There’s more than a little previewing going on in the latest DF Direct Weekly, as myself, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia share our thoughts and expectations from The Witcher 3’s upcoming ‘next gen’ patch, while initial impressions of the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet release paint a less than positive picture of the new release.
We’ll be looking at Pokémon in much more depth later in the week, but the bottom line is that Game Freak delivering two Pokémon titles within the year is perhaps not the best idea: the bugs are memeworthy, the performance is not great generally (circa 22fps to 30fps) while ‘in the moment’ stutter is obnoxious. There are clear learnings here – but ultimately, Nintendo itself has set the template for successful first-party software: give the developers the time they need to deliver compelling, extremely polished games.
The Witcher 3? We spend some time talking of our hopes for the game but right now, we can offer little more: a stream later in the week should offer up more answers, but as of filming, all we’ve had to go on is a single image from the remaster, perhaps suggesting the inclusion of ray-traced shadows – a feature also included in the console versions of Cyberpunk 2077. We can’t help but hope that the PC version also gets equivalence with Cyberpunk 2077 – we know that DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 are supported, but we’d also hope to see the full suite of RED Engine RT features.
00:00:00 – Introduction00:00:48 – News 01: Witcher 3 next-gen patch incoming 00:12:48 – News 02: Unreal Engine 5.1 delivers big improvements 00:27:29 – News 03: RTX 4080 released! 00:44:35 – News 04: Gamers Nexus solves 4090 power connector mystery 00:50:35 – News 05: DLSS 3 gets frame-limiter to overcome v-sync issue 01:00:42 – News 06: Pokémon Violet and Scarlet suffer serious tech issues 01:07:33 – DF Supporter Q1: Why don’t we ever get anisotropic filtering above 16x?01:10:03 – DF Supporter Q2: Why does the PS5 reserve 1.5 cores for the OS, leaving only 6.5 for games? 01:16:51 – DF Supporter Q3: Is Elden Ring a good candidate for game of the year, given its performance problems? 01:18:34 – DF Supporter Q4: Are game developers relying too much on DLSS? 01:24:21 – DF Supporter Q5: When will Audi be released from Rich’s basement and appear in videos again?
The aftermath of the RTX 4080 launch is also discussed in depth. After initial reports that the card had sold out and that Nvidia had ‘won’ with its ‘challenging’ pricing, my own stock check on various sites revealed that the RTX 4080 had not sold out at all and that perhaps the almost unanimous voice of the tech press had been heeded. Attention now turns to the forthcoming RTX 4070 Ti (name to be confirmed), the rebadged version of the RTX 4080 12GB. I think this card stands a good chance of being OK, actually. We need to accept that inflation is real and that the costs of 5nm silicon are not insignificant, especially in a world where two-year-old tech like PlayStation 5 has increased in price. Nvidia’s own benchmarks suggest a circa 20 percent performance uplift over RTX 3080 10GB – and if the card arrives at $799, the combination of a linear relationship between performance and cost, an extra 2GB of RAM, very good efficiency, plus DLSS 3 might make this product a bit more appealing as an upgrade for owners of older GPUs.