mind when you're using DRS is that clearly there is a significant um uh decrease in computational cost in using PICO versus DLSS which, would feed into a higher base resolution if you're using dynamic resolution scaling. So that, you know, that's kind of like swings and roundabouts almost. Um, but it's certainly a very, very interesting technology and you know, to have an engine-speci fic GPU agnostic scalar is actually very, very good. It's just as you know, as you guys say, it's extremely difficult to do. And to illustrate how extremely difficult it is to do, well, you know, look at Epic's T SR. Epic have basically got the equivalent of, you know, orders of magnitude, more engineering resources than um than the the typical developer and T SR is is okay, right? But it's you know, it's it's not the finished article, uh, so to speak. Uh I don't think that is the future though. And I think you're right, just having like a plug in component that does a pretty good job. Hopefully a plug-in component that has sufficient um uh versatility for developers to tweak it and improve it if it's not a quite quite a the best fit for for their art style or for their pipeline. That's sort of like the the way forward. But you know, PSSR2 on PS5 Pro just seems to, you know, with one or two exceptions, like Starfield, as a plug-in replacement, it seems to be doing a really, really good job there. Interesting nonetheless, and it's quite interesting to see so many people sort of perk up at um the findings there. But let's move on. I've got a couple of questions here, I've just lumped them together. It's basically the same thing. Um we'll start with this one from Todd C. Hello Jets exclamation point with regards to Capcom switch two ports and the want for a frame rate cap, would one solution not be to limit the frame rate on the display itself if possible. Surely a PC monitor could be capped at thirty frames per second. And many TVs still have an HDMI support HDMI port that only supports thirty FPS. Would this actually make the gameplay experience better? I hope you have a great week, thanks. Uh before we begin the discussion, no it won't. No display panels are horrific for but we'll talk about that. Teasing hilarity adds. I wonder could Capcom's reluctance to provide thirty forty FPS cap options for pragmata and other titles have something to do with their R with how their RE engine handles input. Could it be provide could it be providing them would it could it be that providing them the frame rate caps would introduce would introduce an input latency they don't want to have. Well, that is an interesting point because if they do cap the frame rate, they will introduce um uh uh a latency hit that it otherwise wouldn't have. It's just a case of how much you would actually feel it, certainly at 40 FPS. Um, but Oliver, what do you make of this um situation? Because we're kind of we're kind of advocating for caps of some description on these games, right? Or at least optional caps. Yeah, I mean, cheese . I think it's mostly just a capcom preference at this point, because when you look back through their software. The girame is beh ave fine by and large when capped at 30 fps or 40 fps when we see them on PC. But if you go back through Capcom's history, going back quite a ways, they try to hit 60, and if they can't hit 60 they, just run unlocked by default. There are some exceptions. Probably the biggest exception that I can think of that is actually properly frame paced when it is capped below its uh output refresh is Monster Hunter Wilds. That game you can go 30 FPS, 40 FPS, 60 FPS, whatever you can do unlocked modes, but it all runs basically as it should. And so I think that they can do it or at least have demonstrated that they can do it. And it may be just like this person is pointing out that input lag is perceived as too high. You know, and there there are other solutions that they could go down. I mean they could use VR handheld properly. I mean it does not seem to be implemented properly at all. It does like when it's at 55 FPS, it's not smooth in the slightest. So I think there are a lot of solutions, but ultimately it just comes down to Capcom wants to do what they want to do, and this isn't what they want to do. Um and it's kind of a little bit annoying because these are good ports otherwise but you know it's up to them um on this 30 fps uh tick here on the 30 hertz tick I guess uh I don't think that would really work because switch 2 doesn't support 30 Hz output normally and it wouldn't deliver the smoothness you're looking for. You'd basically see uh your 30 Hz update on your television, presumably, and you'd see a very inconsistent update and inconsistent present ation between the frames that are presented. So I don't think that would work at all. Um but it would be interesting. I mean, maybe you know, implementing a 30 hertz display mode, I mean TVs certainly support it. Um one big problem there is you're just dealing with like 33 milliseconds of latency between frames, so anytime you're dropping, um you have big problems there and then it also poses big problems for latency, so perhaps not the ideal solution. Yeah, when 4K screens first appeared, they were limited to thirty hertz . And uh just the lagginess just moving a mouse pointer about was bad enough. But you know, gameplay was just just horrible. Similar to the when people start talking about you know cinematic experiences at twenty-four FPS. Well I've I've tried it. You don't want it. No, it's bad. Uh Alex, what do you make of this? Should they introduce caps? I think there should be an option for certain. Just one option 30 fps cap yes or no button do it i mean 40 fps if if xbox three sixty games could do it they can do it. You know, like so, you know, I think I think uh it's been a long overdue thing. They've been doing it for a really long time in their console titles, and I think in the titles where it's like almost 60, pretty often. This isn't a no one even thinks about it. But there's a lot of the things like the switch ports or the PS4 Xbox One versions of their titles that were like between 30 and 40 fps at best. You know, that's really where it should be. And I think the the the downside is of course you're gonna be hewing frames a lot more and probably adding something, I would just presume something like 30 to 50 milliseconds of input latency, easily 50 milliseconds, if not higher . But like the smoothness of the output is way higher on a standard panel . And in Switch 2's case without low frame rate compensation, uh and with the way VR works, you'd probably want that. Although arguably, like Oliver said, why not just also have a VRR mode that is pretty explicit and actually rolls its own low frame rate compensation? Uh that would probably be the best uh combination of these things that would give even lower input latency than they currently have, because it wouldn't be queuing frames, I presume, at that point. So um yeah, that's probably the best way to do it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Um I kind of think that VLR should probably be sorted if you're going to be having run unlocked frame rates. I mean there will be situations where the uh frame rate will go too low, uh really, but even so, you know, sort it. That's that's the at least sort the handheld experience. It it is possible. Okay, let's move on. Right then, another question from Teasing Hilarity. And hello again, gentlemen. Exclamation point. Did you hear about the rating leak and other rumours around Starfield for Switch 2, given the performance Bethesda's been able to offer for Fallout 4 on Switch 2 versus Starfield's launch performance on PlayStation 5, where do you think a Switch 2 port might land? Uh Oliver, so um well first of all, if they're doing a switch to version, please do proper tech QA on it. We don't want to have any more uh situations with a title launching with crashing and stuff like that. It's just I'm still sort of a bit staggered by that. Um, but this is basically a GPU thing, which I think it could probably handle. And then there's a CPU thing where there's a lingering doubt, right? Yeah, I would I would say that's broadly my thinking as well, though maybe with one caveat, I think that in cities it's a bit of a CPU disaster with a single threaded nature, single thread bound nature of Starfield's uh CPU performance profile, I think . Specifically in Akila and New Atlantis, and those cities come up a lot, but like the other cities in the game, like that resort town or like uh the neon, there are lots of other cities in the game that basically perform fine and I would expect would probably be okay at thirty fps on Switch too, but those two cities in particular just seem to bog things down to a kind of ridiculous degree, um honestly, after all this time. It really hasn't been sorted out that much. I feel like on PC or on console, that's still a still a major issue. But Starfield, um, in the open world, I think it could probably be okay. Those areas tend to be a lot lighter and they can run into like the 80 FPS, 90 FPS region on current gen consoles. I suspect those would be fine at 30 on a switch too. On the GPU side, it's also pretty hard in the GPU, or at least it has been historically. And I kind of wonder how much performance would scale if you just pumped pixel count down to like 360p, 540p or something, if you'd actually get the results you're looking for out of the game, or if it would be kind of like a middle gear cell delta situation where you're just dealing with some things that aren't really scaling so well, and then all of a sudden you're you know, things that aren't scaling with pixelacon, you're in and all kinds of trouble with shadow apps or foliage or whatever the case may be. Um it would obviously need DLSS, I think that goes without saying. I think we've seen that from uh Fallout 4, right? Fallout 4 was quite blurry before now it looks a little bit better. But I I would really they would really need to make the most out of their DLSS implementation in this game to make it work at all. But again that really depends on getting this game to a really scalable state on Switch 2, which I'm not sure that it is. It's also not the most handheld friendly game either, so that doesn't portend very well . Hmm. Interesting. Alex, what do you think? Oh boy. Um I was I I honestly don't think this would work that well. Um due to the due to the city portion of the game where you do spend a good chunk of it there at times uh getting missions from mission givers and uh the main questing, you know. So th there's that aspect of it. I think it would just be a very imbalanced presentation as a result of that. Um, but that would be the first time an imbalanced a game with imbalanced presentation is shipped on a Nintendo console, so it wouldn't be something out of the ordinary, and it wouldn't be the first time Bethesda shipped a game with such issues, so maybe there is something to it. Um like Oliver's case here, I would actually say just run it as high res as possible. 30 FPS. Uh just really just do that. Just just eat the cost of it and just run the game at 30 FP S and just just pray at that point. Wow. Because I really don't think this game scales well on the CPU, uh, on the PC testing that I've done of it with it. And you know, the thing is we also I actually have never run it on a Steam Deck. I don't know what it's like there, but I can imagine one of the bigger issues is like like when you go between areas in the cities, it's not just the the generally depressed frame rate, but like there's like zones that load obviously different parts of the cities when you go around them. And they really tumble tumble and fall there on horizon 5, 3600. So I'd presume they'd tumble and fall even worse on something that has a lot lower uh average bandwidth uh um and getting stuff off of disk. So it sounds a bit rough, um, but maybe they'll do it. Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think they'll probably have a stab at it. I think if they limit it to 30 frames per second, they'll be a or at least have a cap option. Um maybe not the how many options was it on PS5 twelve or twenty two? Twenty-four. Yeah. If you don't count the PSSR toggle then twelve. But yeah, twenty-four or twelve. Okay. Yeah. So um I think maybe , you know, go for consistency, at least have uh the option odd by default and um I I don't know. I think there is a a question, uh uh I think there has to be some specific testing on using the DLSS light um at a specific resolution versus the CNN model at a lower resolution. Do a proper quality analysis to see which one is objectively looking better or subjectively even. Um and and go from there. The CPU side of things will be a bit troubling, but I think 30 FPS is doable for for a lot of the content. And where it isn't at 30 FPS, maybe that you know, we we can expect that there should be some cutbacks, right? It's not it's not beyond the realms of of uh possibility or or whatever to to actually just get this running at thirty, but there may be some compromises required. But you know, you've got to remember this is a a game where the engine is quite open ended. You know, if you're gonna be putting like two thousand sandwiches in your cargo hold, there could be problems. Okay. Um let's move on to the next question. Um, this one comes from Wilmarie or Wilmary, uh, Hi DF Gentleman exclamation point. I haven't yet got a GPU hand um that can handle path tracing in 4K, but I'm dreaming of one. There seems to be more and more games coming out with path tracing graphical options and that makes the games look so good. I'm totally on board with T R Alex, aren't we? All we're actually not. Some people aren't but some people aren't. Personal recommendation regarding getting one. Buy 5080 if one can find one somewhat close to MSRP or just wait for next generation of NVIDIA and AMD's GPUs. Worth the wait? PS can't wait to see what Remedy will do with control 2. I'm with you on that one. Um Alex, it's the classic should I buy now or should I wait argument really, but there is a specific use case in mind here. Yeah, I mean if it's something that you really want and want to do and want to see if you want to invest the money into it, can I give you uh something that I would try out? If you have especially if you have a VRR display and a current NVIDIA GPU, I don't know what you have, Wilmary. Wilmary. But maybe give the the highest tier um what's the name of the NVIDIA streaming service again? My brain is broken. No GeForce Now, give it a give it try. Give these games a try on the highest tier GeForce Now one month or twenty-four hour or however long you can give it a play for the cheapest amount of money. Just to see if you think it is visually worth the amount of money because you're gonna be getting you know almost 50-80 like performance there, uh though with a very very different CPU, I would imagine, than like what a consumer set might use. Um and then if you really think you like that so much so then consider getting a 5080 um if not then wait that's what i would say. Because don' It want to say do this because I like path tracing so much. Um that's a that's not cool. Uh buy buy things because Alex says so. Um but uh at the moment I'd say give it a try is since you don't have much experience with it. I think it is pretty fascinating and a lot of fun. Uh, but also do it around the games that are your uh golden cows, you know, like you're really the things you you care a lot about control to o sometimes building a a PC just for a game coming out and then using it for years after the fact is a very satisfying experience. I built a PC for crisis back in the day. I built a PC right around the time Meshro twenty thirty three came out. You know, stu uh so that's that's a fun experience in its own right. And maybe yeah, timing it with that could be a lot of fun for you if you enjoy it. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Um Oliver, what do you make of this particular question? Well, I think a 5080 would be a good place to start because that's where we think the consoles will be, roughly speaking. I mean plus or minus 20%, whatever. Um, probably a little bit slower than that, but good place to be, I think, if you're looking to emulate that console experience. Um, I would think. I would think. Um, and so in that environment, like getting a fifty eighty now seems to entitle you to a class of experiences that uh will be pretty well catered for your hardware for quite a while, I would think, I would hope at least. Um, but you know, I mean uh among the path racing titles, I mean there aren't that many of them, at least the big ones. They're generally NVIDIA sponsored. You know, they come out from these uh custom engines and whatnot. I it's it's hard to really draw up too gener al a plan because it does seem to differ quite a bit from game to game in terms of what that path tracing looks like and in terms of how intensive it is. I've seen recent reports that Pragmata is especially intense and has a number of issues at the moment with its path tracing implementation potentially, um, even unique to this game over and above Resident Evil. Uh so I I it's uh it's very hard to offer one generalized recommendation, I feel like, but in general for like high end PC P tr ray tracing titles, a fifty-eighty at the moment is is pretty good company to be with, I think. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm inclined to agree, but I'm also inclined to agree with Alex's suggestion to check out GForce now because it's actually very, very good . It's a bit you know slightly more latency, but you are getting a lot of performance. You can use past phasing there. You can use um you know all of the features. It is a fully enabled Blackwell GPU. I'm not sure whether it is actually for all games, because there was a kind of um when I looked at it a partitioning system where um some games were using the new GPUs, others were not . But it's still, you know, the ones that matter would definitely be running on those fifty eighties there. Assuming the service is available where you are, of course. Yeah, that was an assumption. Yeah. Yeah, that was an assumption. But you know, that's actually a really good thing, a really good idea, because the image quality is pretty good, very good, I'd say. Uh it runs well. You'll certainly get a a good taste of what the full path tracing experience is, and then you kind of like plan your next move from there. Good stuff. Right. Okay, let's move on. Final question. This one comes from Skyrimfest twenty six FPS edition. Uh what do you think of the idea of the quote unquote series S version of PlayStation 6 being a cloud addition. It could even run on the PlayStation 5. So this sort of follows on the from the uh discussion we had a week or a week or two back where we were talking about potential micro consoles, uh well or cheaper consoles where we kind of suggested that maybe there could be a switch to console, a home console, or there could be um a cut-down um or rather a version of the PlayStation handheld that also operates as a uh a cheaper console. Um I've got great news for you, Skyrimfest uh 26 FPS edition. Um well there's already a system in the cloud um uh that enables you to run PS5 games and those PS5 uh level hardware will persist into the next generation, of course. And it's called uh the PlayStation 5 in the cloud. Yes so it's already there if you want it. I don't think it's perfect. I think the ac um the image quality is actually very, very good uh in the four K mode, but the latency isn't particularly great. Uh maybe there could be improvements there, but that's basically another sort of potential string to the to the bow, really. Um, the concept of actually, well, your cheaper option is just not to own the hardware. I mean, it does tie you into a PlayStation Plus subscription , of course. Um that's the the the downside. Um but um Oliver, thoughts? I don't think the cloud is reliable enough as something that you can have as a major pillar of a hardware launch. I mean, at least I don't really see it that way. I don't really think they're going to introduce the PS6 and say here's the PS6 and then here's PlayStation in the cloud as our alternative lower cost entering point. I just don't think that works for a lot of people. I don't think it makes sense for a lot of people and it has some unnecessary complication, the sense that you still need that separate streaming hardware, that separate streaming device, and ultimately it's not a good experience at the moment. I'll playStation, I hate to say it, in terms of its frame presentation, in terms of its latency, in my opinion, it's not very good. On the GeForce Now side, maybe so, but I think they need to improve it quite a bit before it's really in the same vicinity as a console experience. I personally favor the idea of a canis console. I think it's cool. I like the idea of real home hardware. Real home console hardware that you can actually buy and put under your TV and works in a very simple way. It's plug and play, works without an internet connection ideally. And uh it could really lean on that existing canus spec. It could just be like a mild clock bump, maybe run the same profiles, etc. etc. It could be a very easy system to add into the mix. I think it's a cool idea. I'm less of a fan of these cloud ideas. Even when they pan out, it's not really my preferred route. But I mean I do think cloud is taking off in terms of popularity, but it's taking off rather slowly. So I don't really think it's going to be quite all the way there for next generation console. I think Sony does have a product for those people perhaps and that would be a a PlayStation 5, but perhaps they could even have a a lower price console in the in the Can is SKU. Alex, thoughts Yeah. I I don't think there's gonna I don't think you should rely on cloud for all the reasons that Oliver and Rich said, and you know, if you really want that thing, it already exists, you can try out that cloud. Uh I I'm not a big fan of cloud gaming. I think it really does need the GeForce ultimate level for me to start wanting to consider it. And even then I'd point out issues, you know, like I'm just I'm a real snob. I know that. Um not everyone's a snob though. So I think like you could get away with it for certain people that just want to play games and don't care about all these other aspects. And I think maybe there's a tier of that, though I don't think you should push it as like part of um your next gen strategy. You should probably focus most on the hardware and then you know like on the side if people want to do a bit of extra research about finding out if they can't afford a PS6 then they look for alternative methods older PS5 um optional streaming service . I think the concept of what amounts to a cheaper console for the next generation period is is still a viable question, however. It's just we don't really particularly think the cloud is the the most versatile or desirable solution. So uh for me, it's basically between two. Um is either going to be some kind of, you know, maybe the handheld itself, maybe uh an offshoot version of the handheld that is basically the equivalent to a microconsole. The other possibility which nobody's really talking about is basically um you know a a PS five super slim if you like. Um can they die uh can they die shrink the existing six nanometer chip to whatever it is, four nanometer or three nanometer. I think the new console's on three nanometer. Which one is cost effective? Which one can actually, deliver a cheap console. Is it going to be the the KDIS slash handheld microconsole or is it going to be just you know a PlayStation 5 with a die sh ake? Logic would suggest that it's got to be the the the die shrunk PlayStation 5, surely. Less memory, um a a smaller die . Surely that would be cheaper. The PlayStation 5 is still gonna be around. It's the question of whether the handheld uh SOC presents cost advantages or feature advantages that Sony wants to, you know, for for a more extended life cycle for that level of performance. I think it's a really interesting question that's that's going to be posed, and I'm curious to see if Sonny will have an answer to that. Because I can see the handheld being there to increase the overall size of the market to get more people invested into the Sony ecosystem, but you know, if it's gonna be expensive like six hundred dollars, that's problematic. If it's, you know, cheaper than that, probably not. Um I don't know. It's a fascinating question. But you know, for Sony that doesn't have any kind of uh wish seemingly to want to move its games onto other systems, it 's gonna need a way to appeal to um a mass market, I think, which you know, five, six hundred or six hundred dollar consoles rather probably aren't. Yeah. Interesting question nonetheless. The one advantage Sony does have going into next generation though is the fact they've moved 90 million odd PlayStation 5 consoles. So they have a huge base of customers to soak and to sell games to and to sell PlayStation Plus subscriptions to, and they have a lot of used consoles out there and they have a lot of your you know your friends use playstation 5 might be a good entry point into the console ecosystem and so I feel like they're gonna really lean on those players as we go to the next five years, ye10ars of cross-generation software. I feel like they're really gonna lean on those players and use that to bump up their uh overall ecosystem profits as they have with the PlayStation 4. You know, there are something like 30 million, 40 million PlayStation 4 is still in regular use, and all those customers uh lead to recurring revenue for Sony in a in a major way. So um that at least is a position that Sony is in that's actually a better position than Nintendo is in, uh who are trying to move um obviously into new console generation and a much better position than I think Microsoft is in as well. Yeah that's an interesting point. For reasons that will become evident in the next few weeks I was looking for uh used PlayStation 5s over the weekend and you can get one for like £250 which is very very cheap. Okay then so that was the final question there for the end of the show. Please do like, subscribe, share if you enjoyed it, ring bells for notifications for you , potential algorithmic boosts for us DF Supporter program. 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