Master System Mario and Retro Gaming

If you're chasing data down, instead of seeing it in one place, you need the Intuit ERP. Intuit Enterprise Suite. All your data in one place with built-in AI for real-time insights. Learn more at Intuit.com slash ERP . Hello everyone. Welcome. A warm welcome to this, the 2 59th edition of DF2 weekly, our weekly show discussing the latest gaming and technology news. Joining me first of all, Alex Batalia. Hello. Hey Rich. Yeah, I'm feeling pretty okay this morning. So once again, dipping in from some nice DF Direct and excited to talk about some GDC presentations. Yeah, that's what I like to hear. And uh of course John Nennerman, hello. Yes, indeed. I'm here for Digital Foundry, a Tyndallson story today. Uh there's much to talk about. And yeah, I'm appearing for a bit before going on holiday, so I'll be away for two or three weeks, I guess, which will be great. Wow. Okay. Nice But I might I might join in on a my life and gaming live stream on Sunday as is tradition, so go check that out. Cool. Um, okay, well, not much to say, except we should probably crack on. Our first news story this week. The embargo has literally just lifted on Pragmata. Pragmata. And um, yeah, we'll have some coverage on the console versions later in the week. Um but to begin with, we're going to be talking about PC today. Uh John, this is quite an interesting one because you've been playing the game on a top-end high spec PC with all the pasts traced bell and whistles, whilst I have been running it on a Ryzen 53600 uh with an RTX 4060. So we're trying to sort of offer um impressions from both ends of the spectrum really. Uh but John, let's start by talking about the game because I mean let's be honest, Capcom has just knocked it out of the park this generation really. It's just been like uh bagger after bagger after bagger and you can't really level too many complaints about this one. It's another superb game. Yeah, I I do I think it's worth pointing out. I think Capcom really is possibly publisher of the gener ation in a sense where they're they're one of the only large studios still pumping out games at a relatively quick interval, and they're almost always great. Uh, even if there's some disappointment, like with Monster Hunter Wilds, by and large, uh, they're they're nailing it. And they're doing it all with their own engine, RE framework. So I feel like I don't know what they're doing, but they are ahead of the curve. And they're uh it's it's amazing to me how well Capcom has adapted across the ages, and they're doing excellent here. And Pregmata Malta , very specifically, is the kind of game I think that is worth supporting because this is a rare beast. This is a trip-away title from a big publisher, Capcom , that is an original IP with a lot of interesting new gameplay ideas, along with some familiar ones. Um that's super optimized, beautiful , and tells so far at least a heartfelt story with great characters and really compelling gameplay. Like this is such an interesting, great release, and it's the kind of thing that people have lamented as not existing anymore. But here it is. Uh at its core, it is sort of like an action-adventury-y sort of game. You know, you can see some roots with survival horror in there where you're like sort of exploring this huge space colony, slowly opening up the areas, completing things, but the core mechanics are completely different. As we noted, and you've probably seen if you've played the demo, you would have seen it as well with this hacking thing where you have Diana, this little android girl, riding around with you. Uh by initiating hacking in real time, uh, you sort of like enable your weapons to deal serious damage to the enemies. And it sounds on paper not that great, but when you're actually playing, it's really fun and it adds this level of tension to the combat that I'm really, really enjoying. And yeah, what was especially surprising is that this is my first time really playing it on the PC, is just the way that the mouse is used to sort of select the blocks and that little like hacking game. It feels really good sliding the mouse cursor around in there. So they've not only done great job with gamepad controls, but it also is a great mouse game. So mouse and keyboard support excellent. But what I really like about it is just like the core gameplay, the number of scenarios you encounter. There's a lot of variety there. So you'll have like your main mission objective and you're trying to go there, but the the challenges you face to pull it off, I think are all really well designed, and it's something Capcom does super well. And uh I love the characters. Diana and Hugh are awesome, and like the dialogue between them is surprisingly just enjoyable. It almost reminds me of and they've kind of teased us a little bit, the whole relationship with Mega Man and a role in uh Mega Man Legends, where there's kinda like that back and forth, you know, they have kind of a different viewpoint on things. It's really it's entertaining and it's awesome. So I'm I'm loving what I'm playing so far. I think this is shaping up to be one of my favorite games this year, which is awesome. But obviously, as you said, Rich, I'm playing on the PC, the high-end experience. Um I have zero complaints about technical performance. I set it up and it just works perfectly out of the gate with every setting push to the max. Uh I'm using the path tracing mode. And it's absolutely glorious in this game. I think path tracing was really cool in Resident Evil 9. But because it was such a dark game, there was definitely more limited utility in some areas, right? Like you could appreciate the shadows and the realistic lighting, but here not only do you get still shadows and beautiful lighting, but nearly every surface is reflective to a variable deg ree, which I guess could also be said of the world in general, right? Like every surface is like a mirror of variable roughness. Uh but you really feel it here. And it adds so much depth when you're running down a hall, and it's just like everything is so perfectly reflected around you. It just feels so it feels like you're playing a CGI movie, basically. Wow. It's super, super cool. Um, and while it does use NVIDIA's ray reconstruction and that's required, I believe. Uh and there is a little bit of smearing in some surfaces, so it's not perfect. I've seen better, but the overall experience I think is just gorgeous and compelling and I really can't say enough good things about it. I'm so happy with what they've delivered here. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um just going back to the sort of uh the the gameplay stuff. I mean we've been talking a lot about the rising cost of games and uh the fact that the scope of them is often spiralling out of control and I think this is probably one of the key things that Capcom has seemingly cracked, which is to say that um they're able to produce the diversity of content that we kind of want , different games, right? Um, they're able to manage the scope of these games. So they're still compelling, but they aren't sort of requiring like, you know, untold hundreds of millions of dollars to make. And technically for the most part they're doing a fantastic job with their own proprietary engine. Uh so I'm I I I can only assume that they oh, and of course they're managing to produce um a good amount of games where a lot of developers are are are are failing on that simply because of this sort of um ever widening scope. And you know, you just pick up and play Pragmata. And you know, it's just fun, compelling, interesting, lots to do. Uh the narrower focus um actually works to its immense benefit, I think. The gameplay mechanics with the hacking and the shooting are kind of like, you know, it feels fresh, feels innovative innovative. I think it's really, really cool. Um and graphically it's it's really, really nice. I mean as I said, I played on a very, very uh well I would say wouldn't say a very very low end system, but uh Ryzen five thirty six hundred I mean that CPU is like what seven, eight years old now. 4060. It's I think it's still number one in the graphics card charts. Um so this is kind of like why we'd use those particular components. I was targeting 60 frames per second on this uh DLSS uh balance mode at 1440p, which I think is a highly reasonable target for 4060 um settings. Um we haven't done the optimized settings parts on this, so uh what I just did was to transplant across as close as I could the optimized settings for Resident Evil 9, uh which kind of makes sense, right? You would expect similar similar trains on a similar engine. The difference being that I had the hair strands on, which I don't think we did recommend for Resident Evil 9 with 8 gigabyte cards, and the ray tracing. And um the reason why is because and I think you you sort of identified that, John, the uh the ray tracing is very, very important to this game because of the just the nature of the surfaces, the nature of the environments. It's kind of like almost built for ray tracing and I kind of really wanted that. The hair strand technology, um uh yeah what could I say whether you've got Diana on your shoulder yeah and you know in the cutscenes it those uh hair strands just look amazing really really cool. And I kind of wanted that. And it's in the console versions, right? So why shouldn't I be able to use it in a 60 class product? I mean, 4060 kind of trades blows with the PS5 in prior testing I've done. And yeah, when you start to play on these settings, well actually I could turn vSync on and I'm uh very close to a lock 60 frames per second across the first mission, which is the mission the existing playable demo is built around. So yeah, initially happy days. Well I'll say I'm locked to sixty frames per second or close to it, but you can see understandable limitations, mostly in um like cutscenes, and mostly when the viewport's sort of dominated by Diana's hair. So yeah, the hair strands, computationally very expensive technique there. So to drop down into the 50s, the low 50s, sometimes even late 40s, I can get it. I understand the challenge here. And it's not such a big deal if you're using a G-Sync free sync VRR display. So by and large, then quite happy with performance, and maybe the worries of using an 8-gigabyte GPU are sort of unfounded here, right? Which is uh interesting. Um but then I moved on to the control center and this happened. We start with a cutscene where Diana's hair causes frame rate drops. So yeah, we we kind of established this as path for the course at this point. But then we start to get some pretty aggressive stutter, first of all, in the latter stages of the cutscene, and then when we sort of cut back to uh gameplay, um spinning around on the spot is causing issues that aren't related to compute, so it must be about VRAM, right? So I see where I can make set savings in VRAM by dipping into the settings. I decide to turn off the shadow cache, which I don't think is needed. So returning to the game, now we're back to a lock 60 frames per second. So problem solved, right? Um well the rest of the level plays out as expected. I could even complete the uh pretty hectic boss battle here without any sort of unexpected lurches or hitches. Now, as we move on to the next level, the the street scene, the load is heavier, gameplay is into the fifties. Now what I don't know is if this is down to compute or whether we're overtaxing memory. So it's probably the former, because it looks like a more challenging scene. We're in the 50s consistently, without any hitches or lurching. But then things happen like this, just a complete gigantic loss of perfor mance in this cutscene. So I'm just going to try and sum this up here. I think the port is good, uh but VRAM management could be better because the VRAM allocation guide into settings doesn't seem to be accurate . Yeah, you can lower the texture settings, of course, but I'm not sure the extent to which that actually works or helps. And I really want those ray tracing and hair features because you know that that's sort of a signature look of the game. And at the same time, I'm I'm frustrated because I think the 4060 has enough horsepower and the 5060 will have even more actually. So it's basically on par with a 2800 Ti. But it's super hard for the user to know when memory is the problem and what to do about it. And I can't help but think that life generally would be a whole lot easier if 60 class products had more memory, you know, just like the 50, sorry, the 3060 had back in the day. So yeah, I guess you can claw back memory, you can turn off ray tracing, that seems to save a chunk, you can um uh turn off the hair strands and save performance and save memory. And that seems to be the sort of implicit trade being asked of sixty class users at this point, or anyone who's got an eight gigabyte card actually. But the balance between actual performance and V RAM at this point is clearly out of kilter on these on these cards. What do you think, Alex? Yeah, this is another bummer for 8GB GPU users based upon your testing so far, Rich. I feel like really in a game where you have a character who has very long hair, and they designed it definitely around this hair strand system. And as we see from the Switch version, when you use just the hair cards instead, it does look kind of not very good. Um everything I know about everything I know about this game though, uh and the environments in it, it should perhaps be a better Redding game than Resident Evil. Um and I think that'll bear out when we get, you know, some benchmarks coming out for this game. I'd be very curious to see how it pans out on the base PlayStation five though. Uh it'll obviously have more uh memory to handle all these things together, but will it go to the Resident Evil route and not have ray tracing? Uh that would be very curious to see. I think it does have ray tracing, doesn't it, John ? Uh on PS5? Yeah. As far as I know, it does. Um from the demo and what we played at gamescom and everything. I haven't played the final game on PS5, but yeah, there was ray tracing across the board, I think. I believe the only console without ray tracing, and this is just off the top of my head, is the Sitwch 2 and I'm guessing series S, but again I don't actually know there . Okay. Yeah. Um but um what can I say it's still a really really cool game. I just really like the fact that Capcom are able to consistently deliver here. And this is coming like, you know, just over a month after Resident Evil Requiem as well. Um what's next? I guess we still got Oni Musha, haven't we, John? Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. It's gonna be I loved what I played at that at Gamescom. Such a cool demo. Yeah. Again, man, they're just bringing Oni Musha back, but like in a fresh new way. Like they're and they get the new there's a new Mega Man on the way, and there's there's just so much happening. Um man, Capcom just really on fire. I'm I'm really happy that they've managed to pull it off because they're they're doing great work. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, but really we've just got the game. Uh we're still looking at all of the various console versions and we'll have coverage on that later in the week. But for now, let's move on to the Chat. I think it's time to book that trip to Walt Disney World Resort. You know, you work so hard. I think it's time to give yourself a little TLC. Like, when's the last time you had fun ? We could hop on a light cycle , eat food from all over the world at Epcot. We could even build those lightsabers you always wanted . Like, let's make plans for real. This summer? Find your moment at Walt Disney World Resort. Next news topic. Okay, then. So this week there was a major round of previews, uh, which we weren't invited to, but that is often the case for uh for Service and 6. Um, yeah, we've had uh I believe it was a demo that was locked to the 30 FPS quality mode on what I assume is the Xbox Series X. Um from what I understand, um reviewers or other journalists could uh access the full map, but they only had three races to look at. I actually looked at the video games Chronicle video and the races kind of like you know they kind of admit it in themselves themselves in their commentaries like this is more of the same, but I really like it because it's Forza Horizon, they do it great. Um then we also had um a video from um um uh microsoft itself showing the initial drive uh this is always like the showcase part of forza horizon where they show you some really really awesome stuff, amazing set pieces lov,ely environments. That looks really, really cool actually. Alex, I'm gonna go to you first on this. It's looking good. It is looking good. Yeah, there's uh I mean I was a little bit dismayed when I wrote to you guys this morning. I was like, does anyone have any 60fps feeds of this? I'm looking for the 60fps feeds. And they aren't um because apparently the preview event was uh locked to the 30fps mode potentially and uh the pr pr I would presume that would mean the series X version of the game, which is kind of interesting because um in the previous game they had a a variety of modes uh and they updated the game over time, but you know, at launch there was like a very hardcore, like when John covered a bit 30 FPS mode, which was really pristine looking, and then like a 60 FPS mode with more compromises including resolution and a number of uh finer detail in the world, including stuff like vegetation being quite different. So I'd be very curious to see how it shakes out this time around on Series X, whether or not the 60 FPS mode is of similar uh compromises as it was before or it actually takes some sort of different setup because maybe the engines changed in the background this time around. Maybe they're not utilizing things like MSAA . We'll have to wait and see for the full game to see that out. But there was some cool stuff to even notice within this this 30 FPS footage that they have. And looking at the official initial drive gameplay that is on the Forza channel, um, I did notice ray tracing, which is cool. They do use the the ray trace reflections. Uh they have the ones both on your car, so it self-reflects um itself and I guess smaller things the environment around it, I belie ve. They show up in the cutscenes before it switches the camera view to the car, as well as in gameplay. You'll see that when the car like kind of turns a bit and the camera doesn't keep up with it because it has like one of those kind of lazy cameras which lo,oks good. And you can see on the side of the car, stuff like the the side view mirrors are reflected in the windows as well as the car body, which is something wasn't there in the original Forza Horizon 5 launch version. And in the initial uh thing that I saw, which may or may not be completely new to the Series X , is that in the initial kind of drive-by when the announcer says, like, oh, if you're on a high-speed train, enjoy this. day And then the high speed train comes out on the left hand side of the screen. You know, this is how the game works. You've played it all before. But uh as the trains going by and the cars running parallel to it, there are the power lines which uh power the train. And as it goes by, you can see each of the individual power lines is actually reflected in the train's body. Now, with the way Forza Horizon and all the Forza games have done uh cube maps in the past where they share the cube maps between cars. I don't think that would have been possible. Uh it would just be, it wouldn't line up right. So here maybe it looks like the um ray trace reflections also apply to more than just your car? That's interesting. John, there's obviously been various videos uh based on the uh uh the preview footage, uh preview build, I believe. Um any thoughts on what you're seeing here? I mean, uh looks nice. Yeah, of course. I mean, when there's a new Forza Horizon game, I'm excited for it for sure. Um it does seem and I guess they've made a lot of these and it does seem a bit safe, but you know, it's like coming back to an old friend in a way. Like I I don't mind That if you're doing festival events, you can't just like immediately start jumping into supercars and such and hypercars and all that. Cause that was kind of an issue before. So it does seem a little hopefully a little more gradual in that sense, right? Although you can still do free drive with the more powerful cars right away. So we'll see how that goes. Uh I really I of course love what they're doing visually overall. There's a few weird visu al bugs in the in some of the footage I've seen, but by and large, it looks freaking great. The lighting is beautiful. Obviously, I've seen some back and forth discussion about the way that Japan is represented . And I think it's just this is just you you get I feel like you think of F Horizon games as like trying to capture the look and feel of a spot, but like fundamentally, the roads and layouts are all designed to be best for actually gameplay, right? Like they want to make sure that what you're doing is fun. And I think if they actually got the scale of the roads correct, it would be kind of annoying to play at points. Uh this actually was well, roads in Japan are a lot narrower than they're depicted here. Like all the roads here are like wider than the cars by a fair margin. And that's just not how it is. But I think Rich, you might have felt the same with uh Forza Horizon 4, where I feel like they depicted the roads in the UK as being a lot wider than they actually are. And those guys are from there, so like it's very obvious that it's just it's a gameplay choice. And I think that's probably the way to go in terms of fun. But I do think they've actually done a good job capturing the look of some of these places. Not all of it, but a lot of it it's like it looks pretty spot on. Um and I'm very interested to explore and see. I really just want to see how they link it all together, right? Because Tokyo itself is so big like it's not there's no like obvious like okay here's like uh the suburbs and now you're in the city when you're in the car it's like a it's a very uh large place and they obviously can't represent all of that in here. So I'll be curious to see how it's pieced together specifically. Um yeah absolutely you you always need to have some sort of distillation the essence of the place rather than the whole place because you know you can't accurately, for example, in Ports of Horizon um four, you can't accurately render all of Scotland and the and and England . And uh similarly with Mexico, you know, that's a pretty big place as well. I think it's just about sort of capturing the spirit of the place. The uh the effort, the R and D effort they put into actually sort of um you know capturing materials, uh the you know, all of the expeditions that they do at various times of the year to capture everything just right. Um, you know, I think they do a fantastic job of that. I'm just looking at uh what was the video you pointed out? It was the the T Martin N2 Yeah, yeah. I was looking at T Mart in 2. Uh and yeah. I mean he's basically just doing the whole free roam stuff here, which uh I think it's looking pretty, pretty good there. I'm I'm quite impressed with it. Uh is does is the uh depiction of Tokyo up to your standards, John? I mean I think it's w fair to point out to the audience that you do spend as much time as you can in Japan. You're fluent in Japanese. You you're very embedded in the culture.. Yeah Yeah, yeah. I mean I think I I love how it looks overall. I mean again, I feel like a lot of the complaints are just misunderstanding what Forza Horizon is supposed to be and that if they actually like they showed the Shibuya scramble and a bunch of shots and I think it materials wise and rendering the way it looks, I think they did a nice job, but obviously you know it's set up in a way to encourage racing. So you don't have like the same level of like traffic and uh pedestrian density and all that although there is if you look closely there's a fair amount of crowds along the side the one complaint i would have is that, and I uh this is probably a technical limitation, is that it doesn't really nail the essence of light because there's so many like storefronts and buildings that just are projecting so much light in real life, and when you're looking around inside the game here, a lot of the storefronts just have this kind of dark, dim look at night. Yeah. Like basically we would need like RT emissives to to really capture the way Tokyo looks at night, and I just don't think realistically that's like possible. And because it's such a dynamic game with constantly changing times of day, you're not just gonna be able to bake all that out and make it look convincing either. So uh that's that seems to be one of the limitations here. I guess we'll have to see when when the PC version comes out here because the RTGI from Forts and Motors port uh in the PC version there it did support RT omissives, so maybe it could really liven up the night scenes in Tokyo here that we're not seeing in this Xbox Series X footage. I would love to see it . Well, um a few things that I'm still interested in scalability. They've somehow got to make this run on a handheld. Um, so I suspect it is probably gonna be a case of like just removing layers similar to what they did with Forza Horizon 5. And obviously how it scales up because I think I do think that the uh the drive footage from the channel probably reflects uh uh all of the RT features being uh enabled there, which uh is is going to be a bit of a game changer I I would hope for the for the PC version there. Uh yeah I'm really looking forward to seeing this. It's not so long but we have to wait now. It's like early May this is coming out I believe. My goodness . PlayStation users will have to wait . But um yeah, I think there's plenty to be optimistic about here. There do seem to be some interesting bugs, uh lighting and shadowing related bugs that were in that um preview footage. But you know, it's preview footage. The actuyally put a huge watermark on there saying, hey, this is this is pre-release stuff, it's not finished. Um but it looks as though people are generally quite happy with it, though those who've gone hands on. So um yeah, looking forward to seeing more. Uh but with that, let's move on. Uh another game released this week that um we didn't have preview access to or review access to rather, um but we were really interested in checking it out. It's Samson by uh Liquid Swords, and Liquid Swords um have a very good um uh lineage. Uh the studio is run by video game veteran Christopher Sundberg, and basically um there's the sense that a lot of the guys who used to work at Avalanche Studios are involved here. Uh it's the Avalanche that did Just Cause and um I I'd love Just Cause. In fact recently I've been playing the um modded version of Just Cause 3 that has DLSS3 uh sorry DLSS super resolution added which has been really really cool um but here we are with Samsung uh Unreal Engine 5 not at all related to just cause in any way, shape, or form. It's kind of like a more sort of focused, narrative-driven kind of open-world game. We're hoping for great things about this from this simply because of the lineage and and the idea of a new developer coming along and um uh releasing their first game. There's always a sort of level of anticipation there. I think John, it's fair to say that it's launched with with issues and we can't really recommend it at the moment. Oh boy. Baby, this is Minds Eye 2026 right here. I'm just gonna say it. I uh uh it's okay, so this game is pretty broken in my experience, and I have exceeded my Steam refund time, so I took one for the team. Uh, but it's not that expensive, thankfully. It's 25 bucks. And so let's start with the good. So conceptually, there is some cool stuff going on here the idea is that basically you your character just gets out of prison and you're going right back into the life of crime this city Tyndallston is like the worst kind of city you could imagine.' Its like if you take like a Max Payne vibe, mix with Kingpin, maybe GTA four, and then make it way grungier and like everybody hates you. And everybody hates everyone. It's just the most miserable place on earth. And you just like you'd never want to go here. That's what this place is. And it's always wet. So like it always looks like it just stopped raining. But it so far hasn't rained at all. But the idea is you have to pay back this debt. And I like this part because essentially each day is broken up into you've got the the daytime , uh the evening and the night, and missions take up X number of slots on the daytime cycle. And the idea is each day you have to pay back X amount of debt if you can. So it's about going out into the world and taking a bunch of different jobs. And certain jobs take X amount of time, and then it's like, all right, you complete this job, two of the little like daytime chunks go away, and now it's evening, right? So you've used up that time, and then once you've run out of time during the day, you actually have to go back to your apartment and sleep. And I actually I like this loop. I think that's kind of fun because it it changes the way these game games worked out where it just feels like you could just be awake forever and just running around all the time no, matter what time of day. This actually feels like, okay, they they've considered that. And then occasionally while you're doing that, uh it'll come along and be like, hey, there's a story mission available. Go to this special spot. But the story missions are only available at certain times of day as well. Which is kind of fun . Problem is everything you do in this game kind of sucks, right? The second you jump into the car, you're like, okay, these controls. Like I've been replaying bits of GTA 5, and just you know, with GTA 6 on the mind, and then and like the handling here is just oh boy, it is not good. Uh it's actually playable on a game pad. It's virtually unplayable on a keyboard. It just feels terrible. Oh god. Driving the car. It's like it's so bad. Like it's really hard to adjust. But whatever. That's fine. At first I was like, okay, it's gonna be like driver, because a lot of there's like a lot of car miss ions, but then there's missions where you gotta get out. And like let's say there's this one early mission. It's like you have to go into this construction zone, find five packages. And my experience was this: I take the mission. Uh you have to enter the mission in your car, but you literally drive two blocks, so there's not much point there. You get out of your car. Uh, every mission area like this that where you have to be on foot is blocked off with these like metal poles that ensure you can't drive the car in there. So, okay, you're like, all right, that's where I have to go. You go in there, and immediately like like five guys just start attacking you. Uh, and by the way, the first thing I noticed is before taking this mission, I did a random thing on the side where I just saw like a mob boss and like four goons like picking on some lady and I tried to interrupt and beat them up. Well, those exact same character models show ed up in this other mission. Like exactly. I was like, okay, so did they just move here or is it just different characters? I don't know. Uh I died immediately because the actual like hand- toto- handhand combat is the mushiest most horrible thing. It doesn't play well. It's not fun. When you parry things, it's just like it's conceptually a parry, but it's more like the enemy attack kind of just whiffs through you. You all clip through each other. Uh the animations just kind of stop and stutter. It doesn't feel smooth at all. Sometimes it just nothing connects, nothing has weight. It just feels like a bunch of anim ations that were done kind of like in isolation, and they just kind of like put together in a way that feels bad. Like you're just punching air all the time. But the first time I died, and immediately my corpse fell through the floor, which I thought was funny. Um, then I went back and did it again, and then I died again, and I was like, okay, this is annoying. So I went in there this time and I uh told I basically like kited all the enemies and they followed me outside of the mission zone and it's like, oh go back into the mission zone but instead I just got in my car and ran them all over. And I was like, okay, that's cute. That's fun. Uh so I was able to beat those guys that way. And then you have to go into the yard and find the four packages or five packages and they're all placed on this exact same table with the exact same helmet in the exact same spot and the toolbox in the same spot and you just gotta find you know each of the five identical tables and take the package. Problem is the fifth package was nowhere. I fought a little radar thing. I saw it was like right where it should be. There's no I could never find it. Like it just didn't exist in that. So I don't know, was it a bug? Was it are you are you meant to fail? I don't know . I couldn't find it. So the mission just didn't work. So I ended up just like canceling the mission and then it went to evening. I was like, okay, I got nothing out of that. That sucked. So then I drive to the next mission uh and it's a frickin' like it's a tailing mission. And you just have to like you it's like, oh I can't start the mission without my car. So okay, you drive up to the car and then the mission is on foot, like literally just behind you. So you just get out of the car anyway, even though you needed the car to start the mission. So I walk over there and it's like, Oh, you're tailing this guy. There's no no uh clue what's going on, and it's just it doesn't really give you an indication of whether he sees you or not. It'll just go from like you're green on the meter to red, and oh now you lost. And so then you retry the mission. I noticed along the way there was this conversation between guys being like uh we own this building now. It's like, but it's my home, man. Like, no, it belongs to us now. I just did it. And I I saw that like three times . And then the next time I ran to that to the mission, that same conversation happened uh in another area to the left outside of the mission zone with those same guys doing the same conversation. And then I went into the mission, and then those same guys doing that same conversation were also in the mission. So I'm just like they're just warping around and kicking this dude out of his building all over town, having the same conversation over and over again. But I eventually passed that mission, and then I went to the story mission, and you go into this bar, and it's like, alright, you're having this conversation, everything's tilted and badly animated. So I'm like, okay, whatever. Uh, and then immediately I got in a fist fight after the cutscene. And the cutscene, by the way, is ultra wide, and I was playing in ultra wide mode, which the game supports, but the cutscene itself is presented in like super letterboxed mode. So I have black borders on all sides of the screen. No idea why. Uh, but I died, retried the mission. And here's what I love: when you drive to the mission objective and you say, like, all right, I'm gonna start the mission, it blacks out the camera and then it points your car in the direction of the mission right to sort of set you up the right way but in this case it's the entrance to the bar so you pull your car up outside the bar and when you start the mission it just rotates your car directly into the door of the bar. Like so you you just have to get out of the car anyway. And now the car is like in front of the door so you just kind of climb over the car to get in there. And this time and I have a video of this I'm sending it to Oliver like like Samson hardcore Samson he he was in the floor vibrating wildly up and down the cutscenes going but because you're clipping through the floor, it just like shows the game over screen, but the text says stuck, and then they're like what? And then it's like uh it says stuck collision trap detected, no penalties applied, and then it goes to that black and white screen of game over. But the thing is though, the cutscene kept playing and Samson stood back up and was correctly positioned, except for whenever the cutscene would show Samson talking , he didn't talk. Right? His mouth stayed shut, and he just stood there like this. So the whole cutscene plays out: the bar guy gets shot, and then it shows Samson running outside, and literally, as soon as as soon as it goes from cutscene to gameplay he just collapses in a heap on the ground and it just stays there and then the logic of the game keeps running uh until you click continue and I was just like , okay . So whatever. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I I played it as well, John. And the first mission basically involved me going to some factory and then just uh beating up a bunch of guys inside , collecting some stuff and then getting out again. And uh basically the first time I got there, I pulled up in my car, got out the car and sort of did a recquay around the building to see where I get in. And uh just I saw some dude next to the next to the building. So I walked up to him and accidentally pushed him uh towards the wall, but rather than him hitting the wall, he'd fell through the floor. , well this this is quite interesting. What's going on there? So I moved forward in the same way and basically fell through the floor and then drowned . Um yeah. Uh something else which uh I found quite frustrating is that um uh reverse on the car didn't really seem to work very often. I think that the sort of mechanism is that you um the the the kind of break butt which is typically the same in a lot of racing games, right? Driving games, you you use the left figure to stop and Beyond that though, you know, clipping issues, a lot of clipping issues going to the doors and stuff like that. Um it it's not great. It is Unreal Engine 5, of course. I forgot one more thing. In that same cutscene in the bar, uh I was playing mouse and keyboard, but in the lower corner it says press B to skip or like to fast forward the cutscene. It says press B and it's an Xbox button. It doesn't you I I couldn't figure out what the corresponding key was on the keyboard. You'll never doubt John. So I had to turn on my Xbox controller and hold B to get through it. And then it doesn't even skip it. It just fast forwards it. Like Crimson Desert. Uh all I could say is like when people were complaining about the stuff in Crimson Desert, that that may as well have been like a perfectly polished jewel next to this. Like the the sheer volume of bugs and issues and just weirdness both sucks and is also amazing because uh despite all this, I had a great time because it was so stupid and broken and everything. You just never knew how bad things were gonna get, and it could get pretty bad. It's it's very funny. Yeah, there are some nice bits in it. The uh the the first mission I was talking about there, basically the um you can use uh can't believe I'm saying this, you can use uh frozen fish as projectiles. Which is which is fun. You know, just say just pick up a frozen fish and throw it at someone. It seems to be pretty devastating, harder than a punch. Uh but it did amuse me. Um yeah, there's there's some you know, I I kind of like the fact I'm all in on uh sort of double A games or even single A games, you know, if they're adequately priced, which I think this is. And um if it's fun, you know. Uh I get what you're saying about the combat, um, it's not exactly streets of rage in terms of uh sort of the kinetic feeling of actually hitting someone, it does feel a bit spongy . Um but you know it's it's it sort of lays out lays out its stall as being a fair ly you know simplistic but potentially fun game it's just the fun isn't really quite there. I'm going to talk about the PC side of things because again I was using my Ryzen 53600 with a 4060. Um and it is using all of the Unreal Engine five features, uh, which means that man, it's heavy on the CPU, super, super heavy on CPU. Um, which is a bit weird because when you start the game, you're sort of in fifty to sixty territory . Um actually in terms of the settings I was using here, there's a channel called Benchmarking, which uh does sort of optimize settings, and since we haven't looked at it myself, and I know this guy uh does does put the due diligence in I used his settings and um yeah I mean generally it was sort of 50 to 60 um which is kind of okay uh but as soon as you get in the car and you're driving around the denser parts of the city, you're down to the thirties, you know, super, super CP CPU bottleneck. There was an interesting recommendation from Benchmark King that, you know, just use frame generation because, you know, you can double your performance . So I looked into that and it's true. It does it does actually increase performance. I'm not sure it doubles it on a 4060, but it does increase performance of or rather frame rate. Yeah. It's probably the the better description. Um And the latency penalty was about ten milliseconds there. So but you know, frame generation to offset a CPU heavy game, uh it's it's it's not not great . I mean on a high end system at least uh I just capped it the internal frame rate at sixty and did frame gen up to one sixty five and it was it's it's quite smooth on a high-end system to the point where like performance issues are not something I would complain about in this game. It's everything else. I actually think because it's so heavy on most systems that a lot of the discussion about the game got lost as people were trying to figure out how to make it run well. But once it runs well, it does not magically mean you're gonna have a good time. Yeah, it's a shame. What's the route forward on this, John? Because obviously you know you're comparing it to Mind's eye there which where they've they've they've struggled to improve the game. There's a lot going on here that needs to be addressed. I think there's still potential here because the world they built it's very grimy, but there is something uh there is an appeal to going around like a sleazy underworld like this. And it does have it does look like they looked at the Matrix Awakens demo and said, ooh, let's just do that, but like in a grimier place. Like it feels like I don't know like uh areas like Gary, Indiana or something. I don't know. It's it's just got this like grimy industrial town where where everything's falling apart, feel to it. But like there's some core stuff in here that could be fun and interesting if they massively fix the bugs and improve performance. And fundamentally, it's a lower price, and if the developer is able to put on a good public face and like listen to feedback and respond well, I think they can save it and create something that people like. Uh whereas mine's eye, the developer has basically like threatened everyone and basically said that you're all crazy and this is this is an amazing game. Uh, and like it's generally put people off. I have no idea PRI PR-wise why they thought that was the route forward for that game . Right. I think they could find an audience because you know there's enough interesting stuff here and people like these sorts of games, and it is visually maybe not artistically coherent, but like technically it's good from in terms of what they're rendering. It's kind of fun to see that. So um I think we've seen this scale of project done much better though, like Robocop , which I thought also looked phenomenally good, but it's actually a good game as well. This is less so Unreal Engine 5 does get a lot of criticism and you know bearing in mind its position in the marketplace, it's it's you know it it kind of needs to be held under scrutiny to a certain degree, but you can't deny that it is enabling a certain class of develop ers, smaller studios, to actually deliver games, you know, in a world where games are becoming ever more complex from a technical perspective. So perspective, from that perspective. Yeah, I mean, but there is a lot that needs to be done here, I think. I know. I'm sad that they couldn't pull it off to be honest. Like 'cause uh it's it's really a shame. I'm sure they put in a lot of work here and it took a while to make but and I think without Unreal Engine they couldn't have reached this fidelity that's true but the fidelity was really not the issue here. Yeah. Alex anything to add? Well I do see that the Steam version of the game uh received a patch uh yesterday which I presume you guys were both playing with it was on April the ninth and they're and they're talking about stuff like you know fixing PSO issues. It's like a lot of actually the first uh technical updates. I didn't really have any stuttering issues, to be honest. I did n't have things from that patch. Before the patch. It's just the patches. I got major stutters. After the patch, the stutters are gone. It's been smooth. Okay, that's good. Yeah, I think he played that second one.. Yeah Yeah, that's cool. So they're working hard at least quickly. That's a positive thing. Yeah. Yeah. I think um hopefully we'll see some improvements there. Uh but I was just, you know, been thinking a lot about just cause recently. Um mostly after playing the DLSS patch for Just Cause 3. And obviously Liquid Swords don't own Just Cause. And you know Christopher Sunberg definitely wants to move away from like massive open worlds with huge scale. He's on the record, I believe, as saying that. But man, you know, I kind of miss just cause. I miss physics driven games. I know. We we just we just don't have anything that's kind of I know you really love these games. I know they were among your favourites too. Yeah, even Just Cause 4, which uh was um got a lot of criticism. I really, really enjoyed it and um I actually spoke to the technical director uh at Square Enix. I don't believe he's actually the square uh the the technical director of um Avalanche, but he was kind of like Square Enix's technical guy. And uh, you know, saying yeah, Just Cause 3 on consoles um had issues. It was only running the physics on two two threads, which uh might explain some of the crazy low frame rates. But just cause four, they actually used a job-based system to distribute it across uh all of the cores available and it it worked, right? It was really, really cool physics on a PS4 class CPU. And um I kind of liked the scale and scope in Just Cause 4, you know, the whole map with all of the militias moving about and stuff like that. It was cool. I miss Just Cause. Um, they were also working on like I believe it was some sort of um um multiplayer version, the extent to which it was yeah, the amount of players involved. But you know, you think of a multiplayer game with that physics engine involved, potential. It would have been very, very cool. But you know, Square Enix basically couldn't make it successful seemingly, so no more just cause. So I'm a bit sad about that. But so real but as a quick addendum, since we're talking open world and stuff, uh and rock star Jason, I did see this thing this week. Did you guys catch the Danish guy playing Red Dead Redemption 2 around four FPS for several hours a day? There's clips of basically he's playing it on a an i5 eighty three hundred h laptop with a 1050 Ti and four gigs of RAM. And it basically runs at like four FPS. And according to it took him like 12 hours to complete the intro missions. And people are saying like the the sound of the cooling fan is so loud that it's probably like full of dust and barely functional. So I'm just loving this. I think this is funny because it reminds me of a dude I saw play in World of Warcraft like 20 years ago on like some like broken MacBook with a crack screen and he like put the window in the non-cracked area and it ran at like five FPS. And I'm just like it makes you step back and like think about like are we are we out of touch or is the kids that are wrong? I don't know. I'm not sure for FPS is the way forward. Probably stuff. Study . Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal. Everything you need to study and play with Select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox Wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last ends June 30th. Turns at aka.ms slash college pc. Okay, let's move on to our next topic. Right, Alex is back. Alex is here. Alex has digested a good amount of uh GDC presentations and you have selected some of your favorites for discussion, right, Alex? So what's on the menu today? Well, uh I'm gonna be crisscrossing between a couple. Um Nvidia posted all of theirs uh in video form on their NVIDIA game developer YouTube channel. And I also looked at an Intel presentation here, which I thought was pretty cool. So the first one I want to start with and talk about is they were all primarily ray tracing related, except for one I'm going to talk about at the end here. The first one is called The Future of Path Tracing by Martin Stich, a guy who I met actually at CES 20 25, really nice guy. And uh Carmelo Fernandez Aguera, I think is how you pronounce his name. And we, John, have actually talked to him before uh because he worked on Forza Motorsport and did the ray tracing in it. But this one was basically about uh it was split into two parts. It was like the standardization of NVIDIA features in DXR, and then how to implement path tracing in a kind of no-nonsense, simple, not path tracing in one weekend kind of way, but like doing getting the first basic steps and then optimizing later, thinking about you know just just getting it running. And that was Carmelo's part portion of the presentation, which I'm gonna talk a little bit less about. But um the basic gist is that Martin talks about how now DXR with version 1.2 includes stuff that we saw starting with Ada Lovelace GPUs. Basically we have SER sheeter execution reordering as being part of the DXR API now . And opacity micro maps, which have been used to like speed up foliage rendering in games, uh, and anything that's really transparent with edges and stuff like that. And now as those are going to be a part of DXR, you don't have to call on NV API to put them in your game. And you can make it standard and other vendors will pick it up over time. We see Intel GPUs supporting SER out of the gate and presumably OMMs in the future, while AMD GPUs I'm thinking are going to start supporting both of these technologies with RDNA5 . The next thing that he talked about was DXR 2.0 , but he didn't name it 2.0 in the presentation. But there was that DXR 2.0 uh kind of GitHub release uh a couple weeks back that pointed out the fact that RTX Mega Geometry is going to be in DXR's next version, and you can already actually start using it. And the big part of this presentation was how for The Witcher 4, uh NVIDIA worked specifically on an LOD system, which leverages DXR 1.2 features and the DXR 2.0 spec to make it so that you could path trace millions of trees. It kind of combines uh OMMs for distant trees uh to reduce their instance count. And then up close it uses that DXR megageometry layer to get really fine-grained nanryite geomet. And they wanted to make this LOD system essentially in a way that was invisible to the developer because there's a certain recommended way to make nanite vegetation in UE5 that CDPR is using, and they wanted this to kind of invisibly slot into it, and it works pretty darn well. And they're gonna still keep optimizing it, but they're publishing it later this year, and that was a really cool part. So from here, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about this presentation in a bit, but I want to skip over to uh a second presentation here called Implementing Real-Time Path Tracing in the RE Engine. Uh this is with Hitoshi Mishima from Capcom And I thought this was a fascinating presentation because usually when we see a lot of these presentations about path tracing, we don't get the perspective always from an internal engineer who worked on it, rather than video representatives. And this was someone directly from Capcom themselves. And they actually went over the like the artistic troubles and like into how hard it is from an artistic as well as technical perspective to implement path tracing to an engine that uh maybe or kind of did it support before. Based upon what I can see here, the path tracing in the RE engine is not at all actually based upon their internal reference path tracer, rather work they did themselves with two engineers over a period of 1.5 years, as it says in the slides, which is, you know, that's a good amount of time for two people to be working on something. But at the same time, given the, you know, the benefit it had to the game's visual presentation, I think it was quite obviously worth it. Uh there were some really interesting bits in this uh presentation uh in the spur uh the first part by the representative from Capcom . Uh they did not end up using Restor direct illumination, so the game has a I I guess not a hardcore sampling of local lights like we've seen in other games that ship with Restor DI. They do use roostur global illumination though to make sure that the signal is a bit better on that side. And another interesting thing is that the game, at least Resident Evil Requiem, did not ship using shader recu uh shader execution reordering. They had their own compute wave optimization to increase coherency on the GPU. So that game didn't actually take advantage of like the really hardcore NVIDIA technologies in a lot of ways. It used more, I would say, generic ways to do things like path tracing , GI, as well as to get higher occupancy on the GPU. They didn't actually use SER. Another thing that he talked about was that the game's specific arts in different scenes required hacks in many ways or guided buffers to make it actually look and work right, both with path tracing and with ray reconstruction, which is what the game ships with for a denoiser when you turn on path tracing and unfortunately only works on NVIDIA GPUs, but they needed like a guide buffer to make it so that the rain doesn't disappear, something that we saw recently in Crimson Desert. They needed a guide buffer to make it so that um projected textures actually show up in the scene and actually move around because otherwise it like the lighting accumulates so much with uh ray reconstruction to keep it stable that it would make these things disappear. And also like, I talked about in the transition from the CNN model of Ray Reconstruction to the Transformer model, they needed a special kind of guiding uh map to make sure skin looked right, uh, actually had subsurface scattering. And according to the questions at the end of the presentation, one of the most troublesome parts of getting path tracing working was making sure that the artists were happy with it. Like it's not just it wasn't just put it in and everyone's happy because it's more representative, but artists had maybe artistically designed things with different lighting and they had to make sure that the artists were actually happy in the end. And there was a lot of back and forth between him, the other engineer, and the artist constantly to get it working. Um and the second part of this presentation was from an NVIDIA person, Kelvin Sue , and he was basically talking about how they want to optimize the implementation of path tracing in the RE engine even further than what we've seen before, because it didn't use things like shader execution reordering. And you would think, oh, that should just be a really simple way to make the game way faster, right? It's just an API call changing. Well, if you change that, like he said, like naively , if you uh just implemented SER versus what the game was doing previously , it actually was about three milliseconds slower. So we went into this really long, cool, detailed diatribe about actually there's a lot of assumptions you're making by doing that, and you need to do things differently. And the eventual thing is after a number of optimizations and a couple of other things, uh, they got it down to 3.3 milliseconds uh for the rate uh for the path tracing with S ER versus 17.7 milliseconds without using SER as it is currently. So they said maybe there's gonna be a patch for Resident Evil Requiem, but I believe Pragmata will be shipping with this version of SER enabled and DXR1.2 enabled um uh path tracing, which would be actually a first. I don't think there's been any DXR1.2 game and Pragmata may be the first one. And a last little bit about this presentation was that the representative from Capcom mentioned a number of things that they want to add into the path tracing themselves. Like this is not without, you know, this is not the NVIDIA person there, but it seems like they at Capcom really wanna push path tracing and they want to add in things like research direct illumination. They want transparent, translucent path tracing. So things like stuff going through a glas s, uh, VFX volume rendering, which is actually very hard to do. I'd be very curious to see it. And they mentioned also neural shading. So that's like the stuff that we saw kind of years ago uh regarding things like neural materials. So they really want to push hardcore in a super PC-focused direction for their high-end path tracing. And I thought that was fantastic stuff. But one thing that came out of this presentation was that the hair rendering in res in Pragmata specifically um is path trace down to the down to the triangle. And the the the original presentation I talked to uh talked about here, the future of path tracing by Martin Stish and Camelo. At the second part of the the presentation, before Camelo starts to speak , there's this kind of question put out by Martin: like , why don't we just trace the primary visibility rays with past tracing implementations? And currently all the games that are considered path tra ced that aren't like Quake 2 RTX or Minecraft RTX, they actually do all the primary visibility still through ras teriz ation. And there's performance reasons for doing that, but also simplicity reasons uh essentially at the moment. Uh but in the future, there's a lot of good reasons to maybe stop doing that. Like you could get really cool effects like uh sniper rifle scopes just working out of the box without you having to hack stuff in. You could get like different view projections where you could have wide super wide FOVs like John's monitor without any weird clipping issues ever. There's a lot of really good ways to do it. And also you don't have to do any of the res ervoirization work and then the path tracing work and having two data structures. You just keep using the same data. And that was a really cool question to throw in the room, but there was also this slide towards the end of it. So basically, there's this slide here where uh the question is: at what point in time in the future is it more beneficial to trace primary rays versus ras terizing them? And now this scene may not be perfectly representative of uh all workloads and all games ever, but there was a really cool frame chart here across the different architectures and different GPUs on each architecture of rasterizing the primary visibility versus uh ray tracing it. And on Turing, we can see that it is way in favor of rasterization. And on P and then on peer, it already actually starts getting much more similar. Than Ada Lovelace, it's even more similar between even like the smallest GPUs, 4060 to 4090. And you're starting to get into the more imperceptible performance differences there when you get over to black well. And I presume as GPUs advance into the future, this will become more and more dubious. Now once again, this may not be the most perfectly representative sample to do this test in. So I don't want to say it applies to all games , but we could be looking at future titles where the primary visibility, maybe in a title like The Witcher 4, is actually just going to be have an option to be path trace, which could give some really cool advantages to the game. And uh there was another presentation by NVIDIA here that talked about uh the hair rendering in Indiana Jones, but the hair rendering in Indiana Jones and patch trace version of the game after a patch is actually all primary visibility rays. So the hair is fully patch raised, which I thought was freaking cool. Wow. So yeah, the those were two, you know, I say I was going to talk about more presentations, but I realized I wouldn't be talking too much, but I'll save the other presentations for next week. Um, but those were at least two presentations uh from the NVIDIA side of thing at GDC that I thought were really good. Um, they got me thinking a lot. I was so happy to hear uh someone directly from Capcom . Uh the translation was really good in the in the YouTube video I had, and I wasn't at all complaining about that. Um, just really great presentations, and I'll talk more about some other ones next week. Yeah. Interesting. Well it's certainly uh the collaboration between Capcom and uh NVIDIA has certainly changed up, hasn't it? Bearing in mind there wasn't even DLSS support in a lot of Capcom gosh. Yeah. It's it's kind of rough going back to Resident Evil Four, which I think is a really good looking game, and just kind of being stuck with lackluster image quality options. It's a shame. Mm-hmm. Good stuff. Any sort of hints on what you're going to be talking about next? Uh next week I want to talk about the neural um texture compression and neural shading stuff from both NVIDIA and Intel, uh because they dovetail into each other presentations. Nice. Okay. Uh well, good stuff, but let's move on. So there's been a lot said about NVIDIA and the lack of a new graphics card, uh consumer level graphics card coming from them this year, but that's not strictly true because what we're actually going to be seeing is an SOC, a laptop style SOC, that will be using unified memory. It will be built into Windows laptops, but it will be using ARM cores. The processor itself is called the N1, and there's a higher power N1X version. And I noticed on videocards.com that an Nvidia N1 laptop laptop motherboard has uh images of it have leaked. This one looks pretty hardcore, it's got 128 gigabytes of LP D DR5X memory. Now the funny thing about this is that this having now seen the N1, it does look to be basically a renamed version of the processor that was in the DGX Spark system, which which kind of makes sense. And the specs are certainly quite extraordinary. You're looking at sort of like on in the fully unlocked form. Um, you're basically looking at um a maximum of 20 CPU cores, uh, 10 of them plus 10 big little cores. Um, that could well be cut down on uh the actual N1 versus the N1X. Uh GPU cores, six thousand one hundred and four forty-four Q de cores, which um I believe it is based on the Blackwell architecture. So that's basically in terms of sort of architecture there, very, very similar to the RTX fifty seventy, which is uh GPU that's proven to be insanely popular. The desktop version is actually um according to the Steam Hardware Survey the most prolific um in terms of uh the audience there. Obviously it won't be quite the same because of the memory interface, because of the the lack of bandwidth by comparison, because of various reasons, power, T T DPs for example. But you know , basically this is sort of like what you might call a high stakes entry into the Windows on ARM laptop market. And there's the motherboard. I'm kind of interested in this. There's been various sort of estimations done of performance there. They're saying it's uh equivalent to a sort of high TGP version of the RTX forty seventy , the RTX fifty seventy. Uh it's kind of like um nobody quite knows, but it's expected to be quite potent there. I think the thing that ex uh that excites me about this um is the fact that if you are gonna have like a huge amount of uh memory attached, probably not 128 gigs, but even thirty-t gwoigabytes of memory, uh you'll be able to sort of you know allocate sixteen gigabytes to the GPU, hopefully, and sixteen gigabytes to the system. Uh so you know, all of the things that we have, um uh issues that we have with lower-end desktop silicon, for example, the fact it's basically paired with eight gigabytes of memory, that will go away, hopefully. Um, I'm excited about this. I mean, the fact that this motherboard uh has been leaked, I mean, it's certainly not a DGX Spark, it is a laptop, you can tell. Um, apparently, it's going to be announced at Computex. Um, I'm really looking forward to seeing what it's got to offer. I haven't looked at how good the Windows on ARM situation is on um uh on laptops uh with those these types of ARM SOCs for quite some time, not since uh the surface came out with the Snapdragon and it was incredibly poor uh at that time. Um I understand it has improved, Windows Alarm has improved. We never quite understood whether the GPU issues that we saw like horrendous stutter was down to um Windows Alarm or whether it was down to the drivers, but you would expect the driver stack from NVIDIA to transplant across here. So you know we'll find out one way or the other with this one. I'm excited by this, you know. Um Nvidia class laptops, integrated SOC starts at laptops. You could have like uh Steam machine machine style boxes, could have like very, very powerful next generation NVIDIA shield. Could do with one of those. The current one still has Tego X1. Alex, what do you think? Yeah, I want to see this. Like this configuration right here, I think is just too heavy. Like I think it's too big of a configuration for most consum ers. Uh, this hundred and twenty eight gigs. Uh like uh this is for people I guess who do like local machine learning kind of stuff on their on under their like this that that's the only reason why this exists I think. But like in a smaller configuration, it doesn't even need such a big GPU like this one. All the devices you can think of, like low-end laptops, uh handhelds the shield idea is really cool. I'm actually surprised there hasn't been another shield since then. Um yeah I just want to see more th devices not powered by AMD in that quarter, just because we've seen a level of stagnation there. And that's why I was really excited with Panther Lake and the prospects that that brings to the handheld market, just as much as I would be excited for this, uh, because this will hopefully revitalize that handheld market as you'll actually have more competition there. And given the quality of drivers on the in on the NVIDIA side at times, although lately there's been issues, I think this could be a really comp elling product uh regardless. I'm just very curious to see now what the actual issues on Windows and ARM are for like standard triple-A gaming. And if they bear out now that it'll be on a presumably much better uh like driver base, the NVIDIA one instead of you know what it was previously. Yeah. So a new class of device potentially for NVIDIA, John, and as Alex says, uh some competition for A MD and handheld style or more mobile style SOCs, although Panther Lake obviously was a a another sort of potential competitor there. It's not really your bag laptop gaming, but this is quite an interesting development, isn't it? I mean, yeah, I'm not a big laptop gamer necessarily, but I do have a need for powerful laptop computing on the go sometimes, right? Especially for DF work for out and about and we need this this kind of thing can be really useful for both playing a game to capture it and then taking that footage and turning it into a video because you have the the processing power necessary to make that work on the go, which is great. And that's that kind of professional laptop in that space is usually reserved for I guess Apple's best laptops. But those obviously lock you out of a lot of the gaming stuff. So uh I think it's cool to see what they're doing here and going for like high-end mobile stuff with ARM. So I don't know. Watch it's it's uh you know I don't know what else to say about that until we actually see a product on the shelves, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think the other thing which is uh kind of interesting from my perspective is that when you're seeing what the switch two does with like incredibly low wattages, uh it's it's very, very impressive. And that's using the ampere architecture and it's using you know eight slash ten nanometer process load for Samsung. This will likely be a four nanometer product, I would say. And um uh you know, obviously it's using a blackwell architecture, not ampere. So I'm very interested to see, you know, how low you can go with it and what sort of results you're gonna get. Um and the extent to which it's actually gonna be competitive. I mean, Nvidia sell a a big bunch of laptop um uh graphics cards, uh DGPUs within uh laptops, uh the 4060, obviously, 4070. They've been even more prolific with uh Blackwell as I understand it. So to a certain extent, I'm I'm sort of curious as to whether they might be um competing with themselves to a certain extent. But then you look at this then you look at this um this laptop motherboard here, it does seem to be uh a dare I say a full fat configuration. How many laptops out there are gonna ship with 128 gigabytes of RAM ? But there it is. It it physically exists. Wait, maybe it's the switch three, Rich. Oh boy, start that rumor right now. Start it right now. Start it. 128 gigs, maybe. Yeah, that's the way forward. But no, I'm genuinely excited about this because you know I I kind of like um to see uh the how lower end silicon works. This isn't low-end silicon as such, but the performance level will be on line with more sort of mainstream parts, but you won't have to worry about the memory side of things, hopefully. Yeah, interesting stuff. I haven't got too much to say about it because as you say, John, you're you know you're just looking at a motherboard here. Yeah. Um I'd love to see what they do with it. Um whether these sort of path-traced um optimizations you've been talking about, the extent to which they scale down because I think part of the reason isn't um so much well it is obviously there's a certain degree of horsepower uh required, but you also require a lot of memory. Uh I did run cyberpunk uh on a um mobile forty seventy with eight gigabytes, but you had to sort of reduce the internal resolution very, very, very low to to sort of mitigate against lack of memory and lack of performance. But if this scales higher, if you're not worried about memory anymore, interesting stuff. But yes, I mean there have been sort of talk of delays about this uh of this product because Windows Alarm isn't ready, so I'm curious as to the extent to which that has been addressed and may no longer be an issue. But it's something to look forward to, and hopefully there will be a reveal at Computex and then hopefully we'll get to see it on a hands-on capacity soon after because um at Uber, every single driver is required to pass a thorough background check before they can start driving. That means any prospective driver goes through a multi-step screening process, checking for any impaired driving or criminal offenses. But the checks don't stop there. Every year every Uber driver is background checked again, so the person picking you up today meets the same standards as the day they started. Hey, how's it going? Yeah. Good. Thanks. Annual driver screenings from Uber. One more way Uber is putting safety at every turn. Learn more at Uber.com slash safety. Certainly an interesting development. Um, but with that, let's move on. So we're gonna round up the show here with a tech demo that John showed me the other day. It's an enhanced form of Super Mario Brothers running on the Sega Master System. Obviously, my dislike of the Master System is now legendary. You've got some supporter questions which we'll be tackling on that in due course. But uh my first uh comment to you John was uh uh this is actually looking very very good. I know I made you admit that something looks good on the master system. It looks excellent. It looks excellent. It does. Yeah, it feels like it's one level that 's just it's it's just a sort of a test to show it's possible. But it seems to be derived from the Super Mario All-Stars asset. So it's taking advantage of Monstra System's higher color palette than NES. So they're able to do. Obviously, you don't have the parallax background, but you do have animated grass, detailed sprites and tiles. I mean, it looks freaking great, I think. And if you showed this to people back in the day, I think they'd be like, whoa, genuinely surprised. So it's I don't know, it's fun to see it. And as soon as I see the master system, I think of Rich . Yeah. And I did I did I did admittedly say this does look very, very good. Uh but you know this has prompted a wave of support of questions. This one from Kigar. Good head good day and health to you all, exclamation point. This one's for raving Richard Led Better. Since the game gear can be seen as a portable master system, does this make this the portable master of evil? Well, I'm gonna say I'm I've never been a fan of the game gear. It's a bit big bulky. It's it's kind of bulky. I I didn't like the screen dimensions. Um not so much the master system stuff for it, but um I have got a very amusing story about uh a Sega representative a cu uh a customer service representative they received um two two game gears through okay Uh through the post. Uh and um basically what had happened was two brothers had two game gears. One of them peed into the game gear with the other. And uh obviously no longer it no longer worked . And um as retribution divine retribution, uh perhaps, the other guy, the other brother peed into the game cube of sorry, the game cube of the first guy. Oh no. And uh yeah, the mother basically uh sent both of the game gears back to uh Sega, uh hoping that it could be fixed somehow . Anyway, Master System, uh I didn't sp reallyend too much time with it. Uh I was never really a fan of portables back then to be honest. And um but you know, it did a job, right? The Game Gear. You know. Sh it. It did a job. It did a job on battery consumption, that's for sure. Yeah, I always played Game Gear with uh an AC adapter for a reason. Yeah. For sure many people did. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, the the consumption rate on those double A's was was was was prolific. I do remember that. Uh we got this uh question here from 1040 STF. Sorry Rich, but the more I explore the Master Systems library, the less I understand why it's the Master of Evil. There are actually a lot of great games on the platform. Asterix is really solid. Castle of Illusion is fantastic. Land of Illusion and Lucky Dime Caper are both a lot of fun and fantasy star is genuinely impressive. Even Aladdin stands out with its unique parallax scrolling while being a good game. Vingilanti may not match the PC Engine version, but it's still enjoyable, and in some cases the Master Sister arguably has the best versions of games like Rampage, Jurassic Park, Double Dragon, Bubble Bobble, or Time Soldiers among their 8 to 16-bit counterparts, not to mention Wonderboy 3 the Dragon's Trap. Even at 30 FP S it was widely considered the definitive version until dot E Mus limake. And I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot. So sure, it's not the NES and it's massive library of hits, but why is the master system the master of evil? We need answers, exclamation point. Yeah, I think the thing to bear in mind here is that there isn't any kind of uh uh um rational critique being applied to this. It's basically the uh the former of a teenage boy who is uh looking looking to um uh follow up on the amazing screenshots of outrun that were shown in the uh the press of the time. And I as I said, I went round to my friend's house. He had a master system. He had the light gun. He had the uh the three D glasses as well. And uh yeah, I said, oh wow, yeah, this is cool. Um I love uh afterburner and outrun, fire them up 'cause I' seveen the screenshots and it's fantastic. And uh I think it's fair to say that those particular games, John, are not the uh pinnacle of the Master System. Afterburner two or Afterburner I guess is uh it's pretty horrific on there. Yeah. And um yeah, basically I don't think any home system at the at that time could do a good version of that one. Absolutely not. But that's the dream, right? That's the dream that was being fed to me. And now figure i add this into the equation, which is that um uh across Europe and Australia, uh possibly parts of Hong Kong, um there were other issues to contend with um for for pretty much any consul at the time, which was the fact that we had the PAL versions of these consoles. So yeah, basically everything every game ran slower than you would expect. And they had like blackboarders bottom uh top and bottom and uh most shockingly of all the music would be slower as well. And uh I remember your horror, John at EGX when I showed you what a power console looked like. Yeah, all those years ago. Yeah, because I really hadn't seen much of that person. It's just like wow. It's horrific. It's just not good. Yeah. Well, it was extra bad at EGX because they were using these like CRTs where like for whatever reason the console's the RGB lead was activating the widescreen mode in the set. So it was going to sixteen by nine, and then it was further bordered. So you had like this little sliver that was all squished in the middle of the screen. That's where the game was. Oh boy. Yeah, but I think the bottom line to answer ten forty STF's question is that you know there's there's no rational reason no not to like the micro the master system. It's just when you're sort of growing up and you're fed the dream of like um arcade well won't say arcade perfect but you know very very good ports of of the games that you really want to play and then you actually see them it's like this I don't I don't want to be involved with this. Uh but John, there is adjacent news to this, which uh I discovered this morning. Um obviously one of the great uh platform mascots of the eight-bit and the sixteen bit era was James Pond Rob ocod or actually I think RoboCod was the sequel. And uh I've discovered disturbing news that attempts to trademark the 90s video game character James Pond have been scuppered by uh the license holders to James Bond itself. This is an injustice that that cannot be countenanced. Uh the that wait, this this is a new thing, wait, that happened? Yeah, I just saw it on Video Games Chronicle. Yeah, basically uh the headline is the James Pond IP owner has opposed an attempt to trademark nineties parody video character James Pond. That's okay. God, James James Pond, man. It's uh it's a thing. It's just it to me, it feels like one of those darn series that like like British people just seem to love. Like, oh, I got my me dizzy here. I'm gonna play with this egg and then go around as a giant James Bond fish. And it's uh I don't get it. I just don't get it. Well Pen Pond was uh an iconic character in the uh in in the scene back in the day. There was nineteen ninety-three's uh actually well no let's start at the beginning James Pond, underwater agent, came out in nineteen ninety, followed by the far more I'm just reading the video games chronicle article here, by the way. Followed by the far more popular James Pond 2 codename Robocod . Oh my god. Robocod is a word that I don't want to hear. Probably after this conversation ever again. And um there was James Pond 3, Operation Starfish. And mini game spin off the aquatic games. Aquatic . Yeah . Yeah, the that you know parodies don't really exist anymore in this in this the cheap parody way. You know, like I do kinda miss the title. Yeah, the whole concept of the platforming game mascot has basically fallen by the wayside, hasn't it? And that's a bit of a shame, because we've got some truly terrible works in that particular area. Chester cheetah, too cool to fall, of course. Um cool spot, of course. Can't ever be a cool spot. It's the one I always think about. I have no why did the Noid get a game though? That's like Well it turns out that um uh system three founder, they did like the N last Ninja back in the day. They apparently have acquired the rights to uh James Pond and uh they're not happy about this um uh development. And I would imagine not. Argued that the James Pond character has been established for decades and shouldn't be considered a new IP that's only recently been set up. James Pond is a long-standing, well-established and widely recognised video game property dating back to the early 90s with its own distinct identity, history, and audience in the marketplace. Over the years, it has been commercially published and distributed through more than twelve partners. That history included major industry names such as Electronic Arts before System 3 acquired the rights. Um do you really need to protect James Pond as an IP? No. Is there any g is there gonna be any worry you know any sort of danger that somebody might be coming up with their own Pond uh series entries. I don't know. It does seem however seem a bit heavy handed for um the actual IP owners of James Bond to come up with an objection to this, but you know, I guess it's the world. I wouldn't I wouldn't mind a a modern version of James Pond, but they get Pierce Brosnan to do the voice. That'd be pretty great. Is he that desperate for money these days? I somehow doubt it. Alex, any thoughts on platform mascots in general or James Bond in particular? No, but I'd say probably Gex is the better James Bond uh uh ripo ff uh or parody of the time rather than James Bond . Why do you say that? Have you sampled uh Pond's wares? Oh yes, I have actually played well I've played it in an emulator. I've played Chief Bonded in an emulator . As in I I couldn't believe that I uh when I uh downloaded all the excuse me, I'm I'm I'm admitting to something illegal. But when I was younger, I downloaded all the Sega Master System games in like a a dot zip file and was just clicking through them all. And James Pond happened to be one of them. And that was a double click that I regretted afterwards. So not a very good game Uh but yes, um Master System. Uh Super Mario. Very, very cool demo. You actually showed me an Amstrad GX four thousand version of Sonic as well, uh John. Oh yeah. Sonic GX baby . Hmm. Okay. Uh well that was the last topic there for the end of the show. If you enjoyed it, please do like, subscribe, share, ring bells for notifications, that kind of thing. Um, DFsport program, patreon.com slash digital foundry. We'll be back with our Q<unk>A show soon, but that's all for now. Thanks for watching and supporting Digital Foundry. We'll see you soon. Hey business owners. The NFL season is a big revenue driver. Now there's a smarter way to get ready. Everpass is the only authorized commercial platform for NFL Sunday ticket, delivering every live out-of-market regular season Sunday afternoon game. Lock in the best offer now with up to 40% off saving up to $2,500 . 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