Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2025]

[trinibwoy]

The dynamically lit destruction is extremely impressive. Great sign of things to come.

 

[Cyan]

What kind of performance was he getting and on what setup? I might have missed it but I scrubbed through and couldn't find any mention of it, other than it targeting 60FPS on console which is a good sign.

id Tech has always been the gold standard for FPS control and responsiveness for me. The games feel really tight and makes me feel like I'm actually good at FPS. I think it actually contributes to feeling like the Doomslayer, being able to bounce around popping off headshots in a way I find difficult in other engines.

from what I could understand at the beginning of video -just before John talks about Raytracing-, he was playing on a powerful PC and they want the game to run at a stable 60fps.

Kind loved that weapon that looks so similar to a weapon from Hexen or Heretic, can't recall which one after the 16:40 mark. Never heard about that game, did John say Proteus? Or is it a game called Medieval? Anyone knows which game is that with the trident like weapon?

 

[iroboto]

Finally feels like we’re turning the corner on leaving behind last Gen.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Doom may wake me from my gaming slumber. Many of the indie games I’ve been waiting for are still in early access. Big games have looked poop. Doom looks fantastic. I’m ready for some frantic gameplay.

 

[Dictator]

from what I could understand at the beginning of video -just before John talks about Raytracing-, he was playing on a powerful PC and they want the game to run at a stable 60fps.

Kind loved that weapon that looks so similar to a weapon from Hexen or Heretic, can't recall which one after the 16:40 mark. Never heard about that game, did John say Proteus? Or is it a game called Medieval? Anyone knows which game is that with the trident like weapon?

The game is "Amid Evil". It plays a lot like Heretic.

 

[trinibwoy]

I really tried to get into Amid Evil but couldn’t. Went in expecting graphics to be bad but the weapons and overall feel were really off for me.

 

[Remij]

I really tried to get into Amid Evil but couldn’t. Went in expecting graphics to be bad but the weapons and overall feel were really off for me.

A-mid-Evil you might say?

 

[DavidGraham]

DF covers all the relevant and hidden details about Switch 2.

0:01:22 Displays: 120Hz VRR HDR 1080p internal display, 4K60/1440p120 docked display output
0:10:09 Battery and battery life
0:11:55 Controller changes: GameChat, magnetic attachment, mouse control, Pro controller upgrades
0:18:14 Storage: 256 GB internal, MicroSD Express support, Game Cards and Game-Key Cards
0:26:27 Game compatibility: games with support issues, Switch 2 upgrades and Switch 2 Editions, GameCube backwards compatibility
0:38:15 Pricing: Console prices, game prices, and value
0:46:45 First party games: Mario Kart World
0:52:31 Kirby Air Riders
0:53:57 Donkey Kong Bananza
0:57:02 Third party games: The Duskbloods
1:00:39 Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, FF7 Remake, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4
1:08:56 Closing thoughts on the presentation and system

 

[Davros]

looks so similar to a weapon from Hexen or Heretic, can't recall which one

ps: I was wondering what game to play next after just finishing Eternal Strands and Amid Evil it is - Thank you
pps: free demo https://www.gog.com/en/game/amid_evil_demo
And there's also a VR version

 

[Charlietus]

DF covers all the relevant and hidden details about Switch 2.

0:01:22 Displays: 120Hz VRR HDR 1080p internal display, 4K60/1440p120 docked display output
0:10:09 Battery and battery life
0:11:55 Controller changes: GameChat, magnetic attachment, mouse control, Pro controller upgrades
0:18:14 Storage: 256 GB internal, MicroSD Express support, Game Cards and Game-Key Cards
0:26:27 Game compatibility: games with support issues, Switch 2 upgrades and Switch 2 Editions, GameCube backwards compatibility
0:38:15 Pricing: Console prices, game prices, and value
0:46:45 First party games: Mario Kart World
0:52:31 Kirby Air Riders
0:53:57 Donkey Kong Bananza
0:57:02 Third party games: The Duskbloods
1:00:39 Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, FF7 Remake, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4
1:08:56 Closing thoughts on the presentation and system

They think that the screen may be a mini LED HDR screen... I was thinking more like a HDR 400 trash laptop screen. If it was a high quality screen the price would be a bit more acceptable.

They also think that portable mode is running on 10 watts, so maybe the process node isn't straight up 8nm Samsung but something a bit more efficient.

 

[Cyan]

DF covers all the relevant and hidden details about Switch 2.

0:01:22 Displays: 120Hz VRR HDR 1080p internal display, 4K60/1440p120 docked display output
0:10:09 Battery and battery life
0:11:55 Controller changes: GameChat, magnetic attachment, mouse control, Pro controller upgrades
0:18:14 Storage: 256 GB internal, MicroSD Express support, Game Cards and Game-Key Cards
0:26:27 Game compatibility: games with support issues, Switch 2 upgrades and Switch 2 Editions, GameCube backwards compatibility
0:38:15 Pricing: Console prices, game prices, and value
0:46:45 First party games: Mario Kart World
0:52:31 Kirby Air Riders
0:53:57 Donkey Kong Bananza
0:57:02 Third party games: The Duskbloods
1:00:39 Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, FF7 Remake, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4
1:08:56 Closing thoughts on the presentation and system

Switch 2 with Mario Kart World for €510. How far we are from the days when you could buy a Nintendo handheld for 100/150€.

 

[Remij]

 

[Below2D]

Continues the trend of TLOU Part I. This game on PS5 outperforms even a 3070/2080 Ti and comes close to a 3070 Ti, which is in general 40% faster than the PS5's GPU.

The RTX 3060 performs especially poorly though. 3.5x faster, but doesn't even manage to run the game 1.5x faster.

 

[Nesh]

Continues the trend of TLOU Part I. This game on PS5 outperforms even a 3070/2080 Ti and comes close to a 3070 Ti, which is in general well 40% faster than the PS5's GPU.

The RTX 3060 performs especially poorly though. 3.5x faster, but doesn't even manage to run the game 1.5x faster.

The LOU has access to PS5's hidden sauce apparently.

 

[techuse]

Never underestimate Naughty Gods console optimization prowess.

 

[DavidGraham]

The LOU has access to PS5's hidden sauce apparently.

Yes indeed, Naughty Dog and Nixxes talked about this in a very recent interview. The Last of Us engine is highly tailored to PS5 strengths, especially the shared memory pool.

The way we write the code is very close to the hardware. It's very specific to PlayStation hardware. So the code will work on this one graphics card and this one CPU. It relies on the bus speed between the two being a certain amount and the amount of memory being fixed.

Another one to add in is memory. On the console, [it’s] one pool of memory. On PC that is much more separated, and transfers between those are quite slow.

And so you really need to think about some parts of the code and how those approach memory management, sometimes quite differently. And the more an engine has been tailor-made to fit to those appendages of the PlayStation, the more you really have to untangle that and do things differently.

I think it’s fair to add that the engine doesn't build on PC. Sometimes people say a PlayStation is just like a PC. Well, the hardware, in a way, is, but the operating system and the APIs, the programming the code talks to is completely different.

So, in a way you don’t need to touch all the assets, but you do need to touch every part of the code that talks to something that's platform-specific. And that's an awful lot that needs to be rewritten, then tested against all the assets that already exist and all the game flows and some things will break.

When you start, you can't even compile it, right? Nothing works. In that sense, you build it from scratch. But of course, as you do that, you make it work and suddenly all the levels are there because all the levels feed into the same code.

But maybe all the levels don't have textures, so you add an extra layer on top of that. Stage by stage, this whole game comes back together – just in a very different way than Naughty Dog built it. They would build it – not literally – but level by level, you make pieces of content

We make all the pieces of code that we think it will take, and then from [the] bottom up it all sort of comes back into existence on a different platform.

Naughty Dog And Nixxes On The PC Port Of The Last Of Us Part II: “We Take The Steam Deck Very, Very Seriously”

We spoke with Naughty Dog and Nixxes about bringing The Last of Us Part II to PC.

gameinformer.com

 

[Nesh]

It's quite interesting and shocking at the same time, how much work developers need to put into the porting even if the hardware is actually almost identical. I wonder if PC developers ever had the chance to optimize to the max a game at least for some specific HW specs considering the amount of hardware configurations available on that platform.

 

[trinibwoy]

It's quite interesting and shocking at the same time, how much work developers need to put into the porting even if the hardware is actually almost identical. I wonder if PC developers ever had the chance to optimize to the max a game at least for some specific HW specs considering the amount of hardware configurations available on that platform.

But it’s not almost identical right? The PS5’s memory subsystem is very different to a PC.

 

[T2098]

I'd be curious if they have paths in the engine to allow APUs (thinking specifically of Strix Halo here, but also Steam Deck and the like) access the shared memory pool without having to copy back and forth like they do on the consoles, or whether the PC ports just run under the assumption that the memory pools will always be split and create duplicate buffers and execute copy instructions like they'd need to do on regular PC hardware. They talk about taking the Steam Deck 'very seriously' in the article and mention that they had specific settings for it, but they didn't mention about specific fast paths/optimizations specific to APUs.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

The outsized GPU usage is not that surprising, kind of expected it. Loading tied to framerate..... Come on man.

The background processing of shaders is nice in that it avoids that 30 minutes wait...but now we get hitching on certain systems because of it. Shader compiling, a sore sport - yet again.

The CPU scalability is bizarre, a 9800X3D ~30% faster than a 3600? PCI-E bus bottlenecked again or something?

Interesting though that Alex refers to Iron Galaxy as the primary porters for Last of Us 1 - the consensus here at the time seemed to be that Naughty Dog did most of the port, and Iron Galaxy was providing assistance - wonder if Alex has more detail on this.