DF Direct Q+A: Hands-On With Steam Frame, Half-Life Alyx Standalone + More

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1:01You've probably been putting off your will or trust for years. Not because you don't care. Because hourly rates and a visit to an attorney's office haven't made it any easier. Legal Zoom changed that. Start your will or trust online today with an independent attorney available to help if you want one without the hourly rates. When you need a legal hand, visit Legal Zoom. Legal Zoom provides access to independent attorneys and sell service tools. Legal Zoom is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. Hello there. I'd a warm welcome to the latest edition of the Digital Foundry Direct Q&A show. You have questions. We hope to have some kind of answers for you. Joining me on the panel this week, first of all, probably his last direct appearance for a couple of weeks. John Miniman, hello. That's right, Rich. I've been here for a while. So not here and also Audi and the and Mark and Corey you're doing a DF direct. Sorry, not DF direct, but DF pressure super show.

2:03I'm away. I'm curious to see what they come up with. I've heard rumors that it might be a topic that you're not going to love. But I've heard those we lose. I think the audience might love it, but you probably won't love it. Okay. That sounds good. It's there. Also joining us all over McKenzie. Hello. Yes, Rich, for good or for bad, you're stuck with me for the next little bit. I know, but yeah, it should be a fun episode today. Okay. Yes. And well, I guess we should just crack on with the content that we've got for you. Okay. So our first topic isn't exactly a question as such, but we did miss out on the steamframe in bargo for various reasons. But here we are. We did receive a unit we have spoken to Valve about the steamframe. I am going to take it off now because it is very, very disconcerting when you're not actually in a VR experience. So the reviews are in.

3:04I'm kind of curious going to you first, John, what you make of the various feedback that Valve has had to this because it's it's an interesting device in very interesting times, you know, and certainly the price point has, well, I don't think at this point any kind of price point would surprise anybody, but you know, north of $1,000 that is kind of tricky in the world, whether Quest 3 is kind of like half the price. And I guess the whole concept of launching a VR device right now kind of crazy, but that's the way they roll. I'm curious about your take on it. So that is an interesting thing and it's a very valve move. And this is one of the reasons I like Valve. So you just kind of do their thing. They do what they want to do. And, you know, the success of steam has actually allowed them to pursue projects like this, I would say in a way that a lot of other companies might not be able to. But obviously the nature of the component shortage has had an impact on this and the price is not super cheap. But it's also, I guess, not dissimilar to the original index, I believe was

4:09similarly priced. Is that right, Rich? I can't remember the exact price. It was very, very expensive back in the day, but it was a huge, it was a huge endeavour, wasn't it? He had those lighthouse boxes for that. True stuff like that. And yeah, I mean, this is like a far more refined device on, on every level. Yeah, yeah, curious though about the whole concept of launching a machine like this. Yeah, absolutely. And so what's interesting though about VR is that the, it's sort of found itself into its little niche where it's able to games releasing on VR are largely able to actually make money from what I understand. I've spoken with a lot of developers and publishers in the VR space now. And the feeling I get is that despite the low audience numbers, the people that are into VR are into VR and the game budgets are kept in check in a way that allows them to still be viable.

5:11And I think that's what's really important here. Not every game is going to make back their money, but a lot of these VR games are, they're still reasonable in terms of how much they cost to make. And because you have this dedicated audience, they've kind of continued to be able to do okay, and valve, of course itself is kind of supporting the VR ecosystem. And as, as they told me when I spoke to them about Half Life Alex on the steam frame, the original goal of Half Life Alex was just to make like the most ridiculous, like zero compromised VR experience that they could. And it was not just about the success of the game, but VR as a whole. And that's also kind of the message I got with importing Half Life Alex to the steam frame, which we'll talk about, but it's like the steps in the process of doing this ended up benefiting the hardware as well in terms of developing the API, the drivers and everything else. So we're kind of in a situation where it doesn't seem like a big mainstream thing and I don't think it is, but it might be enough.

6:12And steam VR is a really nice ecosystem. It's a great place for VR content. But when you think about like, all right, well, the Quest 3 is like at least half the price or even less, but it's also kind of like your deciding between, do you want to be in the steam ecosystem? Or do you want to be in the meta ecosystem? You know, it's like you're kind of paying extra money to get out of the meta ecosystem. So to say, right? Like you don't want to have a Facebook account to play your VR games necessarily. I've done it, but it's I understand why people would not be too enthused about this and it'd be better just to use a steam account for such things. So I get it. But I think the steam be our, the steam frame is for a very specific audience and that audience will be happy. I'm happy with what they're trying to do here. I think there's still some compromises. I really even got enough time to test this obviously. I will when I get back.

7:12But they they did make some choices that make it feel like just a slight upgrade from the Quest 3. And in some ways, maybe even downgrade, but in ways that don't matter that much. Like the like you were just wearing the heads that a second ago there, rich and the passer cameras we commented on are. I was their monochrome, but like purpley monochrome, I guess. Yeah, that's interesting because I, you know, I bought a Quest 3 as well. And my prior experience was the Quest 2 and the the the generation or leap from the Quest 3 from the Quest 2 is astonishing. And part of that experience is the kind of AI AR. Sorry, not AI, certainly not AI, that AR side of things. The the past three cameras and the quality of the image. I mean, it's not amazing on the on the Quest 3, but it does the job right. And you can use it in that sense as an AI device. And yeah, it is basically just I'd say it's better than the Quest 2,

8:16but it's it's not great. It's not designed for that sort of the right. I guess that's kind of like the thing that I kind of like about the Steam frame is that it was built for a purpose. Fowl really love VR. That's that's that's so evident. They're fully committed to it. They don't care about the size of the market. This is a device that they want to make, right. And they've made it. And I think there's certain things that they need to refine about it. There was quite interesting to sort of read the summaries and the various reviews from the outlets that I trust. And there's a lot of commonality in there in terms of like how that, you know, there's some bugs in the experience in the VR layer, that sort of thing. Yeah, I experience some of those as well, but you know, ultimately it plays VR games and it plays them well. They've really put a lot of effort into the concept of having your PC as a base station for beaming out VR to a dedicated headset, which well, you know, John, it's actually really good already on Quest 3,

9:16but they've kind of like over engineered this solution for the frame. And it's kind of like one of the key success points for it, which I think is, you know, it's kind of like remarkable that this thing exists, you know, in the world where it's basically turned its back on PSVR 2. So yeah, it's a really interesting device. We'll talk about Half-Life Alex in a minute, but that just is an extension of this philosophy, which is kind of like VR at any cost, really. We're going to give you VR and it's going to be great. Maybe the market isn't huge, but here it is. I think that sort of sums it up really. Just sort of quick impressions on the device. I mean, it is obviously the battery is in the back here, and the whole thing is very, very light. It's very, very comfortable to wear. It's comfortable to wear even if you've got glasses, although obviously the dedicated lens inserts are the way to go. You can run native games on it. I did some streets of rage. That was pretty cool, streets of rage 4.

10:16I mean, those sort of types of game would just run extremely well on Steam Frame, because it's a low-power device. Throwing cuphead, that sort of thing, super, super easy to run, but great games, and you have the kind of virtual theater experience that you'd kind of expect there. In theory, you should be able to do some benchmarks on that, because I am quite curious to see what the Qualcomm chipset in this is actually capable of, versus say the Steam deck. I suspect it's going to be significantly less powerful, but let's wait for the benchmarks there. But yeah, I just find this whole thing quite, quite fascinating. Oliver, you have used the Steam Frame. You were found when you did it. Yes. But your thoughts now, the review's around. Yeah, quite a while ago, I suppose it was a bit of an early version, at least in terms of the software. But even then, I could see that it was a really nice headset. And judging from a review, is it does seem like a very good headset.

11:17The thing that stuck out to me most in the pieces that I read was apparently battery life is rather poor and standalone, more than that. Streaming seems okay. Three hours and streaming maybe an hour, an hour and a half and standalone. That's not disastrous. But I think they clearly made some choices in terms of putting the battery in the back that had set in terms of making that better, actually a relatively small cell relative to the expected draw of the unit that seemed to be oriented around maximizing user comfort, which I think is sensible enough. Over longevity of the device in actual extended use. I think in terms of my own feelings on it, at least from my own experience with VR headsets, I think it's the best VR headset I've ever used. Not necessarily in any particular narrow sense, but in terms of offering the most comfortable, complete VR experience I could imagine out of any device with integration of steam, standalone capabilities, great streaming, like a really high quality experience, and to end in every domain that it tries to tackle.

12:17It seems to do a really good job. But I think, I don't know, it's kind of weird when you're evaluating VR devices. And I've noticed this strain across a couple of reviews that I happen to observe, which is that there's one class of people who's like, hey, listen, this is a great VR headset. This does all the things I wanted to do. It's reasonable, relative to the other entrance in the space that's doing a lot of really cool things. And it's interesting standalone, interesting streaming device, whatever, whatever, obviously, it's primarily a streaming device, but it has standalone capabilities. That's kind of one bucket of reviews. And the second bucket of reviews is like, this is Valve, this really cool company, aiming to tackle this problem again. Can they fix all the problems with VR? And they haven't fixed all the problems of VR, right? Is that a realistic expectation for Valve? For people to have a Valve? I don't know, but in some cases, people do put a lot of emphasis on Valve resolving underlying tensions with the VR market, in particular, with its software offerings, right? The fact that premium software experiences aren't available in VR and arguably, like, the last huge one that people really look fondly on

13:19was like Half-Life Alex, you know, some five or six years ago and Valve obviously hasn't offered a new game to support the launch of a Steam frame. So I think those are kind of two schools of thought when it comes to Steam frame, and I've seen different reviewers mix in the match, between those two perspectives. But for sure, I think by the standards of the first reviewer, perhaps, I think this is great, by the standards of the second reviewer who wants this to, like, really solve these underlying tensions in the VR market, I think this does some things in terms of accessibility. I think it does some things in terms of giving people that cool, standalone experience with PC games for the first time, but it doesn't actually move the needle on pricing or a game library in such a way that it radically transforms the fortunes of the market. Yeah, I just want to pick you up on the whole Battlefield-Life situation there. It is quite low. There's no doubt about it. One hour, I think, you know, the sort of baseline figure you can kind of rely on

14:20is sort of like, you know, an hour standalone and two hours streaming. One thing that I would say, though, is that the fact that the USB-C port is actually on the rear makes it quite easy to plug in when you're, you know, let's say you're streaming from your PC, he's actually quite easy just to, you know, plug in the USB and continue gaming there. But obviously, at that point, it sort of diminishes the whole point of the enterprise having a good, good, good, good, good, good, isn't it? So it's kind of like, you know, not quite the perfect solution, but, you know, what would be the solution, like a Bat-Feed that's twice the size? How's that going to work on this? That's not going to work, is it? Yeah, so, hmm, I mean, let's talk about Half-Life Alex because, I guess, infamously, when you went to see it, Oliver, you know, the first question from many people was, you know, okay, so where's the standalone Half-Life Alex? And it wasn't there. And it's kind of like, you know, okay, you're going to have to stream it.

15:21Now, John, you actually spent some time last week with Valve talking about the story behind Half-Life Alex on the Steamframe. And it's kind of like, how can you say it? An engineering, a technical triumph, really? What they've achieved here? Yeah, that's right. So I understand that they worked on it for about 18 months. And during much of the project, they were unsure whether it would be something they actually ship. Which is why, of course, they didn't confirm or deny it with you, Oliver, because at the time, they didn't know. But they were able to keep going at it. And they finally got it up to a place that they felt was playable. And it did require some sacrifice, for sure. And the two key things that allowed it to work. And it's not the best things, but it is what it is. One, obviously, there's the frame rate situation, where essentially they run it at 36 frames per second,

16:21which sounds very low, but this is not uncommon in standalone VR. And they basically have various methods for interpolating that up to a higher frame rate. It's very common in VR. It is kind of frame-gen-like, right? That's the whole idea of it, but they use different inputs to create something that's works okay. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Nearly the entire library of PSVR was like this. And that's just kind of how it works. But it has drawbacks, or sometimes things can look like different frame rates at once, depending on how you parallax the environment. So it's not perfectly smooth, but I think it's the job done. The other trick, I think, is a bit better, though. And that's their dynamic eye-track-phobiegated rendering, which I think this is going to be a game changer for standalone VR, because your eyes really are not able to see the areas that are not being rendered at high fidelity.

17:21By tracking where your eyes go, they're able to change the render resolution in real time, but just for that area. But everything around where you're looking that you can't really see in your peripheral vision runs at a much, much lower pixel resolution. And really, you kind of can't tell when testing this stuff in real time. And PSVR2 actually has this as well. That's kind of the trick here. And it's something the Quest 3 doesn't have. And so on Quest 3 games, developers did have to push it a little bit harder to get the resolution up to get decent image quality. We're here. They can like really dial down the peripheral areas and just focus on making where you're looking sharper. So you actually can get slightly better image quality than you might otherwise have. It's perceptually higher, even though around your viewpoint is actually lower. And those two things basically gave them the headroom that they needed to make it work. Because the rest of the game is not changed.

18:21And that was what surprised me. They didn't downgrade it or make changes to the way it works. And their reasoning actually isn't just about the experience. It was about they wanted to retain full compatibility with the PC version, including workshop support. So everything that works in PC must work on the standalone version. And it does. And so you basically get the exact same graphics and the visuals and the same level sizes like no compromises to the rest of the game. It's really just the image quality frame rate stuff, which I think is an acceptable compromise in this case. And just being able to have this on a portable machine like this is pretty cool. I must admit, especially since it's all directly tied into your PC versions. You can be playing this on the go. And then if you want to do wireless streaming with the dongle, you can do that later. And I feel like all of the stuff is super well integrated. And just gets into it made me think as well about the nature of what the frame is because it is running steam OS, isn't it?

19:23And that means you actually do have a full-fledged PC strapped your head. If you want to pull up a Linux desktop on your headset in VR, you can do it. And I think that is actually like really cool because these virtual desktop stuff, it's fun. It's interesting. But usually it was either streamed from your real desktop or it was like a simplified kind of interface. But here you get like the actual proper desktop. It's a feat to have that. And I think that Half-Life Alex is one of those games that I still, from talking to people, I think a lot of folks have not been able to experience. And I think with this price point, they're not suddenly going to be opening the way towards a huge new audience. But I do think it's an important inclusion here. And I think it does. It is something that if you've not played it before, you really need to. Because I still think it's one of the most interesting and important games released in the last decade. Everybody should experience it.

20:24I concur with that. I have had time to play Alex for a couple of hours on the steamframing standalone mode. I'm actually sort of renovating my office at the moment. There's like another room over there, which is basically now just a big open area that I could use to play the game in. Yeah, you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. Basically, the big cutback, if you like, is a resolution. It does look pretty chunky. It has to say, I have to say, you know, the resolution drop in high-conferced areas. You know, the sort of specifically the external areas. Yeah, the aliasing is pretty off-putting, as to be said, it's a necessary compromise. Also, yes, you're right. It caps at 36 frames per second, and it kind of interpolates up to set the frame itself is set to 72 hertz. And then if they're sort of like an interpolation step there. I have no issue with that. I didn't really have any problems with that at all, which surprised me bearing in mind that, you know,

21:28going back to the origins of steam VR, it was kind of like 90 hertz or bust, wasn't it? But yes, it's running pretty well, I'd say. The only time you can actually see that the frame rate is low, is if you actually change the controls to kind of like a joypad style arrangement with like one stick to look around and one stick to move. And in that scenario, when you're sort of having like heavy lateral left-right movement, it looks like 36 frames per second, but you know, that's sort of just a byproduct of the effect really there's not much you can really do about that. The visuals are really good though. I mean, I think part of what they were aiming for here is a seamless experience. So basically, you can play on the standalone mode, on the frame, or you can play streaming. And your saves will transition across the content is the same. And from that perspective, it works. And I think that's kind of like something that they absolutely needed to do to maintain consistency in the kind of in the ecosystem there.

22:35I mean, you can't have two separate versions of Half-Life Alex, right? They got essentially the same headset. So yeah, that's that's really, really impressive. And the quality of the game is similar to all of the Half-Life games from from Valve. So it's kind of timeless really. And the fact that VR hardware has kind of like remained. Virtually static, you one might say, means that, you know, it just kind of still looks good. So to speak, it's still a top two experience. So yeah, I mean, you know, I'm just mega surprised they were able to carry it off, but they have done so. And it turned out that, you know, it was kind of like work that happened in parallel with the hardware development as well. So, you know, one thing fed to the other. Got some footage here, and you might notice that we kind of beholden to the limitations of capturing VR here. So you might occasionally see some like really blocky parts in the image, but what that actually is is the foveated rendering working exactly the way it should.

23:41In those points, the eyes not looking at that area of the screen. So it gets deep prioritized and rendered a lower resolution. Do you see it in the headset? A little bit, but it's virtually unnoticeable. Only if you're sort of going out looking for it and coming up with scenarios to kind of like fall the the high tracking. That's really a bit of a lower resolution. But this is Half-Life Alex working on a mobile chipset. Holy crap, this is great. One out of battery life here that is a bit. I did see rich. There was a people were testing a lot of standalone games that were not VR in here and high end games don't work well naturally. But I did see somebody playing cyberpunk on it. And again, frame rate's not super high, but like somehow just the idea of a game like that running on what's basically a mobile phone chipset on a VR headset at all. And it's somehow cool to me like you just like wow, okay, that's kind of awesome that it works.

24:41Yeah, so funny you should mention cyberpunk 2077 John because come on, it's the benchmark game of the generation right. And so naturally you've got to give it a go. I mean, we're in he be dragons territory, I think, because it's a mobile chipset and Valve is positioning this primarily as a streaming device. So local play almost like an extra. Yeah, anyway, got some gameplay running here, but frame has no video output. So it's running through remote play and comparing in helmet results to remote play results on the benchmark. You're losing about 12% of performance here. So it's not entirely representative, but arguably when the gameplay is as choppy as it is here, it doesn't really matter. But if people want a benchmark for comparison purposes 720p FSR2 balance mode steam deck preset got me 22.4 FPS average and steam deck will be a whole lot faster than that.

25:42I actually lost frames dropping settings to medium. And I think that's because maybe you're shifting work away from the GPU exposing the CPU and CPUs definitely a primary limiting factor here. You can see that just by loading up a save it takes ages to stream in and decompress that data. So yeah, expectation management is the order of day really. You got to pick your battles. And as I said, you know, I played streets of age four locally. That was the first game I actually played on the steam frame. It's one of Valve's recommended titles and it just runs beautifully locks 60 frames per second. It's awesome. That's the kind of experience that you should be targeting for local play on this machine. Higher end games though, I mean, just got to accept that this is not what this is built for, but it does make the achievement of getting half life Alex running locally, even more impressive in my books. So yeah, I mean, how do we summarize all of this discussion over I mean it's it's kind of like a product I guess only Valve could produce at this point. It looks like meta kind of stepping back from VR doesn't it.

26:53And that kind of leaves us in the realm of like niche devices like John's. The climax old. Oh yeah, I'm encouraged that Valve is continuing to iterate in this space. I guess if anyone is going to, you know, hold the torts for the art for the definite future might as well be Valve because they're in the position to control the plot from ecosystem. They have a really compelling device. I think it could well be them for well to come. I don't really see any else pushing VR in that interesting of a direction at the moment at least outside of the high end headsets, but I think the market for a high end climax is a lot more limited than for a steam frame. I think the steam frame is much more compelling, you know, mass market would probably be pushing it too far, but certainly a much more compelling mainstream ish device for VR. But yeah, I don't I'm not really seeing anything with this particular effort that that makes me think it's going to make VR a truly mass market proposition, but I am seeing a lot of things that make this seem like a really cool VR headset.

28:03So if you're already interested in VR, I think this is a pretty safe bet if you're flying with some of the battery life limitations, especially as I think like like we saw with steam deck. Hopefully we'll see the same for them on with steam frame where we see actually a lot of development and a lot of compatibility on the software side with the device, right? Because I know at the moment there are like something like 120 games that are white listed for steam frame to run standalone in the device. I expect that number to creep up and up and out, you know, and for a lot of games to be pretty accessible. Hey, this is Nick and Jack from the best one yet podcast. Now the last company we worked at they used pay lost and everything just worked. It wasn't until launch our own media business this show that we realized how where that is because pay lost is one delicious burrito of operation. They roll up HR finance and IT seamlessly into one delicious bite. And everything wraps together like that all once your workforce, your tech stack, your business, you don't need more tools. You don't even need cilantro.

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30:08We're going to kick off with this one from cheaper one. Hey, y'all, exclamation point. How many technical problems are due to feedback? Not piercing the language barrier, for instance, from software games often have poor frame pacing. Are they just not aware? Do you think, do they just need a poke for my Japanese source? Thanks for all you guys do. Interesting question, right, John? But ultimately, I think it's fair to say that the Japanese are fully aware of everything that's being said about the games. But from software situation, though, is I think it's basically to the point where, you know, I have spoken to platform holders that deal with various third parties. And they have dealt with from software. And it's, you know, basically it's they do their own thing. The technical side of things. It's not really their focus. It is what it is. This stuff is highlighted to them. And it's down to the developer to fix it. Yeah, it is a bit of an egregious problem. But I'd say that the frame pacing thing, you know, it's, it's not a wholly from software type thing.

31:11We've just had the blood of dawn Walker come out with very poor 30 frames per second. So yeah, I'm not sure how much the language barriers on issue here, particularly in the world where developer development is a global enterprise at the moment. And, you know, even the likes of catcom, etc. Have a lot of Western stuff on board as well as I understand it. So yeah, not really an issue. Yeah, this is a tricky one. And I don't think so. So the frame pacing issue we've always talked about is due to a capping the frame rate below the V sync or the refresh rate. So you're going to see it if you're at 30 FPS and a 60 hertz container or 60 hertz 60 FPS and 120 hertz container. If the game doesn't perform it correctly. And because 60 FPS has become so more prevalent this generation, it feels like we haven't seen it as often. But it does still creep up. It's not just from software game. Obviously, Dragon's dog my two and it first came out from Capcom.

32:13I had a 30 FPS cap. Same problem. Blood of the dawn what wait the blood of dawn. Oh my gosh, that's stupid name. The blood of dawn Walker. I think that's right, Rich. Okay, the blood of dawn Walker has it as well. So I've wondered about this because I've worked with the number of developers now sort of on the side. For various things. And I've encountered these type of issues before. And I've sort of posed the question like, do you guys see this? And what I found is that when it ships this way, a lot of people do not see it. It is a subjective problem. And that a lot of people's eyes just don't seem to pick up on this this issue at all. And developers are used to working in scenarios where one, the game runs kind of bad often throughout development, especially in the debug tools. And you know, when you're actually developing it to the tools often report results that are good.

33:18You're getting the correct or smooth enough frame times and frame rates and everything seems to be good on the performance side. Three, a lot of developers I found actually use remote workstation setups where they're off. They're like basically like connecting to diff kits remotely and that stuff also introduces its own problems. And other things like that. Basically, there's a lot of things that prevent people from seeing the raw footage of the game. And you'd say, well, just play it normally. And I think even when people do. It's like a weird blindness for some folk like they just subjectively are not able to detect the problem, which is why not everyone picks up on it. And I know that seems silly for the people making it, but I think it really is just that simple. If the tools are reporting results that are good and you're, but your eyes aren't able to detect the problem, you don't solve it. And I almost guaranteed that's what happens in from software. Whoever's involved in this doesn't see the problem.

34:19They're not able to physically see it with their eyes. And they don't understand the complaint is my guess. I don't know for sure. Maybe there's other things going on in their engine that make this tricky or annoying or something. But I really think it's just something as simple as that. It's just that they're missing it. Well, it's kind of become a moot point because they've come up with another solution, which is just to run unlocked. Yeah, most of the time it's true and that that also sucks, but it's probably sucks less, especially if you have a VR or not that I think you should lean on it as a crutch, but. Yeah, from software. And some others they really just don't have a clue when it comes to the stuff with frame health, if you will. So I really appreciate when developers do take that stuff seriously and a lot of them do take it very seriously indeed. Yeah, I mean, famously we do have a video up on the channel that shows that with like a very, very simple patch to the game to any form software game, you can run it properly, frame, place 30 frames per second.

35:25The wall back being it's using like a Sony library to do the job. And it does incur extra latency presumably through extra buffering. And so the latency is higher, but you know, again, thinking of going back to the beta of destiny one that had inconsistent for the facing and they fixed it, but they did make a point of saying that it wasn't easy to do that while maintaining low latency. So that might be another part of the issue there. I suspect it's even a combo there where people are largely not detecting or feeling the issue is significant, but they do see the numbers about latency and they're like focused more on that. And I understand the idea of keeping the latency down that is important, but I think you shouldn't do so at the expense of frame consistency and I think both are actually possible. Any thoughts on it? Yeah, I think in some cases there might be an issue where there's put priorities like like John and you indicated where if you're getting lower latency with the broken FPS cap, higher latency with the fixed one, maybe go with the broken FPS cap and like games for most their development kind of run like crap, you know, they don't.

36:41So maybe you aren't picking it up on it as much if the game is already not hitting its frame rate target for the majority of development, maybe you're just used to it. And then when you actually do hit frame rate target, maybe you're not seeing it as much. I'd also point out that it's something that you know, to discuss the language barrier problem. I don't really think it's language barrier problem because within different like Japanese teams, even it's two years like Capcom, you see different approaches being taken right depending on the team. In some cases, they have a broken frame rate cap. In some cases, they have no frame rate cap. In some cases, they have a correct frame rate cap like with on a motion switch to, I believe, monster hunter wild some capcom also has a correctly frame rate cap. But conversely, there are titles like Dragon stock, but two and a million other titles that are not so well behaved in various ways, right? That way you've documented over the years. So I think it's just it's rooted primarily in different perceptions of the issue within given studios, perhaps between different teams or between different studios, etc. But I have noticed that occurring a little bit more in some Japanese titles. I'm in particular recently with some Japanese ports to switch to.

37:47But I don't really think it stems from language barrier. I just think it's something that comes from different priorities within different teams. And if you don't see it or you prioritize lower input latency, you can be led down a chain of decisions that I don't really agree with. But ultimately, you know, that produces an image that you know, kind of like John said, some people just don't see it. And I wish was one of those people, but I'm not. Right. Okay, let's move on. Next question here from Octolima. Hello, D.F. Lance, exclamation point. Besides things like new or anything and all that. What you quote unquote, straight of DLSS, which you'd be interested in is it some sort of virus at this point. I would love to see performance of the newer models improve, but besides that, I'm not sure where else the tech could. What would be after frame, Jen, an upscaling any thoughts? So yeah, obviously, and video has gone in one direction with a kind of generative lighting pass with DLSS 5. And yeah, I'm not entirely sure that it should be under the DLSS umbrella as such.

38:51So Oliver, any thoughts on where DLSS in terms of its kind of, I guess the original AI powered performing heart enhancing side of things should go. Yeah, I would like to see some kind of latency reduction technology, which I know is under reflex, but perhaps that could fall into DLSS. And I'd love to see more progress on the reflex time warp concept they had. I think Alex, nice solid it. CES like two years ago, but it never actually shipped in any game to my understanding. It seems to been dropped and video is not talking about it too much. I don't know exactly what's going on with that. That technology, especially if it could be made to work with frame generation, which I think the technology that we saw was not able to work with frame generation, could make games more responsive. Because I think as we kind of decouple the update of the game and the updated of any given rendered frame from the actual frames, the player is seeing. I think a technology like this is probably interesting, if not important, I think it would be cool to see it.

39:52And that would be a really cool feature to have under DLSS or some kind of a video technology. But on the kind of other set of things on the neural rendering set of things, I think you could push a technique like not DLSS 5 necessarily. DLSS 5 is trying to do lighting, but I think you could kind of do a neural re styling filter. Maybe that would be an interesting area to go with DLSS, kind of like a filter that translates one game's tile into another game style. So you could have like a neural re styling filter that implements self shading into a realistic game where a neural re styling filter that maybe gives the game like an animated painting look. Right, then I know some games have achieved in various forms using various art tweaks, asset tweaks, various shaders, whatever, but you could actually achieve something that feels maybe a little bit more natural, a little more sophisticated, a little bit more emergent in that sense. I think you could push DLSS in a lot of interesting directions, basically. But I think the most proximate thing would just be something to tackle latency, but not actual latency perceived latency.

40:59I think that would be the way to go. I think they're being interesting places. Right. Yeah. From my perspective, it is about basically the thing, the quote unquote thing that is holding back frame generation from being everything it could be is essentially the fact that you're always going to need to buffer a frame. Right. You're always going to be a frame in that you're going to need to render in advance and then generate the interpolated sort of intermediate frames there. That's the thing that's kind of like the major downside to DLSS frame generation, which is to say that, you know, inevitably you've got to add latency because of that. Now, the extent to which that latency is important, I think in some scenarios is overblown in a world where every game has a different level of latency and nobody sort of points fingers again running at 60 FPS saying, well, this is running 30 milliseconds slower to response than this other game running at 60 frames per second, but at the same time, that is kind of like the wall back of frame generation.

42:04And I don't know how they're going to fix that in terms of like have you know, unless there is some sort of re-projection into the future, so to speak, which would be super super tricky to do. But with that said, you know, everything DLSS 5 is doing is super super tricky to do on a technical perspective. I don't know where else you can push DLSS in terms of it being a performance enhancing technology, which is kind of like what I associate with with the brand, you know, deep learning super sampling. I guess can go either on sort of tempo or spatial resolution, but I don't think it applies to AI filters. So I think it should maybe there is some sort of future in folding in reflex into DLSS because you know reflexes inherently performance enhancing technology. Tricky one for sure. I think the other thing, which is quite interesting is you know, on the upscaling side of things DLSS 4.5 is really, really good, right?

43:05But at the same time, FSR4 is really good. At the same time, I think the 4.0 transformer model is really good with DLSS. So we've actually reached the point now where I would say for a lot of people, the upscaling side of things is kind of good enough. And there's only iterative improvements to come. And maybe there is an argument to be said for focusing on other things. And I think you know, the recent release of the 4.5, maybe construction DLSS was like pretty much what we wanted. So we're going to do a lot of things on DLSS. Oh man, what kind of silly things could we do here? How about DLSS smooth motion? And by that, I mean, you know, you have the pulse or monitor doing that to try to clean up motion blur and moving images. What if what if you could do this on any high frame rate monitor? I mean, we could kind of do that already. But if they found a way to implement this at the game level.

44:07And then just like, uh, cleans up motion uses the high refresh rate to do some sort of backlight, not even backlight like black frame insertion or something. But controlled by the GPU in a different way. I don't know. That'd be fun. We could do what about DLSS VR. No, I know VR is not big. Well, what if what if every game you could just magically render out two frames and like appears so basically like three bringing 3d vision back but doing it so like it's like a hassle free process. I mean, a lot of the stuff already exists in mods and other programs. It's just the idea of being able to just like put on your VR headset and have the game be 3d would be awesome. Yeah. Or DLSS sound. I don't even know what that would be. I don't even know. Did you said it? I think one of their serious answer would be I think Brian Katenzaro said this to me and Alex a couple of years ago, maybe where he basically said, well, what if you had, this is not a new concept.

45:08But what if you just had automatic frame gen up to the refresh rate of your monitor from like an arbitrary input kind of like we see with LSFG at the moment, I believe. Where every frame is maybe a generated frame. That would also be really cool. If you had some super fast hardware to do that and just give you like 1000 FPS from your 60 FPS input. I don't know how good that would look, but that is one way for DLSS FG to evolve beyond like the fixed integer. I guess it's not a fixed multiplier anymore, but it is kind of a multiplier based approach into germ multiplier based approach to frame generation. Maybe you could achieve something new in that field as well. That would be kind of interesting. There is something else that we could discuss here and it is basically the whole concept. I mean, obviously there has been the concept of DLSS 5 working on an AMD GPU, the extent to which it's actually properly working, which require proper analysis. But you know, there has been a port. Secondly, the kind of moat that Nvidia has developed around certain DLSS features seems to be disappearing. I mean, there are now mods that enable you to run multi frame generation on 2030 and 40 series.

46:22This is really interesting from my perspective because it seems to me the case that there's a lot of reverse engineering going on that is expanding the remit of DLSS to older hardware in a world where people are basically being forced through the AI hardware crisis to keep their old hardware. Right. Invent, you know, necessity versus invention is pretty amazing to see all of that stuff. And it's reached the point now where the BC 250 mining card, which is based on basically effective PlayStation 5 silicon. It's got a working version of FS R4. It doesn't have intate acceleration that that particular APU, but basically it's been reverse engineered and made to work with reasonable frame times on the BC 250 running Linux, which is astonishing. Now in theory and maybe I should try and find a few moments to test it, the DLL that makes that possible should in theory allow FS R4 to run on RDNA one.

47:30So yeah, there's there's kind of like the progress should of features that we might hope to see Nvidia take DLSS and then there's basically this entire movement that's working to take these AI features and make them run on as much hardware as possible, which is, is remarkable. Anyway, let's move on.

48:42Okay, final question to show this one comes from Skyrim Fest 26 FPS edition. And the question is this now technology has advanced to the point where you can play alongside an IKEA Calak shelving unit in Skyrim. What budget Swedish furniture would you like to see in Elder Scrolls 6? My money is on 4xDLSS 5 rendered lactables. John, this has been like, I think, probably one of the most amusing and delightful grand collaborations we've seen in recent times to iconic franchise is coming together. What do you think? It's cute. This kind of stuff is fun. I like to see it, you know, obviously these these games are often about storing items and collecting tons of stuff. So just it's just a fun joke. What can I say? And I'm happy to see that given where things are at these days, it's fun to see a little bit of levity in your updates.

49:45So it just reminds me how back in the morrow in days, my younger sister was so into this. I think I've mentioned this before, but she played for like thousands of hours of morrow in. But used to like, I remember took took over Balmora in that game and killed everyone in it or pretty much everyone in it. And like, basically took over the houses and made each house like a storage for a different type of item like you had the sword house. Yeah, like the shield house stuff like that. You could actually display them all out, which was a really fun thing. So that's the first thing I thought of when I saw this kind of like little joke here was like, oh yeah, they're just kind of referencing the older storage aspect of these Elder Scrolls games. And it is funny having a little calics following you around. So I feel like the calics itself is rather iconic at this point. Most people have at least a calics somewhere. We certainly do. Yeah, I was going to say I do, but I actually have its predecessor, X expedite. I think it was called justice for expedite. Why did they replace it?

50:52It's a retro. Yeah, I've got the retro version of the Kellex. Well, let's talk about key furniture. Obviously the strand on wing chair in Nordwala dark way. I think is. It could replace some phones in Skyrim. That would be pretty good, I think. But beyond that, I just enjoying this particular brand collaboration. I thought it was really fun and kind of stuck the landing. Oliver, any thoughts on IKEA and also Ekea to give it the correct pronunciation and game collaborations? Well, I have an IKEA and game collaboration right behind me because that is an IKEA billy bookshelf, I think. Oh, I see. The whole time I had old consoles and such. I built that when I moved into this apartment because I thought it looked reasonable and seemed sturdy enough. And I only had so much money. So that's what I bought. And it seems to work that okay. Seems to work that okay.

51:56But in terms of this question, I mean four times the LSS five, I don't get out of bed for anything less than 10 times these days. Come on, you got a those are rookie numbers. You get a pun for that. I don't. Yeah, four times. I've seen. Yeah, four times is pretty intense, but 10 times is where it's at. I'm sure we're going to agree. I've got a man. I'm getting bored of those bond videos on social media now. It's becoming right click, not interested or right click mute because they it's time for dresses. They're just looking worse and worse. So I saw a Alan Wake 2 one the other day, which the author thought was like really, really good. And it basically just makes Sarger look about 30 years older. What's the point of that? The whole thing is, you know, let's see some actual game integrations at this point. I'm done with a TLSS five mods at this point. They're just looking for more, more hideous with each passing moment. So anything more you want to add to this particular discussion, that John?

52:56Well, unrelated, but why you were finishing up, I just discovered something rich. Do you know what I'm playing right now as we record? It's a fantasy star online in a browser. Wow. It's really important. Fantasy star online, the Dreamcast game to a web browser. It's running right now at a very high frame rate inside Chrome. I'm looking at it as we play. And I'm just like amazed. Like this is the whole game. It's here online and offline. Like what the heck? Like I just thought that was really cool. Like you can just sit here and play. It's PSO reborn.com. You just go there and you got PSO running in your browser. Oh, man. It's a really cool game. It's a really cool game. Yeah, it brings back many, many happy memories. That's freaking cool, man. I was just remembering that back in the day when I was playing it, there was a particular supplier that was, I think it might have been British Telecom that was basically gave you like a reasonable price for two hours online. And so you had like two hours online, and then you reached a two hour point and then you had to like go offline and then we connect again to continue.

54:05That was a great game. That was an amazing game. Wasn't it? Sure. I was doing the same thing over and over again, never got old. Yeah, I'll have to take some. I'll have to take some footage of this and playing it right now, but I can't. It's cool, right? It's like a last very long, but it's very cool. This is outstanding. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. Well, that is the end of the show. So please do like, subscribe, share all of that stuff. Ring bells and whatnot. DF supporter program, of course, patreon.com slash digital found V early access to DF to it weekly. High quality video downloads and free of everything we do and have done since pretty much late 2016. We're going to be coming up to the 10 year anniversary of our video downloads soon. And at free access to our website, digitalfoundv.net. And yes, if you want to read everything that we talked about, about half life Alex and indeed the steam frame, that's going to be up there right now. And lots of other juicy content as well, but that's all from us on this one. We'll see you soon in the next direct.

55:07And I guess John will be seeing you in a couple of weeks. Yep. Sounds good. Okay. See you soon. With my Sapphire preferred card, we took a trip to a desert oasis. Twenty five times the points on Chase traveled two times points on all other travel plus a hundred dollar hotel credit. And the Sapphire preferred card that's preferred for a reason. Guards issued by JP Morgan J's bank and a member of the SE subject to credit approval terms apply. You've never been one to settle. Stand down or stand still. You're a lifelong learner. Energized by excellence. There's a fire inside you. You can't ignore. You've got competition to outrun, momentum to build on, and your own high standards to meet. Stop now. Not a chance. At Capella University, we help you catch what you're chasing because you've always had the drive. Now go earn the degree. Capella University, what can't you do? Visit Capella.edu to learn more. Forming a business seems easy until influencers, Reddit, and AI give different advice.

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