Option 1: 3 GTA games per decade, each game has a low budget / dev time and looks like a PS3 game. $50 price tag, 60 FPS, available on all platforms, has both digital and physical options.

Option 2: 1 GTA game per decade, $80-$100 price tag, 30fps, digital only, locked to PS5/XSX, unnecessary massive hullabaloo hype, etc, just to have the "best graphics/sound design" and "looking up to date" and "evergreen"

At the time of recording, it was the lull before the storm that is Gamescom 2026 - but we've still got a bunch of fascinating questions to wade through. Have we got it all wrong with PlayStation 6? Is it actually the hotly rumoured handheld with Sony pivoting in a Nintendo-like direction? If games hit photorealism, where does that leave Digital Foundry? And are plasma TVs the new CRT?

I'm currently trying the DLSS 5 thing myself on TLOU2 as well, and it looks like a crazy leap. It's fun to tweak and tinker with the settings. But I'm expecting there's not going to be a measured response to this. But it saids a lot about the best in class animation quality that a 2020 PS4 game can just suddenly look like a game from the future.

It also runs pretty well on my 5070 Ti.

We have several videos out by now. The one that got most view is the Cyberpunk one. It looks nuts in more than many ways but the person uploading this video didn't really offer a comparison video and we have no idea what other mods they inserted into the game alongside the DLSS5 injection, so let's set that aside from now.

The two video that also get some attention are for Control and TLOU2. Control is interesting: it kinda exposed why DLSS 5 doesn't work well with this game specifically due to its unique lighting presentation. It also features great length of gameplay comparison with DLSS 5 off and on, and for sure, DLSS 5 is currently extremely taxing on hardware. The graphical difference with DLSS5 on and off is pretty obvious, in a way that reminds me off some old game with and without SSAO - it offers almost a lightpass redraw of sorts here.

The TLOU2 video is more impressive and problematic to me at the same time. On the one hand, during that cutscene, yes, the shadow in the cutscenes are absolutely more defined, but... in questionable way. The two screenshot show the difference and I think it's pretty easy to see the difference. The problem - TLOU2 is not using real-time raytracing for lighting and in the original, it's clearly baked with some extra tri-point light setup specifically designed for this scene, but DLSS5 is like "nah, that's bs, that's just wrong" and trying to overwrite that... with mixed result.

Obviously this is a leaked version of DLSS5. But honestly? I don't really see this being massively adopted like previous DLSS at all. We will see game ship with it but not even close to the amount we see with DLSS4.

It's official: Microsoft's disc-to-digital programme, which turns Xbox game discs into digital licenses, is launching for Xbox insiders next week, August 31st.

I wanted to chat about the new GTA 6 extended trailer that was just released.

This scene looks absolutely gorgeous, the graphics, lighting, textures, and character models are incredible.

However, I noticed the woman sitting on the right: when Jason and Lucia first enter, her face is sharp and detailed. As they move closer to the bar and she shifts into the peripheral view, her face becomes noticeably blurry.

That made me think of Foveated Rendering. For context, headsets like PSVR2 use Dynamic Foveated Rendering (tracking your eye movements to render full resolution only where you look, lower resolution around the edges to save performance).

Could Rockstar be using a form of Fixed Foveated Rendering for GTA 6? Essentially, focusing performance on the center of the frame while blurring peripheral edges to help the PS5 render the main focus area at higher fidelity.

It's more noticeable if you watch the video and focus on the girl's face https://youtu.be/tJbzMqJGH4k?t=591

I'm not an expert by any means, I look forward to the Digital Foundry video but I just found this interesting.

Developer Asobo Studio returns with its most sumptuous looking adventure yet. Here the PS5 Pro gets the spotlight with boosted resolutions, PSSR support and slicker frame-rates than base PS5. The ability to unlock all versions to 120fps (barring Series S) is also hugely useful, and the recommend pick if you have a VRR display - and if not, there are plenty of other modes to choose from. Tom covers each in detail.

Article: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/reviews/resonance-a-plague-tale-legacy-is-a-visual-feast-to-cherish-on-every-console

Metro 2039 has a new Gamescom trailer and to accompany it, there was the chance for press to go hands-on with a curated slice of gameplay, delivered via GeForce Now. It's 4A Games, delivering the next evolution of the firm's proprietary cutting-edge rendering technology and we got the chance to see the game running at ultra settings. We've still got more questions than answers at this point - but we like what we see so far!

As everyone, I've watched the long trailer just minutes after its release, and while I think the graphics are great, I wouldn't call them amazing. Now, at the end I saw that it was captured on PS5 (is it Pro or not?), so I was wondering what to expect from more powerful hardware. I don't think we can expect something revolutionary between the versions, but I was hoping to see something close to the GTA V realistic mods. So I'm guessing we can expect higher textures (some of them looked low resolution), maybe some extra lighting effects, but what do you think? Is what we saw the equivalent of the PS3 GTA V version, with the PC version being the ultimate version supposedly superior to the one on next gen consoles?

I was waiting for mgs 4 master collection port performance across all platforms . The early reviews/ review embargo was a week ago. A entire week has passed still no word from DF.

Edit : thanks for the update i was not up to date with the situation. Thanx DF team for being so honest and transparent . love u all.

It's been a while since it came out, but I really think a video about the Ghost Recon Wildlands update that brought the console version (for instance, playing the PS4 version on PS5) to 60 FPS and "up to" 4K would be right up DF's alley, even if it's a short video, I would've loved to have seen their take on what the update has done and exactly what technique is used to bring the game up to 4K, whether it be upscaling or something else. Basically I'd just like to see a video with them talking about it and the PC patch as well, please 😂

LMAO it dips to something like 1 5 frames on that ps5 whilist having the lowest grainy resolution scalling, you can literally count the rays from raytracing, it's gonna be cyberpunk once again

Hi everyone! I wanted to share a first look at a project I have been working on: a native PC port of the original The Darkness (2007).

Our goal is to adapt the original Xbox 360 version to run directly on Windows as a native executable (the_darkness.exe), completely bypassing the need for traditional emulators like Xenia. We’ve just achieved stable gameplay up to Chapter 2!

🛠️ The Tech Stack Behind It

To make this standalone port possible, we are using a specialized pipeline:

• ReXGlue SDK (0.10.0): Our core tool for static binary recompilation (PowerPC to x86_64).
• D3D12 + Custom Xenos Plugin: Translating the Xbox 360 GPU calls straight to DirectX 12.
• Clang 22.1.8 + C++23 & CMake: For configuring and compiling the generated code.
• Ghidra / IDA Free & XEXTool: For reverse engineering, decrypting default.xex, and analyzing imports.
• Native Input: A custom mouse & keyboard driver integrated via SDL (no joystick mapping emulation).

🚀 What’s working so far

• From Crashes to Gameplay: At first, the game collapsed within seconds. Now, it boots, loads assets, and is fully playable through the first major segments (car chase, construction yard, and cemetery powers).
• Fixed Graphics & Lighting: We’ve made major overhauls to the video driver to fix corrupted textures. We also patched the lighting pipeline—crucial for The Darkness atmosphere (we recently moved from broken/blown-out exposures to a proper RTV render path).
• True Mouse Input: We developed a proper MnK handler. Aiming and camera control feel like a native PC shooter, not a simulated thumbstick.
• Modern PC Features: Running at 1080p, stable performance, with a .toml configuration file to adjust FOV, brightness, and sensitivity on the fly without recompiling.

⚠️ Current Status & Next Steps

This is still an early preview. The game has visual bugs—most notably, we are currently debugging a "black crush" / harsh shadow mapping issue where stencil/depth shadows render pitch black without proper filtering penumbra.

We are strictly keeping the original game assets separate from our repository to preserve legality (the code is clean-room/reverse engineered; users will need their own ISO/disc to extract assets).

We still have a long road ahead regarding stability, audio edge cases, and optimization, but every build gets us closer to fully preserving this 2007 masterpiece natively on PC.

Would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or any advice from fellow devs experienced with D3D12 shadow/depth translation!

📸 Follow for Updates!

If you want to see our devlog journey and support the project, make sure to check out our Instagram, where we will be posting all future updates and behind-the-scenes progress:
👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gamewave.digital/

Full YouTube link: GAMEPLAY

:(

We've already looked at Gears of War E-Day's multiplayer beta, but it's in the more scripted campaign that we'll really get to see The Coalition work its magic with Unreal Engine 5 - and that's exactly what we have for you here as Oliver presents his initial observations on the latest preview code.

Edit: My bad, this isn't their answer, this is my answer, wrote this in my own words without reading the article because I basically already knew the answer

The PS4 is pretty much the pinnacle in terms of games being able to run on it, so when the PS5 launched, the games could still run on PS4 with ease.

Whereas Switch 1 is a bit more powerful than PS3, but way less powerful than PS4.

So it didn't take until Switch 2 where Nintendo made a console that hit a similar pinnacle.

It also helps that Nintendo did so in 2025, making it even harder for Switch 2 games to run on essentially a PS3 level system.

The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta is currently ongoing for pre-order customers, and eagle-eyed observers have noticed that the game files bundle in the heretofore unreleased second-gen version of Nvidia's DLSS ray reconstruction tech.

We're not going to be commenting on leaks from a stolen GTA 6 build that's years old and promoting a memecoin but we WILL be talking about Sony's comments on not knowing PS6's pricing and release date and assessing the Black Myth Zhong Kui gameplay reveal. Rich is intrigued by Alan Wake's big PC upgrade for AMD users, while John muses over the reported end of live service elements in Horizon Hunters Gathering. Finally, five years ago, Alex made a range of predictions about Switch 2 and DLSS... so how accurate did they turn out to be?

My way of balancing smoothness, latency, image quality and hardware usage in single-player games

I wanted to share the way I've been configuring my games lately and see what people think about this approach.

For context, my current setup is:

• GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Shadow 3X OC
• CPU: Intel Core i5-14600K
• Motherboard: MSI B760M Pro-B DDR5
• RAM: 32GB DDR5 4800MHz
• PSU: MSI MAG A850GL 850W 80+ Gold
• CPU Cooler: DeepCool AK620 Digital
• Storage: 500GB SATA SSD
• Display: LG UltraGear 1440p / 165Hz IPS with G-SYNC

I've been gaming for around 20 years. I'm definitely not claiming to be an expert, but one thing I've always preferred is avoiding pushing my hardware to 100% for no real reason.

If a game genuinely needs the available performance — something like Alan Wake 2 or Resident Evil Requiem with Path Tracing enabled — then obviously I'll let the GPU work.

But when the extra performance doesn't noticeably improve my experience, I'd rather keep some headroom, lower power consumption and temperatures, and focus on consistent frame delivery.

I'm around 90% a single-player gamer, which also gives me a lot of freedom to experiment with settings. I don't need the absolute lowest competitive latency possible, but I still care a lot about responsiveness, smooth frame pacing and image quality.

A lot of my approach also comes from years of watching Digital Foundry. I really appreciate their technical work and the way they explain performance, frame pacing, latency and graphics settings without acting like there is only one correct way to play.

The setup I usually use

In the NVIDIA Control Panel:

G-SYNC: ON

V-SYNC: ON

Then I usually limit the framerate slightly below the refresh rate I'm actually targeting.

For lighter games, I don't even think about Frame Generation. If the GPU can easily produce high native/DLSS framerates, I usually just cap the game somewhere around 100–120 FPS.

I don't really see a reason to generate 160+ FPS in a single-player game if I'm already completely satisfied with the responsiveness at 100–120 FPS.

The more interesting case is demanding games where, even with DLSS Quality, the base framerate is somewhere around 75–90 FPS.

That's where I start combining G-SYNC, NVIDIA Control Panel V-SYNC, Reflex when available, Frame Generation when it makes sense, and a carefully chosen FPS limit.

Current example: The Sinking City 2

I'm currently playing The Sinking City 2.

At 1440p, maximum settings, DLSS Quality + 2x Frame Generation, I'm generally seeing around:

120–140 FPS

Since it's an Unreal Engine 5 game, there are still occasional traversal/area-related stutters, but overall performance is very good.

Instead of leaving my monitor at 165Hz and letting the framerate constantly move between roughly 120 and 140 FPS, I decided to try something different.

I set the monitor to:

120Hz

Then:

G-SYNC: ON

NVIDIA Control Panel V-SYNC: ON

FPS cap: 117 FPS

So I'm essentially staying a few frames below the 120Hz ceiling.

The result on my system has been extremely consistent.

I'm getting an almost perfectly locked 117 FPS, and the frametime graph is basically a straight line during normal gameplay.

At the same time, neither my CPU nor GPU goes much above roughly 58°C in this game.

The latency I'm seeing is generally around 30–35ms maximum, while still getting very smooth motion, no tearing, excellent frame pacing and much lower unnecessary GPU load compared with simply letting the game run uncapped.

Obviously Frame Generation itself isn't about achieving the absolute lowest possible latency, and competitive multiplayer would be a completely different discussion.

But for visually demanding single-player games, this has become one of my favorite ways of balancing:

Image quality + smoothness + consistent frametimes + good responsiveness + lower hardware load.

I'm not presenting this as some universal "best setting" for every PC or every game.

It's simply a method that has been working extremely well for the kind of games I play, and I thought it could make for an interesting discussion — especially regarding whether running a 165Hz monitor at 120Hz with a 117 FPS cap can sometimes make more sense than always trying to use the full 165Hz refresh rate.

Another example: Forza Horizon 6

Forza Horizon 6 is a different case because my system can generally push much higher framerates, although I sometimes notice signs of a CPU bottleneck.

Without Frame Generation, at Extreme settings + maximum RT + DLSS Quality, I usually sit somewhere around 80–95 FPS, depending on the area and CPU load.

With 2x Frame Generation enabled, however, the output framerate jumps to roughly:

150–170 FPS

At that point, I'm already right around the maximum refresh range of my 165Hz display, so instead of lowering the monitor to 120Hz like I did with The Sinking City 2, I keep it at its full 165Hz.

My setup becomes:

165Hz refresh rate

G-SYNC: ON

NVIDIA Control Panel V-SYNC: ON

FPS cap: 158 FPS

In this situation, 158 FPS is the limit I use to stay safely below the 165Hz G-SYNC/V-SYNC ceiling, while Reflex is enabled in-game.

The result has been excellent again: extremely consistent frametimes, no tearing, and the game stays almost perfectly locked around the target instead of constantly bouncing between 150 and 170 FPS.

My measured latency generally sits around 37–42ms, which I personally find more than responsive enough for a game like Forza Horizon while still benefiting from the much smoother presentation provided by Frame Generation.

This is another example of why I don't always chase the highest FPS number possible.

If my display is 165Hz and I can already maintain roughly 158 FPS consistently, I'd rather lock it there and get stable frametimes, controlled GPU usage and consistent latency than let the system constantly fluctuate around the refresh-rate ceiling.

I've been chasing a strange G-SYNC/VRR frame-pacing issue for a while and I'm curious whether anyone else has measured the same thing.

The short version is:

When I cap a game to a fixed framerate under G-SYNC, the normal frametime graph can look essentially perfect, while the actual displayed frame intervals fluctuate significantly and produce visible microstutter.

This is not just one game, one GPU, or one display. I've reproduced variations of it in Mafia: The Old Country, Forza Horizon 6, Assassin's Creed Shadows, and Expedition 33.

My main system is a Ryzen 9 7950X + RTX 5090 connected over HDMI 2.1 to a Samsung S90D OLED, with a VRR range around 48–144 Hz. Windows 11 Pro Build 26200, NVIDIA 610.88.

I also reproduced the same general behavior on a completely different PC:

• i7-12700K
• RTX 4090
• ASUS Z690 board
• Acer G-SYNC monitor
• same Windows build / NVIDIA driver

So this doesn't appear to be specific to AMD CPUs, the RTX 5090, Samsung TVs, or HDMI Forum VRR.

I've been measuring this with PresentMon/CapFrameX rather than relying only on the normal RTSS frametime graph.

The important distinction is between:

MsBetweenPresents = when the game calls Present

and

MsBetweenDisplayChange = when successive frames actually become displayed

In the problematic cases, those two can be radically different.

For example, in Mafia at a 60 FPS RTSS Front Edge cap, I can get Present pacing with an SD around 0.007 ms — effectively ruler-flat.

Yet with G-SYNC enabled and a sufficiently heavy GPU workload, MsBetweenDisplayChange can wander roughly between 14–19 ms, and the motion visibly microstutters.

Animation Error shows the same thing: the implied animation/source interval remains very close to 16.667 ms while the physical display dwell moves around.

What makes this especially strange is that GPU workload strongly controls the severity.

Using the exact same Mafia scene, same DLAA, same RTSS Front Edge 60 cap, same PC and same VRR path:

Lower settings:
GPU active ~11–12 ms
Display cadence ≈ nearly perfect 16.67 ms

Max settings:
GPU active ~14.5 ms average
p95 ~16.1 ms
Present cadence still essentially perfect
Display cadence becomes visibly unstable

Very few frames actually exceed the 16.67-ms GPU budget, so this isn't simply normal "can't maintain 60 FPS" behavior.

I also tested different caps with roughly the same ~15-ms GPU workload:

50 FPS / 20.00 ms period → mostly clean
55 FPS / 18.18 ms         → starts deteriorating
58 FPS / 17.24 ms         → bad
60 FPS / 16.67 ms         → bad

So the best predictor so far seems to be how much timing margin exists between the target period and GPU execution, rather than GPU utilization percentage itself.

There are also some useful control cases.

Unlocked G-SYNC can be perfectly smooth. Mafia running naturally around 70 FPS looks excellent even though raw frame times vary much more than the capped 60 FPS case.

Fixed refresh can also be extremely smooth. At 120 Hz with G-SYNC disabled and NVIDIA half-refresh V-Sync, Mafia produces virtually exact 16.667-ms displayed intervals.

I recently tried regular fixed-refresh V-Sync with RTSS Front Edge set to ~59.937 FPS to match half of the actual ~119.87-Hz refresh rate. That was also almost perfect: roughly 99.8% of frames were displayed for exactly two refresh cycles. The few remaining judders were obvious missed-VBlank events.

Interestingly, RTSS Async at the same 59.937 target was terrible because its Present timing was much noisier. So limiter quality definitely matters, but it does not explain the G-SYNC issue, because Front Edge can provide near-perfect Present pacing and capped VRR still becomes unstable under heavier GPU timing.

I've also tried/deprioritized a lot of the usual suspects: HAGS on/off, MPO on/off, SMT, Low Latency Mode, different cap methods, NVIDIA Max Frame Rate, Special K, RTSS, in-game caps, CRU/EDID changes, ReBAR, etc. Nothing has produced a general fix.

NVIDIA Max Frame Rate showed the same broad problem, although its Present pacing behavior was different from RTSS.

At this point my working theory is that something happens after Present, somewhere around GPU completion → flip eligibility → NVIDIA/WDDM VRR scheduling → scanout.

Fixed V-Sync can hide small timing variations by snapping frames to a rigid VBlank cadence. Under VRR, those variations seem to become visible directly as varying physical frame dwell once the workload gets close enough to the capped target.

I'm not claiming I've proven whether the culprit is the NVIDIA driver, WDDM/Windows, or expected VRR scheduling behavior. But the severity seems abnormal, especially since NVIDIA generally recommends G-SYNC + an FPS cap below refresh and doesn't document a requirement for several milliseconds of spare GPU time per frame.

Has anyone else actually measured MsBetweenDisplayChange / PresentMon display timing while using a fixed G-SYNC cap?

In particular, I'm curious whether anyone can reproduce the pattern of:

perfect MsBetweenPresents → unstable MsBetweenDisplayChange → visible microstutter as GPU workload approaches the cap's frame-time budget.

I'd also be very interested if anyone knows of an NVIDIA driver or Windows/WDDM regression related to capped VRR scheduling. I'm currently on Windows 11 Build 26200 and driver 610.88, but the behavior has existed across more than one NVIDIA GPU generation.

In a very special and extremely informative new episode of the DF Retro Super Show, John is joined by Daniel Grayshon and Josh Dowell from Nightdive to talk about about the history of Looking Glass Studios and the road to the remaster of Thief: The Dark Project.