Pragmata Resolution Discrepancy Investigation

Well, hello there and welcome to this uh the 260th edition of DFDEC Weekly, our weekly discussion show discussing the latest gaming and technology news. Uh joining me on the panel this week. First of all, Alex Batalia. Hello. Yes, you wouldn't maybe know it from that angle, but I'm actually walking out a treadmill right now. I am uh I have uh graced myself with a working treadmill and I'm at a uh a loving saunter at the moment in the moonlight. Okay . Um just to reassure our podcast listeners that actually not seeing this makes no difference whatsoever. Yes. Basically, just imagine me lightly bobbing from side to side. That's that's what you it's kind of like a third person view of Doom Guy. Yeah, it's like the uh also joining us and he's not bobbing about in any way, shape, or form. Oliver McKenzie. Yes, I'm very taken by Alex's slow rhythmic movements there. Kinda reminds me of uh those commercials they used to do on treadmills like uh Bye Bye bye Birdie or something, you know.. Yes Very funny . Okay. Slightly disconcerting, but let's move on to our first news topic. Okay, so um we've literally just seen the public reveal of Metro twenty thirty-nine, the latest game from the iconic, the legendary 4A games. Um came out of nowhere. I wasn't expecting to see it for another year, I don't think. I'm amazed and happy that it's happened. Lots to discuss here. Um, Alex, you're Mr. Metfo. Where do you want to start? Well, um, so let's talk about my own preconceptions. Usually when game developers come out with a CG trailer, I get really pissed off. But those are usually contextless and it's the only thing you know about the game. And usually when they're shown next to the gameplay footage thereafter, the game looks really bad . And I'm very lucky here that this wasn't contextless, and the gameplay footage they did show looked really, really good, even next to the CG. So Alex was happy. But um to get it down, you basically get a large CG trailer in the beginning using assets though that probably are derived from partial in-game assets, I think, because just recreating all these environments seems very expensive and silly. And when you get to the gameplay shots at the end of the trailer, you can see actually there's a lot of continuity there. So those may be some of the hero assets for the game. Um but then they go after this uh CG trailer, which gets you know the mood setting for the game, uh they have multiple developers, I believe three in total, executive producer, artist, and I forget the third gentleman's job exactly, going over how the game's story has changed ever since they started development, uh, what the new story of the game is, and also their ambitions for it technically and uh gameplay-wise. It's gonna be a darker game, more focused on the metro tunnels instead of Exodus's larger open world . And they're going to be keeping their own 4-A engine. And that was actually a big part of the presentation here, where they essentially say with another engine they would be more constrained, where with the 4A engine, they can essentially add on anything they need for the game's development. And we didn't get too much in-game footage, only at the end, and a number of snippets in the middle while the developers are actually talking about the game. But one thing you can see is the first shot that I want to point out is we get to see some nebulo us game system being played. And on the screen, as the characters moving about, you can see frame time or sorry, a GPU readout that says the game is pegged at 30 FPS and the internal resolution is 1516 by 912, which I presume is the pre-up scale resolution. C View times locked to 33 milliseconds, so I assume V synyncc's is masking it and the GPU time is 23.5 milliseconds. So whatever this nebulous device is, it's targeting 30 fps. Now it'd be pretty weird for a developer to set a developer build to any lacked frame rate, honestly. Usually they just do it unlocked. Uh if they're doing it on a PC version specifically. So I wouldn't take this as gospel at all, but one thing is I wouldn't be so surprised if there was a 30 FPS mode, at least, in the console versions here of this game. And just as like a little refresher, all the Metro games have always targeted 30 FPS on console, but when they are re-released on the next generation of systems, they upgrade them to 60 FPS. That happened with Metro Last Lite, with its um rem ade version, retooled version for the next gen consoles, as well as with Metro 2033, and it happened with Metro Exodus, which originally came out at 30 FPS on the Xbone and PS4, and that was upgraded to 60 FPS on PS5. So you got that out of the way. Hmm, maybe the game will target 30 FPS in some capacity. Then the next part. They do mention that they're going to be using 4A engine again, and that they pioneered ray tracing with Exodus. And this time to quote it , uh John Bloch says , with Metro Exodus, our engine enabled us to be early pioneers of ray trac ing. This time we have focused on rebuilding our implement implementation of this technology to bring a more tuned and performant experience. While I honestly don't know exactly what that means , but I do have some ideas. Um I think it means they're gonna still use ray tracing because that's what it says. But uh the exact type of ray tracing may be different. Uh the environments of Metro Exodus had different demands on art and gameplay than this game may have. Metro Exodus large open world areas in some places where the sun and moon went down readily, and lots of open spaces with diffuse texture work. Most of it takes place outside, where the shiniest thing is water, which was covered with SSR primarily on the console versions there. Inside the metro, as this game is going to take place in Moscow, it's going to be much dam per metallic environments. And you can already see that at the end of the trailer, there is actually quite a lot of reflective surfaces there. So I'm thinking uh that they will have to change the ray tracing to have a better coverage of reflective surfaces, is one guess I would have. And another guess I would have is that the RTGI they did ship with Exodus was actually kind of laggy. It was built into it with like this um feedback system it had to give itself infinite bounces. That's fine for a large open world with a slow-moving sun. But as soon as you have a lot of moving small and easily extinguishable light sources inside of small tunnels, you're gonna need to have light be very reactive, uh, and especially secondary bounce lighting. Otherwise you'd turn off the lights in one scene and everything kind of slowly glows down to zero brightness. Wouldn't look that great. So I'm presuming that's another retooling aspect that they would mention here, that maybe it's going to be a lot more reactive in some way . Um but other than that, uh when you do get to that end bit of the trailer here where they do show off some night gameplay, there's some really cool stuff like ice on the back of the gun, super dense environments. Uh there's obvious evidence of ray trace reflections when the character wipes his hand across his gas mask and you can see on the floor in front of him there's a reflection of a sign that doesn't disappear with SSR-like traits . And the one other thing that you can see in the really screenshots for the game that you can find on the Steam store Steam Store page, as well as any of the footage here, is there is no direct ray trace lighting. There's still the usage of shadow maps. So if there is a path trace version of this game, we have yet to see it. And in spite of that, it looks kind of ridiculous in this last little gameplay snippet here. So I was uh generally pretty happy. I don't know. What'd you guys think? I'm very excited. I was I was reminded why um uh one of the guys associated that I first saw Metro twenty three on Xbox th ree3 si6x0 in his house 17 years ago. And uh that was sort of like the beginning of the of the sort of relationship Digital Foundries had with 4A and sharing their games and getting super, super excited about them. I mean, you know, back then 2033 on the 360 it was it was a thing, right? And I'm looking to this and I'm thinking to myself, well, I'm hoping that it's gonna be repeating the trick and then more so uh for the consoles this time around. And you know, um quite interesting that they actually showed you the debug screens there, sort of literally telling you like what the GPU and CPU time is, internal resolution. I think m maybe there's just something a little Easter egg there for us to pick up on and discuss there. Thirty FPS slash forty FPS not a problem when you're dealing with um uh quality of visuals like this. If the if they can push it out to 60 by you know uh various means, that would be great. Uh we'll see . I don't know though, you know, th these guys are hardcore. I mean that's kind of like the other thing to take away from this presentation, the conditions under which this game has been created . Astonishing that it actually, you know, work is possible in that kind of environment. Astonishing. Um I'm excited. I want to see more. I was initially a bit disappointed that we kicked off with a CG trailer, but we did get to see gameplay. We did get to see the developers presenting their vision for the game. That's exciting. Um I'm stoked. I'm happy. Oliver. Yeah, I was also a little bit disappointed in the kind of CG-ness of the early showing of this game, the first like six minutes or so, five minutes or so, being basically a CG offline trailer and not being representative of gameplay or presumably even in-game cinematics. Um obviously it looks incredible, but kind of glazes by a little bit. But I thought the gameplay showing looked very promising. I do wonder if, like you said, they would be able to pull the trigger on a 30 fps only game, 40 fps only game, or if they would go to 60 fps. I kind of suspect that probably they're going to be in a space with with the CPU where they can hit 60 FPS. I would expect just to have decent performance across all platforms. And in that environment, I don't really I at least if as long as you're doing okay scaling on the GPU. I don't see why you would target 60 FPS. I really think that 30 FPS only will be possibly the the provenance of only rock star in terms of actually getting away with it. I really can't think of anyone else who who would be able to do that in terms of the audience expectation at least. But I think they would be justified in doing so based on the visuals in this uh in this excellent little trailer here, this excellent little snippet I'm excited to see more. I I'll especially you want to see more of the game in kind of more wide open environments, because this is a very dark, kind of cloistered area, limited uh limited shot here. I think it's maybe a little bit less representative of like really demanding shots, really demanding areas than you would see in a more metro Exodus style open world environment or relatively open environment. Um, so yeah, I I really want to see more from this game, but apparently it's gonna be out this winter, which is coming up pretty soon, and I do kind of fear for games that are in this window like Fable obviously recently was rumored to possibly be uh delayed in some capacity. Um perhaps as a byproduct of just being in that release window with the biggest game of all time, which is obviously going to be a big challenge for a lot of developers. And I wonder how they'll navigate that because it does seem like a tough launch window to be in. Yeah. Yeah. For that launch window, I think they were being very generous by saying winter, because winter goes from twenty twenty-six to twenty twenty seven. So I'm very I'm very c curious to see if that uh goes off. One thing that you can see on the Steam screenshots um that they did release for the game . There are some outdoor settings. I mean, the the Metro games always have you go up on the surface, even the earlier ones before it was open world. I'm just very curious to see whether or not it's slightly open worldish at all at any portion of the game because Exodus had like these wide linear areas that were very big. And there's some hints of that. There's some like debug stuff there about like time of day, and each time of day taking about like a hundred and twenty minutes or so, which is seems like legacy baggage from Exodus maybe. It's hard to know if that actually bears out for this game or if that's just like I said, legacy debug. But yeah, I would not be surprised if there are some very dense outdoor environments in spite of that. Yeah, there seems to be a lot of emphasis also on the sheer artistry and effort that they're putting into every inch of the environments here. They want the environments to tell stories. They want you to infer stuff that's happened in the past. I thought that was quite an interesting take. Um something that you don't typically associate with open worlds. But then again, you know, just the uh the sort of post-apocalyptic nature of the metro um open world kind of did leave a lot of room for the user to have their own interpretation of what's going on there. Um I thought this whole thing was just a really good teaser. And it was a teaser really, even though it was like 15 minutes. It had content, but it just leaves you hungry for more. And the fact that we are apparently quite close to um the game actually being finalised, hopefully we'll start to see more stuff uh pretty soon, you know. I'd hope to see that. Uh but yeah, the whole GTA six thing uh sitting within the same window as that. I don't know. I think there's room for, you know, quality games. Um and I think the nature of the Metro games is that they typically do have very, very long tails as well. Yes. So I'm not so concerned about that. And to be honest I kind of want some variety in that sort of winter period. You know, it's it's not just you know what are we supposed to do? Just sit about playing GTA six all day . That's not pretty you know, I'm sure it's gonna be great. I mean you may be playing not not that great. You know me. I better be waiting. Yeah . I want my metro. Very bad. You could you you could watch us play GTA six, Alex. How does that sound? That sounds wild and go for. I've got to also congratulate you, Alex, for doing uh effective um uh presentation there while working out. Yeah I was having to pace my breath a couple times and like uh even though just as a saunter, this is like this just you don't usually talk for minutes on end while walking forward into a camera. It's a very odd feeling. I guess the other thing of, course, the perennial question , um, how's it gonna look on Xbox Series S? Yeah. Um that's a thing. I mean uh it was like the uh the last game was like dipping from sixty at its worst five forty P internal res, right? We're calling the taiga section, so and that was old gen assets and stuff like that gen game. Yeah, it's gonna be rough possibly. It's gonna be brutal, I bet . I'm excited. I want to see more. I don't think we've got too much more to add on this one. So shall we move on? Okay, so an interesting rumour emerged this week that actually showed the share prices of Dell and HP temporarily spike for some reason. And there was the rumour that um Nvidia is actually looking to acquire um a significant PC maker. I think this rumour emerged from semi accurate. Um it seems that NVIDIA itself has denied the claim and shut down the rumour. I'm kind of wondering, you know, why this rumour emerged in the first place. I do think there is probably some good reasons from the uh the Nin Nvidia side rather, uh to actually do this, to actually, you know, own a significant PC making um presence . I don't think it's going to be particularly good news for um the end user though, you know, because obviously uh the lack of competition there could be troubling this uh potential hookup could mean that this potential company would have access to uh NVIDIA GPUs at prices that others don't have, and that would be problematic. At the same time, from an NVIDIA perspective, I can see that there probably would be reasons to do this if, you know, as the rumors are kind of lining up to suggest that Microsoft is looking to um basically license Xbox uh chipsets to the likes of um Asus MSI, etc. I think it's probably an a you know an a an attempt to undercut the pre-built PC market, which would have um implications for NVIDIA. Curious state of affairs. It does seem to have been shot down . I am curious as to where this rumour came from. It could potentially have merit. Oliver, what do you think? Yeah, I think this would make sense, in part because I'm I'm not totally sure what value N vidia is getting from some of their partners at the moment because in hardware they seem perfectly capable of shipping and designing video cards and they have reasonable distribution and they could probably expand further. I think with the PCOEMs that do exist , when you look at the products they're selling, oftentimes like half of their bill of materials, presumably something in that vicinity, is coming from packaging and discrete NVIDIA GPU. So if you're the bulk of the cost in the bill of materials, perhaps you have uh you know perhaps you get a more say in that hardware design, potentially or at least in terms of uh offering your own potentially your own systems, your own laptops, your own things like this. Um I think it's part of the equation in particular because you look at like products like the DGX Spark and the N1 and N1X, and those look like much more consumer-oriented pushes into dedicated SOC design for laptops and desktops. You know, that could indicate something in this direction of travel, certainly. But I think in general, probably NVIDIA is just looking to create value. I think we see this a little bit with their software offerings with their RTX GPU suite, and obviously in enterprise and data center with CUDA, there are obviously a lot of different kinds of interesting experiences that NVIDIA is going to offer you that make it more than just like a discrete uh commodity hardware vendor and enter it into something more of a platform. In terms of the specific rumor, I mean they have delight it denied it flatly. There are ways to deny stories to put them down and this is one of them I would say. The only the only possible wrinkle, if I was reaching a little bit, is they they told CNBC that this media report is false and VIDIA is not engaged in discussions to acquire any PC maker. That that leaves open a little bit, a tiny crack in the doorway of saying, well, maybe we've had discussions in the past to acquire PC makers. Perhaps it's come up uh once or twice, perhaps it's even come up in the recent past, but I I presume that would mean it's not an active discussion with any particular PC maker and probably there aren't uh probably that is a a a a sufficient putting down of this rumor to quash it for some time but yeah I'd be one I'd be very curious to see if they would go down this road. I think it makes some sense for them in the consumer market in particul ar. I'm not sure that necessarily their partners would be too thrilled, but then again, other partners like you said, Rich, like Microsoft, are not behaving in a way that is too hospitable to NVIDIA's whole enterprise of shipping added in boards for laptops and desktops. So perhaps they need to go down a bit of a different route. Yeah, I mean I am more interested in this from a gaming perspective, but obviously, you know, the lacks of Dell HP, they ship a lot of workstations, that kind of thing. Could well be the case that, you know, if Nvidia is looking into this kind of thing, it would be um uh a more broader play than just gaming alone. I think that probably makes a lot of sense. And you know, we do have the laptop chip coming, the N1 slash N1X slash whatever. And um further on down the line, of course, there's going to be the um Intel slash NVIDIA um SOC hookup, which um potentially very, very exciting. You know, why not produce your own range of laptops at that point? Yeah. Um Alex, thoughts? That's basically what I was thinking. When they have for the first time their own SOCs driving normal Windows-based PCs, I think that's when maybe they, I don't know if they acquire something like HPR Dell, which like you said, there's so many problems with that, both for consumers and the rest of the market in general. Uh, but maybe like doing the Microsoft style of we have a an NVIDIA machine, kind of like a Steam machine or an Xbox that we lease out to HP Dell, whomever , and then they produce the NVIDIA box that has a base spec that is based upon a stable SoC with mostly stable motherboard configuration for the base stuff. And then they can kind of go wild and add their own fl air after the fact. Because at this point in time, the the market is kind of dividing between NVIDIA and a lot of everybody else. And if the other companies are trying to make their own gardens, so to speak , like Xboxes with the Xbox PCs that are gonna be coming out. Um, you know , I guess that would be one way NVIDIA could respond. Uh, but that's just me saying stuff under the wind. Yeah, I mean I I kind of like NVIDIA hardware. I like the Founders Edition cards. Um I like, you know, stuff like the NVIDIA Shield, the stuff they're doing like the D G X Spark, you know, this is kind of like um uh i how can I say it it's it's it's still small enough to not be offensive to market sensibilities. Do you know what I mean th there is still competition out there in that respect. Um although, you know, thinking about some of my comments in the past about the graphics card market in particular and why NVIDIA doesn't just do it themselves. Well, yeah, suddenly that's sort of uh comments like that are coming home to roost, chickens coming home to roost, so to speak. I'm curious as to where this is gonna end up, whether there is this has just been shut down, uh or whether there is gonna be something more to it. The concept of Nvidia making PCs though, I mean, hmm , not entirely sure what to make of that. I guess though we just have to wait and see, as usual. But let's move on. So last week Digital Foundry uh published its review of Starfield for the PlayStation 5 and the PlayStation 5 Pro. Um Oliver, you did most of the groundwork there. Yeah. And I have to admit I was kind of like watching your twenty-seven minute video. Uh my jaw gradually dropping ever further at some of the things you discovered there. There has now been a response from Bethesda. Uh they're looking to put out a hot fix, which is uh looking to address some issues, and then um a more uh comprehensive fix apparently coming next week. Um what do you make of this? Because I've got to admit, as I said, my jaw was progressively driving still further during that twenty-seven minutes because there are things there that should just never have happened, never have shipped. Yeah. And then there was kind of like you've got you've got your kind of critical bugs, so to speak, which never should have got through tech QA um the platform holder. And then you've got like a range of other sort of minor things that just don't make sense. It doesn't protect paint a particularly good picture, right? No, I think this is just such a disaster. Beyond the beyond them like issues that I noted with like this mode is weirdly configured or this V-Sync toggle doesn't work. Like those are significant issues obviously but they they aren't uh game ending issues and a crash is certainly or a hang is certainly a game-ending issue. And I had like four or five crashes over my time playing and stress testing the game, but I wasn't really stress testing it for very long. Like I was at it for a few hours, so to have that level of crashing behavior in the game over such a short span of time just running around the cities, running around open world environments, quite striking. Um I kind of assumed that normal play patterns wouldn't cause as many issues. And I wasn't doing I mean I wasn't anything too crazy , but after I published the video, after we published the video, I saw some reports come in from people like uh the journalist Destin Lajari and other people in that position who were playing the game for the first time and noticing crashes in areas that I wouldn't necessarily expect, like Destin noticed a crash in the first six or seven minutes in the game in the opening area, which I thought was quite striking, 'cause I that's obviously not gonna stress the game out too much, at least you'd expect, right? Um a lot of people commented they had crashing behavior in this game and there were a lot of very interesting combinations of settings that were advised to prevent the crashing behavior. Like in almost all cases they're they're placebo effects, right? They're people who have a crash with one set of settings and then test another set of settings and don't have a crash for 30 minutes and they say it's all alright, right? Like people saying disable the new PSSR or disable V Sync or do this or do that or play on PS5, base PS5, whatever. These are not really solutions to this uh to this problem. And in that same vein, I think that Bethesda's uh answer here, I mean, I don't want to say that it's not true, but it it certainly doesn't strike me as the kind of fix that would necessarily resolve most of these issues because firstly when I was playing the game I had most of my crashes on modes other than the PSO Pro enhanced mode. I think I only had one crash in the PSO Pro enhanced mode. So you know that's not going to help you if you're on the visuals mode on play PlayStation 5 Pro or any of the modes on base PS5 or any of the number of uh configurations that have been reported to have issues with this game. Secondly, the crashes occurred in similar circumstances for me in the same areas, specifically around the outskirts of Aquila and in New Atlantis. So to me, the fact that I was getting a similar play pattern across these modes across the two consoles and getting the crashes. That suggests to me this is probably a shared problem across the consoles and not something that's just a unique hot fixable issue with the enhanced mode on PS5 Pro, I suspect it's a deeper problem, um, perhaps. And it might have something to do, I don't know, this is speculation on my part, but it might have something to do with the fact they shipped the PS5 version and it coincided with a major patch that changed a number of things in the game, perhaps that strategy of shipping major patches alongside new versions of the game, perhaps it was unwise. And then secondly there's this kind of I don't even know how to approach this because I only really briefly explored the Xbox Series version, but I did encounter some like major stuttering issues, major, major issues in Xbox Series as well. Only briefly, only to brief slice the game. I can't report too much on it because I was only playing Xbox Series briefly as a kind of comparator for the PS5 version because obviously my focus was not on how they messed up possibly the Xbox version, but the fact that I was seeing those kinds of issues and those aren't don't really seem to be addressed with this kind of push, um, that's a concern of mine as well. So I just have big concerns over the software quality of this game. And it's kind of striking because as much as Bethesda gets kind of crap from players, frankly, for not shipping technically polished games, and perhaps some of that is des erved. When I covered this game at launch, like back in you know, I was playing the game in August 2023. Um, I didn't have any of these issues. It didn't for me at all. The only the only issues that that that John and I really noticed, I mean, outside of the fact that it was 30 FPS only, which some players took umbrage with, right? Was the fact that um the game had kind of long load times, a little bit when you played for extended periods, right? If you were 20 hours, 30 hours into the game, you'd start to get like 20 or 30 second load times. That was not ideal. But you weren't seeing crash behaviors in that case, so seems like it was better three years ago. I don't know. Maybe that's just my own input here, but not not a very promising situation. I I sympathize because whenever you see issues like this, um the initial thing is always is there something wrong with my console? Right. Is there something wrong with my PC? And you kind of begin to doubt, you know, your own process because you see things like this, and it's like, it can't possibly be doing this. There's got to be a reason for it. And it's similar uh when I'm doing like uh CPU or GPU um uh reviews and the results just don't make sense. You know, you expect it so much better. I remember when Ryzen first came out, for example, um and um it was very slow in gaming. And but the benchmarks were very, very good. It's like this doesn't make sense. Is there something wrong with my process? What's what's going on here? Um yeah, so I sympathise because you know some of the stuff that I saw in your video , I would be like first of all, blaming my console, I'd be blaming my capture equipment. You have to sort of validate all of that and then repeat it and then make sure it's correct. Kind of baffling, but I guess at the very least, Bethesda has actually recognised that there are issues um quite late in the day though, I think, um, and are looking to make fixes to it. Hopefully that will all get sorted within a week, but um I'm just shocked that it actually went to market in that condition. Um Alex? Yeah that's what it seems like a big waste of time because you know you spend years waiting for this game to come out and it was never one of one of those four games or whatever uh that was gonna be released to the PlayStation and it comes out so much later and you're gonna drum up that fanfare releasing expansions for it, hoping to drive the the the the player base up again, CCU numbers on Steam and the prime version that comes out is like crashy after all that time. It seems like ah it seems like such a such a dumb idea. I don't like I don't know. It really seems like it just needed more time and for some reason wasn't given the the more time it needed. These should have been obvious issues. Mm-hmm.. Yeah Um, it's one of these situations where um a game launches with these issues and you can't quite believe that it actually got into a paying customer's hands. Yeah. How did this happen? It's especially tough because you look at Microsoft's history, Microsoft's track record on shipping games on PlayStation 5, and it's been pretty darn good so far. I mean, when you look at a title like uh Forza Horizon 5, that was like a really good port I thought on PlayStation 5. Hit all the marks in the base console and had some nice enhancements on the pro console. I mean look a lot of other games like Sea of Thieves would be another good example, or like uh Flight Simulator, lots of other games, Age of Empires 2, Hellblade, a big one for sure. Those are all games that basically hit their marks on PlayStation 5, and they all have, I mean, at least many of them have substantial enhancements for PSR Pro, have things like PSSR support, have things that make those PSR Pro experiences unique. And here I think with Starfield, not only are we seeing a failure on the front of uh the the developer just to maintain a stable and performance experience that's not crashing and hanging all the time. But they're also just not taking good advantage of PS5 Pro. They're also, you know, the PSSR implement ation is uh not that great. They're using Lash and PSSR and then when you turn the new PSSR, it's a not ideal experience. They have a million modes, and I know that people have different opinions on this wall harp on that too much, but like it doesn't speak to a very focused kind of development effort here when you have this mode explosion of PS five pro. So it's just kind of weird because it is coming three years after the game on Xbox. And you kind of expect that there was no rush. No rush. You kind of expect them to kind of work out all these problems in the interim or at least have some kind of theory of uh the case and fix some of these problems for PlayStation 5, but that's just just not the case, which is uh I have to say it's a big disappointment, especially considering Microsoft's pedigree and other titles. Alex, final thoughts. Um, fix your game. No, but uh to be serious, uh when they were given very direct feedback after the launch of Starfield on PC regarding why is this running so poorly on NVIDIA, why are there no other upscalers , etc., um they did pretty surprisingly quickly get about to fix ing the issues and it was fixed rather rapidly I would say. Uh so I imagine it'll be the same case here. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Fair enough. Uh I've just kind of realized look at your feed Alex, it's like you're having a silent disco there. You got your headphones on having a nice bop in the background there . Okay, enough. Steamer here. Give me the dirt. Hey Steamer, my kids want a dog. What do you think? In a way your kids already have pets, and by pets I mean the billions of bacteria living in your carpets, couches , and rugs right now, and they're not that cute. So call Stanley Steamer, and we'll take care of it. Then maybe start with a goldfish. They won't pee in your carpet. Put your deep clean Now at Stanley Steamer.com. Move on to the next news topic. Right, so it looks like change is afoot. Asha Sharmo is now making her mark at Xbox. Um, and there's rumors, uh, memos have been leak ed talking about how um there's the perception that maybe game pass or games pass as alex likes to call it uh may actually now be too expensive. Actually got a supporter question here from uh Andre Thompson. Hello, DF Team Exploration Point with new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma recently admitting that Game Pass has become quote unquote too expensive for many players. How do you think they should restructure the service? Specifically, do you think Microsoft needs to move towards more modular ti ers? And should a massive franchise like Call of Duty eventually be spun off into its own premium tier? Keep up the amazing work. Uh this is a bit of a problem really, isn't it, Alex, because um, you know Xbox Game Pass has basically been built up as a service where you get all of these great games at a great price. Now we're still getting the great games, but not at such a great price, and now there's sort of rumors talking about um perhaps the removal of you know um call of duty from that particular um service. Or maybe yeah maybe some other tier or some some uh different mechanism. So, you know, it's basically you know it's not well, you're still getting some great games, possibly not at a great price, and maybe the amount of great games is being reduced. What do you make of all of this? I find it funny or ironic or poetically tragic that the entire purpose of the Activision Blizzard buyout was presumably to bring Call of Duty onto Xbox platforms day and date with Game Pass. Like that was the eventual goal with it. And then to see it kind of like as a result of that being so expensive of of a a thing to do because you're eating sales, you're people are not buying it for that full day zero price anymore that you're having to make the entire service more expensive and potentially radically shift the entire like public view of that service. Because for a long time, I think even we and John even would admit, you know, if you just casually play games and don't care about ownership , Game Pass, Games Pass, uh was like a reasonable investment for you if you just gave away all the ownership idea. But then after they increased the price and they kind of like sta ggered it like with the way PC works now, it's like much less of a value bargain there. And if it changes even more to not give you your latest call of duty, well then it's even less of a bargain. But to be honest with you, after the performance of the last Call of Duty game with its really bad aspects , uh maybe it also didn't perform on market as well as they would have lik ed. So that could be another reason why where it what like it's normal nominal sales uh from dedicated buyers outside of Games Pass wasn't as high as they'd like. So that so that actually affects the whole bottom dollar here. Um but in general, games pass, man, it's like it's evolved in a really strange place. And what it means for the future of Xbox with Xbox Helix around the corner, it's like awkward . Uh Oliver, what do you think? Well, I I think this is a tricky situation because I agree with Asha that the current version of Game Pass is kind of a poor value for players. I think they probably have some telemetry suggesting that. But $360 a year for that top tier in USD , it's it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money, I have to say. And um, I think most people would probably rather spend that money on game purchases, which last forever. And I think that's especially true on PC as we kind of approach this Xbox as PC kind of project helix generation of hardware. When you look at the PC store, for instance, it seems to me like any game that's older than 12 months, 18 months goes on sale regularly for approximately the cost of free. Like approximately free. And it seems like the the PC market is is really devalued with respect to those older titles for for better or for worse. Like I think it could meaningfully be worse for the for for various industry reasons, but certainly for consumers. It's a heck of a deal. So uh I I think that that uh this is gonna be a a tougher situation to round with um upcoming hardware and it's already not a very good situation I would think with current hardware. That's especially because I think that people only have so much time and when you look at the audience for a 30 game pass tier that has absolutely everything on it only hardcore gamers are gonna be on that and then uh those gamers have the ability to trade off their spending habits such that they end up on Game Pass and it actually ends up being a net negative for Microsoft because perhaps those gamers are going to invest a lot more money in discrete console titles for purchase, right? That could potentially be the situation as well. So I think it's an interesting um interesting kind of economic uh push here where we have a subscription model and a purchase model, but because people are free to choose, they can kind of sort into the least ideal bucket for the platform holder, regardless of what happens, right? Could potentially be an issue. And I think it is definitely an issue with Call of Duty because so many people buy Call of Duty every single year. I don't know what the solution is. Um I don't know if it's a price cut. I don't know if it's a restructuring the tiers. I can definitely see pulling call of duty out of that most expensive tier and maybe lowering the price would be reasonable. I also don't understand what most consumers are getting out of Fortnite crew because I feel like if you want Fortnite crew playing a lot of Fortnite, maybe you could just pay that separately. And then the Ubisoft editions, like they're adding a ton of old titles, but again, the value proposition of these like very old Assassin's Creed games. I mean, I I don't mind them, but certainly that's not a high ticket item for people who want to be on this service. So yeah, I really don't know how they square this circle. I really don't know what the market will demand and what people will ex pect here, but I think Microsoft is just in a tough situation, and they're probably in an especially tough situation because they've made Game Pass such a central focus their boxes. Whereas I feel like Sony and Nintendo with their subscription services, they've put it much more to the side. They've not made it a central selling point to their console experiences. Instead, they've pushed exclusive games, right? Microsoft has done entirely the opposite. They've sold her in a service, but those exclusive games are there forever, and the quality of the service can vary a lot over time. The pricing of the service can vary a lot over time. So yeah, I just don't think they're in a very good situation right now. And I think they need to try to figure out some kind of strategy, but there's not really a clear way out. Yeah. I think, you know the thing about Game Pass was that it was, you know, incredibly great value. That was the whole sort of USP behind it. It was, you know, uh the closest you were gonna get to like Netflix Netflix for games, the difference be ing that you know you got a lot of premium high quality titles in there. Uh, but then there was a period where you didn't get so many of them. And then there was the and then there was the addition of Call of Duty where you know um I think the problem there is that the actual quality of Call of Duty has actually been declining quite severely in recent in recent years uh after the acquisition, right? So suddenly this sort of what looked during the acquisition as some kind of killer blow that you know would take Game Pass to the next level, actually it it sort of doesn't anymore. Um so yeah, I mean they're in a really really tricky place at the moment. I'm not sure what they can do about this because it's the the service has got to be understandable. It's got to be um you know something that you could sum up in just a few words. I'm looking at the three tiers here, ultim ates, premium, essential, PC Game Pass. I don't understand you know the segmentation there. There's still that weird gate PC Game Pass outlier as well, where it seems to be that uh people who want to play console games are getting charged an awful lot more money than they should be. Uh yeah, I just don't quite get it. Um they kind of need to have a bit of a reboot and a bit of a relaunch on that. What do you think, Alex? Yeah, I basically would say the Helix release uh and the drum up to it should probably allow them uh to reconfigure themselves and approach the aud ience again with a new take on Games Pass, because uh, like you said, the three, four tiers, etc., it 's not really visible and not very good for people to do like I can't parse it just visually when you look at it, especially the separate PC thing. It needs to be more unified if Xbox is gonna be uh a more unified platform with PC in the future. And it is kind of ironic that the PC users are have the cheaper experience for some reason. Yeah, yeah, absolutely baffling. Any final thoughts, Oliver? Yeah, I think there's a kind of core contradiction in what Microsoft is trying to do here, which is they're trying to have that kind of universality, right? They're trying to have like you said that Netflix for games model. But perhaps like streaming services we're actually seeing increasing bifurcation of their offerings and increasing bifurcation of the kind of content that you get. And indeed, to get all the content or to get most of the content, you have to pay a lot of money. And I think that core contradiction between universality and the desire to achieve a s a cheap and sustainable price for their consumers and for their bottom line is tricky. Game pass at fifteen dollars a month, as it was introduced. That's just a totally different concept than Game Pass at $30 a month for first run Xbox titles, which is how it's developed. So it's just it's just a tough service. And I really do think as many problems as they're having right now with the Xbox Game Pass on Xbox Series Consoles and Xbox One, I think they're gonna have a whole lot more problems when you go onto PC and you're dealing with Steam. Steam is a totally different proposition. You look at what uh Tim Sweeney is doing with EGS, he's giving you he's dropping games for free all uh uh all over the place, right? There are free games everywhere on PC. They're cheap, reduced price, free games, whatever. Totally different landscape, and I know they have PC Games Pass. I don't think that's gonna be there forever at the current price. I really can't see it. I think that's probably gone for this, not long for this world. I think that they need to increase their uh average selling price for for that kind of product. Um and in that environment, I really cannot see uh I really cannot see Microsoft having too easy of a time trying to bifurcate their offerings while still offering acceptable value to the vast majority of consumers. Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's another thing as well, another sort of elephant in the room where um Game Pass is kind of like this weird um it's a lot of sort of console baggage attached to it, which isn't gonna be relevant when the Helix comes along. I can't imagine that paying for access to multiplayer is gonna fly on Project Helix if you can just, you know, buy your game some Steam and get multiplayer for free. So I think there's some sort of um uh re vamp that's going to be needed. Um it will probably have ramifications also for the uh uh older Xbox consoles as well. Will they still continue to charge for multiplayer on that? I don't know. Uh lots of questions though, and not a lot of answers at the moment, but I think it is probably a bit too expensive at the moment. Anyway, let's move on. Okay, so this is actually extremely good news . Um we're hearing reports. I've read this one on WCCF Tech that um the Ryzen 7 5800 X3D is coming back. It was discontinued a while back. There was the 5700 X3D, which was basically the same thing. Then that was discontinued. At the moment, you can get an AM4-based X3D processor, but it's six core, 12 threads, it's not quite as performant. It's not as massive an upgrade over the non-Xvd versions but the the King returns the return of the King even uh third uh 5800 XVD is apparently going to be making a comeback in Q2 2enty twenty six as a kind of uh celebration of ten years of Verizon and ten years of the AM four plat form. And um I'm on the record and I'll say it again, I think the fifty eight hundred X3D is one of the most consumer friendly, forward looking and fantastic CPUs ever made. Basically, when everyone was expecting AMD to move on from AM4 or AM4 to champion AM5 to shunt as many users across as possible. They kind of left behind uh um a a final present for that particular platform and the X3D basically allowed you to keep your existing motherboard, uh, keep your existing memory, and um offered performance sort of like within the ballpark of like Intel's 12,900k at that point. Awesome stuff. It's discontinuation obviously though is problematic in a current era when basically um if you want to upgrade your system you kind of need to move across to a DDR5 and that presents lots of problems specifically problem s for your wallet. Um Alex, uh this is fantastic news, is it not? It's good to have more choice as a consumer. Uh where you're and what you're buying. In the case of the 5800X3D, what ended up happening with it is it started going for ridiculous prices at some point in time because it wasn't being actively produced and shipped anymore. And that left people, I mean I I d would have never recommended any one to buy a fifty eight hundred X three D as soon as it got, you know, north of like four hundred and fifty USD or something like that, Billy. It's like the prices got ridiculous. It reached the point. Yeah. So like and that's the one thing right now. And like when you wrote this news to me earlier, I was like, I'm not sure if I'd recommend buying that. And I was referencing the fact that you're gonna be, it really depends on what they relist this at and how many models of it they make. Because if it comes back at MSRP, which was I think was it 450 euro of a USD, I believe, at launch. And um, you know, at that point in time, I know DDR5 is very expensive, uh, but so many years after the fact , to drop in a new processor to prolong prolong yourself on that syn cause this is a that would be a very serious investment to I mean they unless AMD really thinks that the price of computing is gonna only only get worse, worse, worse for the next three to five years. Um it it seems like a really heavy, it seems like a really heavy user investment, uh, which at some point in time I would say maybe bite that bullet, give out the extra 150 to 200 euros or whatever it would be to secure a DDI5 platform, but with a less powerful, maybe single-threaded processor in certain games, like a 7600 or something like that, you know, like I I mean it it I would really need to know the price of this thing to before I get like super excited about it. Yeah, you're you're quite right. I mean um I just checked using the power of Google that the MSRP at launch was $4 49 US dollars, which is um let's just say not particularly good value in the year of our Lord 2026. So yes, they would need to have an attractive price point. And if they're going to be making this a celebration of ten years of Ryzen, you know, to to bring back the culmination of the AM4 platform, at least do it in a manner that is affordable. You know, that's basically, the whole point of bringing it back because, you know, basically people on AM4 platforms potentially being priced out of AM5, almost certainly being priced out of AM5 at the moment. So, yes, I mean that really should be the number one priority there. Um what do you think about this, Oliver? Well, I think that per Alex's comments, I think getting EM5 does make sense for especially for enthusiasts who intend to upgrade because that's a platform that still probably has I think one processor generation left in it and you do have access to a higher tier of gaming performance when it comes to x3d processors on AM5, you do get better. But when you actually look at the numbers, I mean a 9800X3D is only like 20%, 30%-ish faster, I think, than a 5180x3D in gaming. So for most users, I don't think that's an upgrade. I don't think that's necessarily an upgrade point, right? I think you're probably looking for a little bit more than that. And in that context, I can totally see someone saying, hey, like, let's just settle for AM4. If I can get a decent processor on AM4, might as well do that. Save a little bit of money on the DDR4. Although DDR4 prices are going up as we speak as well. So I don't think there really is a solution here. Every kind of uh every kind of route that you can go down to get a cheaper system, I think people are going to saturate because of the incredible price of the uh DDR5 based systems at the moment, incredible price of various PC components at the moment, SSDs in particular, not so good. Um, I do wonder what the logistics of this are though, because like did did they just hold on to a bunch of chips? Did they restart production in some capacity? Did they have like a backlog of Zen 3 CCDs that were just waiting to be paired with uh the IO die and the and the L3 cache and whatnot? Or what were they doing? Did they have a hold up on packaging? Because like it's it's a little bit weird to just withhold, seemingly withholding, I don't know, but seemingly withhold a big tranche of chips just to sell them for I mean, presumably uh presumably they'll be just at that old retail price, or at least not much above that old retail price, even though the market has clearly indicated they can bear a much higher asking price. I don't think AMD is going to go for that. So I'd be curious to see how this lands. And indeed, the story behind how this ended up. Mabey they just found like, you know, like uh like like a big trunche of dreamcasts still in boxes somewhere in a landfill or something. You know, they just pull them out and they sell them for cheap. I mean that's entirely uh I mean I wouldn't say it's entirely possible, but who knows, because this does seem like an interesting product. Well, I think the way it works, Oliver, is that AM4 never really went away. They're still making the chips, right? And so, you know, the the C C D's are still there and they are still making X three D products. You know, they've got a fifty five hundred X three D you can get that from uh AliExpress for like a hundred and sixty dollars, which you know, in theory sounds like a well it is a good price um but in actual sort of um uh the cost of it outside of importing it from China, it's significantly more expensive than like uh fifty six hundred X and it's not you know, you've got to seriously think about whether you wanna spend that extra money uh on a processor or whether you're actually going to be spending it more on a GPU, a better GPU, for example. Yeah, there's I just think the return of the 5800 X3D though, it is pretty much the ultimate that you can get for the AM4 platform. And specifically, you know, the you know we say this a lot, but AMD sold a ton of you know Zen2s processors, you know, 3600, 3700. Um to actually have like a a meaningful upgrade to like 5800 X3D, I think is a very, very good thing to have. The issue there, of course, is that um certainly with budget GPUs cutting down on PCI Express lanes and those older motherboards will be using PCIe 3.0 . Yeah, there's you know, you've kind of got to have a a decent GPU as well. Yeah, it's um I don't know. You're right, Alex, it is all gonna come down to price. I was really, really excited by that news though, and you're quite right. Perhaps we should be tempering our excitement until we find out exactly how much AMD you g'onnare be uh charging for. Trying not to be a Debbie Downer about this. It was really cheap at last. Yeah, really cheap. So MSRP is higher. I think p again the market would be willing to bear higher than MSRP now. I don't know what route AMD would go down, but perhaps it wouldn't be as low as you'd like . There was a glorious period where you could get a 5600 from AliExpress for like 80 quid and uh you could get the 5700 X3D and I actually bought one for like 130 pounds. That was just like awesome. But um yeah, clearly those days are well behind us at this point. Anyway, let's just see what they price it out. So we're going to round off the show with a bit of content discussion and uh something which has been driving b uh Tom particularly bad this week, comparing him by these on the project, is that um well he's looking at the console versions of Pag Rata and um he's looking at the PlayStation 5 version in particular. He's done his pixel counts, he's got a native 1080p resolution there for both modes. Um, you know, Tom knows his stuff. He certainly knows how to pixel count. Unfortunately, when we were looking at the PC version of the game and we did our console comparisons with PS 5. Um, we were getting the frame rate mode uh pixel counts coming in at fourteen forty p . And um Tom went away, checked all of his equipment, checked his capture cards, and was still getting a native TED ATP. So on the one hand, I think uh Oliver, you counted TED ATP. Um Tom obviously counted TED ATP. Rayanne, our PC guy uh for doing optimized settings counted 1440p . I sort of stepped in to figure out what's going on there. I got 1440p . So you know, who's wrong? Something must must have happened there. And it we still don't know exactly what's going on but we do have a bit of a theory now um basic ally um i um loaded in um a saved game from the cloud and this saved game seemed to be running the game at 1440p. However, if you started the game from scratch and you didn't use that saved data, it was running at 1080p . So something th there's we've got this sort of like this unicorn save game that you can download and it runs the frame rate mode on Pragmato at 1440p, which is like a what 77% increase of resolution Yeah. It still seems to be using FSR1 upscaling to get to 4K, but yes, it does look better. And I mean, I didn't do a huge amount of performance testing, I just grabbed some footage there, but it does seem to run uh okay. You know, there are dips into the 50s in frame rate mode. Um, but you know, it's it's a perfectly viable way to play the game. We still have no sort of definitive answer as to why it's happening, but I I have a theory. I think what happened was that Tom did his pixel counts first of all on a base PS five and then he moved to the PS five pro and I think what possibly might have happened is that the PS5 Pro syncs to the cloud, and maybe there is some sort of resolution marker within the save game. So then when you switch back to PlayStation 5 base and it downloads that save from the cloud, then suddenly uh you're getting 1440p on the base PlayStation 5. It is just a theory, but it kind of makes sense because uh Rayanne noted that he used a save game from the cloud. I used a save game from the cloud. And I guess the clincher for it is is that on my you know it's it's not hardware specific. I don't have a magic PlayStation 5 that runs the game better than uh than Oliver or Tom. Um and we kind of proved it out by actually deleting the save game and then restarting from scratch and uh lo and behold, it's native 1080p on my uh not so unicorn level PlayStation 5 hardware. But this has just been utterly bizarre because, you know, basically we've been throwing screenshots at one another saying, look at this, count this, it's definitely 1440p. And Tom saying, No, no, no, look at this, it's definitely 1080p. And we're both right . Um, so maybe it is the case that having a PS5 Pro save game does actually increase the resolution. We still have to test that one out. You know, we're gonna have to isolate the saves again and figure that out. But I think it is safe to say, because you actually alluded to it in your switch two coverage, uh um Oliver, where it wasn't entirely clear what was happening. But it does seem to be the case that um it is save game related and I think the pro might be involved somewhere. Uh Tom hasn't done the counts yet for the actual pros um uh frame rate um mode there. So I'm not quite sure whether this this is just a theory, but some some something has happened. Yeah. And uh it's it's utterly bizarre. I don't think we've ever seen anything like this before, have we, Oliver? I think there've maybe been um certain games where um on the Xbox side um things have happened. Yes. Um but on PlayStation this is a bit weird. Certainly from Capcall. Yeah, to my rec recollection we've never seen something like this. I mean it's a very weird issue. I did think I I think I suggested to you this morning, that maybe you try a fresh save to try to get that 10 MDP res. So I'm glad that panned out. And that's what Clech did. Yeah, yeah, I'm glad that panned out. Um, but yeah, we tested the game on PS5, I tested on PS5, I pixel counted, you tested and you pixel counted, and then you sent I'm sure your footage to Tom and befuddlement and your footage to me in befuddlement, and you're like, this is not tened p guys. So like could you and I counted your footage and it was fourteen forty p and it's just like this kind of intractable problem. And in the end from my piece at least, I just said, Listen, I don't I don't have time to track this down. I just I'm just gonna say it's ten eighty p slash fourteen forty p and we don't really know what's going on and maybe hopefully Tom can uh can round it out but yeah it's just a really weird situation totally bizarre but it did it did make sense in my head like even before I pixel counted it, I expected that it would be 1080p because that was the resolution that Resident Evil Requiem was at. And this is like pr probably a pretty similar version of RE engine to Resident Evil Requiem doing pretty similar things in terms of its ray tracing use, I would think to resume or requiem, at least in that frame rate mode where it is like 1080p with no ray tracing at least we believe on PlayStation 5 consoles at the moment. But based PlayStation 5 of course. It does have resolution mode which curiously doesn't seem to increase resolution in my accounts. Still seems to be 1080p. But it adds I think uh RT reflections and also um I have not done direct too many direct comparisons, but I think uh RTGI as well possi,bly in the mix uh they're based in the uh lighting presentation as well. So yeah, weird situation with that. Uh perhaps I'll leave that aside. Perhaps that's something for Tom to delve a little bit more deeply into. But yeah, it makes sense that it's 1080p all around. It definitely looks like 1080p. Relative to switch 2, it definitely, you know, imparts a 1080p class image, which makes sense because it was 1080p in my capture. But the fact that you could end up with this weirdly diverging scenario where maybe you get a PS5 Pro Save and all of a sudden you're at this diverging resolution. I mean, this is these are the kinds of problems that I think you alluded to earlier, Rich, with your PC testing, where you don't want to end up with just this blocker, this like kind of insane, intractable, bizarre issue to track down that then you we have to spend time trying to sort out this issue instead of just delivering coverage in the game like we'd want to and get that content out to you guys. We have to go and chase down sometimes these rabbit holes, which uh often don't conclude with anything that's too satisfactory for content outside of like don't end up in this weird situation that only we end up in because we're testing on multiple PSO consoles. Yeah, I mean I sent you those messages this morning where uh because uh Tom wasn't online yet and I'm saying I'm a bit worried about Tom because uh this this is like gonna drive him crazy and he's gonna need to know a solution to this. It's like we don't have time for him to be spending days figuring out why two different consoles are delivering the same game at two different resolutions. So I sort of tried to step in and figure out what was going on there. But yeah, it's it is definitely the save because I can actually make my console run at the correct resolution. But you know, it is posing some questions when you look at the performance of how it actually runs at 1440p. It certainly seems like uh a pretty uh massive reduction in resolution there. And you're quite right. If the resolution uh mode is running at at um ten eighty p same resolution as as as as the as the performance Of course, Alex, you're just sitting there thinking, well, my PC menu, I just tell it what resolution I want. I mean, uh maybe a little bit, but I was I I've been baffled by where I load up a save of a game and there's like a missing graphical setting in a scene that was in every other scene before, and I can't get it to like show up again and I have to like butt heads, or I produce footage of a game that uh my game was bugged due to something I did early game, and then the rest of my footage is tainted thereafter uh because it had a bug in it. These things happen and they piss me off. So I feel so bad for Tom here having to have dealt with this. Uh I really commiserate with the guy. Yeah, it's kind of like when uh Captain Kirk is using logic to defeat Androids. They explode. Yeah. I was I was a bit worried that that the sort of DF equivalent could happen to Tom there 'cause we are sort of denying his reality almost and providing the uh the video evidence in the the bargain. But we think we've at least well we do at least now know it is the save that was the issue there. How it we actually got there, we're still figuring out. Does seem that um PS5 Pro might be a potential answer there, but curious nonetheless. Anyway, that's all we got for you on this particular show. So if you enjoyed it, please do uh like, subscribe, share, ring bells for notifications. Do you have supporter program? Join us. Um, join us. Um uh become part of our crew, uh get early access to a bunch of stuff, including the directs, pose questions for the show and for the QA show, of course. Um, patreon.com slash digital foundry. If you'd like to wear clothes with our logo on it, store dot digitalfoundview.net. But that's all from us on this one. 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