Welcome to the latest DF Direct Weekly – and while the year is drawing to a close, there still seems to be enough gaming and technology news to allow us to deliver a packed show. We kick off with discussion on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 – now dated for ‘Fall’ 2023 – while we also share our thoughts on the extent to which Death Stranding’s content would work for its transition to cinema.
The story that caught my eye this week was Sean Hollister’s interview with Valve on The Verge, where the company revealed that any successor to the existing Steam Deck would concentrate on quality of life functions like battery life and an improved screen, as opposed to delivering much in the way of extra performance. Improved performance is always a good thing but in this case, I think the decision is a sound one: it sets a baseline for all Steam Deck users, it keeps the current hardware in the game, and it addresses the key issues have with the existing model. Put simply, the screen redefines ‘mediocre’ while battery life can be poor on the latest games, or even by ramping up settings on older titles.
However, as you’ll see in the show, I had concerns over the extent to which Steam Deck can survive the cross-gen transition. It’s unfair to judge the hardware based on sub-optimal PC ports like The Callisto Protocol – where the Deck struggles – but I was more concerned about whether the hardware has the performance to handle Unreal Engine 5 features like Lumen and Nanite. I actually followed this up after the recording by installing Windows on my Deck and running Fortnite. At 1280×800 resolution with TSR medium on quality mode, I can indeed use the high-end features and performance is in the 30-36fps region (unfortunately, the 30fps cap has frame-pacing issues and there is some shader compilation stutter in traversal). I was genuinely surprised by this bearing in mind how poorly UE5.0 demos ran on the Valve machine.
00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:00 News 01: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 to launch in fall 202300:08:51 News 02: Death Stranding film in the works 00:14:45 News 03: Valve discusses Steam Deck successor00:26:45 News 04: RX 7900 XT/XTX review aftermath00:51:34 News 05: Returnal PC requirements announced00:57:39 News 06: High on Life launches with major issues, quickly patched 01:06:54 DF Supporter Q1: Which games would you like to get RTX Remix enhancements? 01:10:51 DF Supporter Q2: Why doesn’t DLSS significantly lower VRAM use? 01:12:22 DF Supporter Q3: Would you ever release the DF performance analysis tools to the public?01:17:05 DF Supporter Q4: Would you prefer to play a game with great ray tracing but with shader compilation stutter, or a game without ray tracing with no stutters?
Another interesting point to emerge from the Valve interview is that the designers remain happy with the custom Van Gogh AMD part they’re using in the Deck, even though more powerful APUs are emerging – with several handhelds arriving using the Ryzen 6800U, which packs in twice the amount of physical CPU cores along with more RDNA 2 compute units. Valve believes that the 6800U’s specs advantage makes it less suitable from an efficiency perspective for a handheld. This is something I’ll be testing soon as the AyaNeo 2 just arrived at the Digital Foundry lair. I can’t wait to give that a go – and a 15W power limit face-off against Steam Deck will be forthcoming.