DF Direct Weekly #174: Star Wars Outlaws, EA Sports RT, AMD AFMF 2 Tested, PSVR 2 Discounted!

With John and Alex either on holiday or otherwise unavailable, Rich is joined by Tom and Oliver for our weekly show discussing the latest gaming and technology news. The team take a look at the recent Star Wars Outlaws previews, Tom gets to grips with Nobody Wants To Die and Visions of Mana, while also taking a look at the RT upgrades to EA Sports titles using the Frostbite engine. Meanwhile, Rich shares the ROG Ally X benchmarks we couldn't share in the preview, and shares his thoughts on AMD's Fluid Motion Frames 2 upgrade.

Find DF Direct Weekly as a podcast on your favourite podcast streaming service.

0:00:00 Introduction
0:02:01 News 01: Star Wars Outlaws gameplay preview!
0:14:31 News 02: Nobody Wants To Die impresses
0:23:05 News 03: EA Sports titles getting RTGI
0:38:55 News 04: PS VR2 dramatically discounted
0:47:47 News 05: Visions of Mana demo released
0:55:47 News 06: ROG Ally X benchmarked!
1:03:40 News 07: AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2 previewed
1:17:45 News 08: Destiny 3 not in development
1:25:51 Supporter Q1: Could you compare in-home streaming services like Steam Link?
1:33:01 Supporter Q2: Where is the console Minecraft ray tracing update?
1:38:56 Supporter Q3: Could upcoming consoles feature more bespoke kinds of hardware?
1:46:42 Supporter Q4: Do developers deserve flack for not optimizing their games, or are more demanding titles just a consequence of graphics advancement?
1:54:37 Supporter Q5: Why wasn’t x86 adopted for earlier consoles?
1:58:27 Supporter Q6: Could Microsoft release their backwards compatible Xbox titles on PC?
2:03:29 Supporter Q7: Is the M4 iPad Pro’s display bright enough for Oliver?

[Daniel-yzzf]

Guys - big opportunity for the merch store - framerate Caps. Make it happen and I will buy one instantly

[Moravias]

Oliver and Tom? That's feels almost like a secret team being brought back for a stealth mission.

[thanksbetotap]

Thanks for covering Visions of Mana, Tom! Always grateful that he covers a lot of important games that may not otherwise get attention.

[killerfugu]

My biggest concern with the Mana demo having stutters that bad is how many games, Elden Ring, Dead Space, Wild Hearts, Jedi etc etc have launched with stutter and never been fixed. I have less faith in niche JRPOG's getting technical patches.

[D-OS_II_Fan]

Oliver looking extra devious in the thumbnail.

[kieranczyzniejewski]

Wait, after praising Avatar up and down, Massive didn't invite Digital Foundry to play this game?

[Jahus]

08:22 - When Thomas speaks, you notice that the sharp parts in the image are the hair at his left side, and his left eye. Other parts of his face, like the nose, his right eye and the right part of his hair are blurry. That's because the camera is set to use a small f/ stop (aperture widely open), thus the depth of field is very shallow. I advice changing the f/ stop (closing the aperture) to widen the DoF. Sure, it will lower the bokeh effect (blur in the background), but the face will be sharper in more places.

[jarrodkober]

6:25 ugh when animations snap into place like this it looks terrible. We've had examples of other games like RDR2 And LOU-PT.2 blending animations beautifully. I don't know why they'd have this quite intrusive pop/snap-to takedown animation in a game of this tier

[julianorozaa]

Oh wow, was totally unaware of “Nobody wants to die”. If you speak to the developers let them know they got a purchase thanks to this video 😅

[SITSIndustries]

1:25:33 "In-the-here-and-now" drinking game.

[walter_the_wobot]

The power of one.

The power of two.

The power of stutters.

[BurritoKingdom]

American Football is basically a turned based strategy game with real time elements.

[SoFishtry]

A video on Moonlight would be very interesting! There are Moonlight clients on the Switch and Vita (with homebrew, naturally) and that would be a neat point of comparison between Steamdeck/ROG Ally/et al and the homebrew options. Could look at games of varying intensity as well as emulation.

[malevellysian]

tom and oliver = most chillax team to listen to

[techsamurai]

Tandem is the holy grail - I don't know if it's achievable for large TVs. It's essentially Dual-cell using 2 OLED panels which you'd think would be more complicated and expensive than Dual-cell but somehow they've struggled to generate Dual Cell for TVs. It also begs the question of how cheap Dual Cell would be using a monochrome LED and colour LED panel together for which you wouldn't even any local dimming which is now becoming the more complex part of the TV with 1, 000-10, 000 dimming zones.

1, 000 nits full screen is overkill for TVs, most high-end LEDs top out at 700-800 for full window and it's irrelevant if 700 or 850.

For OLEDs, if they can hit 500-600 nits full window and sustain it for a few seconds with 400 nits full window sustained, TANDEM may be less important at that point.

Also, Tandem reduces the risk of burn-in massively.

[omega_sauce]

Tom and Oliver! We’re being spoiled this week.

[stuckintheinbetween]

The textures in Outlaws are looking really rough. It reminds me of UE3 games before the textures would "pop in."

[deepblue]

I wish DF would sometimes bring back a 4th member for these directs like they used to, I really enjoyed that instead of always being 3 people.

[DonaldHendleyBklynvexRecords]

I never understood the distaste for PSVR2, The features missing on PC arent their for Meta Quest either, In fact no other headset has the feedback of PSVR2, When I want a better submersion I go PSVR2 on PS5, If I wanna lounge I play Meta Quest, Theres room for both as I enjoy both, I just dont get it but I enjoy my PSVR2 for the last few months

[GordonGordon]

1:32:25
... To be honest... All the many folks who say "works fine on my rig" on forum threads that discuss stutter/micro stutter are probably the same ones that are happy with Play Station streaming despite our grievances about lag and input delay...

EDIT:
Haha. Alright. Thanks for all those who replied. I should try my own home network. I remember steam link being roughly ok. I should give that another go i guess. Does anyone play out of their own home for PlayStation?