Having skipped a week with our usual, scheduled DF Direct show in favour of The Last of Us and Intel Arc specials, we have plenty of news and discussion to catch up with, starting with the news that a brand new PlayStation 5 revision is en route to our shores now, having already made its debut in Australia. Tech journalist Austin Evans has already imported a unit, dismantled it and got to the bottom of what makes it different – and lighter – than the existing units.
We’re looking to go hands-on with the unit as soon as it arrives in the UK, but what Evans has discovered is intriguing – a completely redesigned, much smaller, mainboard along with another smaller revision of the heat sink along with other internal changes within the existing PlayStation 5 casing. Annoying from a future-proofing perspective is that the CMOS battery on the board now resides under the cooling assembly, so when this does inevitably run out of juice years down the road, replacing it will be a far from an easy job.
From my perspective, it is the power consumption numbers that are most interesting. Evans talks about a reduced power draw compared to the prior units he’s tested, but the nature of the observation is inconclusive in that his CFI-1100 power draw number was actually higher than his figure taken from the launch unit, while this one is correspondingly lower. Fundamentally, the silicon did not change between CFI-1000 and CFI-1100, so is this reduced power draw actually down to a chip revision? Or is it simply down to variances in the quality of the silicon – which can change on a per chip basis? Or maybe Sony has moved onto lower power memory modules? Regardless, a power consumption figure in or around 200W is still in the broad ballpark of the launch machine.
- 00:00:00 Introduction
- 00:01:38 News 01: New PS5 revision is lighter, possibly more power-efficient
- 00:11:58 News 02: 1440p PS5 firmware released to all players
- 00:21:42 News 03: Sony calls Microsoft’s Call of Duty on PlayStation offer “inadequate”
- 00:29:57 News 04: Halo Infinite split-screen co-op cancelled!
- 00:37:13 News 05: Metal Gear Solid remasters incoming?
- 00:42:35 News 06: Sonic Amateur Game Expo 2022 recap!
- 00:49:30 DF Supporter Q1: How does Alex feel about his new OLED TV from a PC gaming perspective?
- 01:03:18 DF Supporter Q2: How did gamers feel about the transition from CRTs to LCDs when it was actually happening?
- 01:09:36 DF Supporter Q3: When can we expect DF videos with direct-feed VRR game capture?
- 01:11:06 DF Supporter Q4: Will we see early signs of a Switch successor soon?
- 01:13:37 DF Supporter Q5: Should I upgrade my Ryzen 3700X to a 5800X3D for ray-traced gaming?
- 01:18:32 DF Supporter Q6: Which console has DF recorded the most? Also, which console is the hardest to record?
Other discussion points this week include the official roll-out of the 1440p display support update for PlayStation 5, which seems to be much the same as the beta firmware we’ve already tested. This is a touch disappointing to be honest, because features that should have been added – such as variable refresh rate support – didn’t make it into the official release. Not only that, but there are still reports of poor compatibility with HDMI 2.0 TVs, which we did feed back to Sony as soon as we encountered the problem. With some tweakery, it’s possible for an HDMI 2.0 screen to display 60Hz content at full 4K and 120Hz games at 1440p – the best you can get from an HDMI 2.0 TV – but the test procedure could be easily tweaked to make this set-up easier to attain. Ultimately, the feature is more likely geared to owners of 1440p monitors, where it does well, but HDMI 2.0 TV support doesn’t seem to have been a priority for Sony.
Elsewhere in this Direct, we discuss the ongoing war of words between Sony and Microsoft over Call of Duty’s multi-platform future, while we also puzzle over the cancellation of split-screen support for Halo Infinite’s campaign co-op feature. During filming, we were aware of the ‘exploit’ to access this feature in the current code, but we hadn’t tested it. Well, now we have – and it works, albeit with some issues. Microsoft told us that the developers were politely declining to comment on this, but ultimately the key question remains: if the fundamentals work, why has the feature been cancelled? We’ll be showing how it does look later this week.
In other discussion points, we cover some of the brilliant homebrew games to debut at the Sonic Amateur Games Expo (and remember, you can download them all for free), the potential in Metal Gear Solid remasters and then of course, it’s the Supporter Q+A segment, where we tackle a bunch of questions offered up by backers of the Digital Foundry Supporter Program. How’s Alex getting along with his bargain 48-inch LG OLED C1 purchase? If CRTs were so good, why wasn’t more of a fuss made during the transition to inferior LCD technology? When will we start to feature direct feed VRR footage and analysis? Our supporters not only provide plenty of great questions for our show but are also the backbone of our excellent community on Discord – join us!
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