Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 44 2025)

Hello there and welcome to the latest weekly update from Digital Foundry. Sorry it's a bit late. Rich here and beyond the background admin stuff you'll see the fruits of in due course, I've spent the day adapting our automated benchmarks for handhelds on a separate Steam Library on an NVMe SSD within a USB-C dock - the idea here is to be able to take the pain in setting up the mods/patches just once and then swap the SSD between handhelds simply by plugging each into the dock and pointing Steam to the SSD library. Portable libraries on Steam. It can be done!

But it's all about the #content, right?

• Rich (ie me) is all about the handheld benchmarking. As Oliver has bought and Ally X, we will be joining forces for the review on that, so similar to the PS5 Pro review, we're looking to bring multiple viewpoints and experiences into that #content.

• John is working on an impromptu video on the RTX Remix work happening on the original Unreal, and he's eagerly awaiting delivery of the 20-year-old, untouched Xbox 360 I sent him. We were worried it was lost owing to lack of tracking information, but it seems like DPD is delivering it by horse, hence the delays there. It has cleared customs at least!

• Tom is circling back to Pokémon Legends: Z-A and after that moves onto embargoed content.

• Oliver is considering some #content on Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, but the Ally X review and some embargoed content is likely to keep him busy. Persona 3 Reload Switch 2? Got code in from Sega yesterday, so curious what he makes of it.

• Alex is taking an early look/preview at the GTA 4 path-tracing mod for RTX Remix we discussed last week, with the developer's blessing.

Beyond that, we're gearing up for the launch of the new Digital Foundry website - and as I keep saying whenever I mention it, it's looking great. Oh and we're looking to roll out the DF Retro Super Show this week to Retro Tier Patreon Supporters! Similar to DF Direct Weekly, there will be an early access window before the show goes public. I've just downloaded the three hour (!) episode myself and will be checking it out in due course. The website? The Retro podcast? All possible owing to independence and of course, your support. Many, many thanks.

One more thing:

Other things going on - lots of behind the scenes things, basically. We're looking to get the commercial side of things in order and have sorted proper representation. Expect to see short integrations in some #content going forward - with the reassurance that the download versions of the videos will remain ad-free. It's all part of making the business side of things a little more balanced so we can expand and deliver more.

I've also spent some time taking another look at our general video workflow. We use the open source tool VirtualDub for capture, which brings in fps data on the fly - problem being that its reliance on the AVI video container is now causing us a lot of headaches with Adobe Premiere. We've been assessing OBS with a view to porting across the on-the-fly fps analysis we built from scratch for vdub. OBS has a huge amount of advantages but brings with it a number of issues - for example, it doesn't seem to tell you if any frames are dropped during capture, which is a bit of a deal breaker as is - meaning more mods needed.

Still, that's where we are generally - there's always a lot going on. Do share your thoughts on what we're doing or what you'd like us to be doing and - as always - have a great week.