DF Direct Weekly #275: This Is The Most Performant Console Generation Since 16-Bit 2D

**Rich** (0:02)
Hello there, and welcome to the latest edition of DF Direct Weekly. We have now hit the landmark 275th episode, not including specials and videocasts. Lots to get through this week, and joining me first of all, John Lilliman.

**John** (0:17)
Hey Rich, I've been playing Truxton. Truxton Extreme, it's really good. I like it. There's a video up. Go check it out.

**Rich** (0:26)
Good stuff, and Oliver McKenzie. Hello.

**John** (0:29)
Yes, Rich. I'm always keeping track of these milestones. I saw a user in our Discord very helpfully put together a cross-section of our DF Direct appearances, and who's appeared on with whom. Very interesting diagram I saw there.

**Rich** (0:45)
Wow. That's scary in a way.

**John** (0:49)
Was it Alan that did that?

**Rich** (0:51)
No, it was leftist hominid, I believe. Oh, okay.

**John** (0:53)
Well, that seems like an Alan thing. He's very good at organizing data together and presenting it to us.

**Rich** (1:01)
Absolutely. Before we go on, I should get a shout out here for digitalfoundry.net, our website. Please do check that out. We'll put together some highlights here.
Keychron has announced the first open-source firmware for gaming mice echoing keyboard projects like QMK and ZMK. Story on that. Valve has released Steam Deck CAD files.
Maybe we'll actually get a version of the Gabe Cube that has a handle like the Gabe Cube. That'd be pretty decent.
News that apparently God Galaxy is coming to Linux next year, which I think is absolutely fantastic news. Very, very interesting. Our first new story of the week. Not so much a new story as a discussion about how this generation is actually panning out in terms of performance. There's a weird thing that's happening here where, well, actually I'm just going to read out your tweet on the matter, John, because it was in response to somebody who was not happy at all about the performance they were getting from Halo Campaign Evolved on their PC. And your response to that was really interesting and opened up a debate within our Slack channel, which we're going to open up now onto this Direct. But your comment was, this generation has been interesting in this respect. PC gamers are struggling to achieve desired performance in a lot of modern games, and that sucks. But on the flip side, console performance is the best it's been since the 16-bit 2D era. Most games are 60 FPS now, which rules. It's a really interesting job because I think you're right in terms of like the outlook on what's happening on consoles here. I was wondering whether it might actually have been the 3D PS2 era because that was really strong in terms of 60 FPS, but it's better than that even, you're saying?

**John** (2:43)
I would say it's better than that because, yeah, that era was really good for 60 FPS, but there were still a lot of higher end games where they just had to go back to 30 and some went much lower.

**Rich** (2:54)
I would say.

**John** (2:55)
This time around, 60 FPS is genuinely the default on game consoles. When I say that, I mean, really across the board, whether it's a high end game or a budget software you can find on a shelf like a media marked or like anything in between, like 95 plus percent of the time you're going to pop that thing in and it's going to be 60 FPS, which is a standard again we have not had since the 2D era. The reason 2D was like that had to do with the way the screen was drawn and the way that type of hardware worked. It was very specifically architected around that. So I think that's awesome news and it really got me thinking about it. You have a lot of complaints about like, oh, Unreal this, Unreal that. Unreal has issues for sure, especially in the image quality department. That's one area where we're still lacking, I would say. But this generation of Unreal is the best performing Unreal we've had ever on consoles. And it's not even close. Like it is so far beyond. Like Unreal Engine 2 and 1 on the PS2 Xbox era, not great. This games had to be chopped up into little bits and there's loading screens everywhere. It didn't run that great. It was not made for consoles. Unreal Engine 3 was obviously revolutionary, but like 99% of games were 30 FPS or less and often way less. The only exceptions being like the Netherrealm Mortal Combat games and maybe like one or two others, but everything was much lower. The target that gen was 30 FPS at most.
Unreal Engine 4 was kind of mixed on the generation after that, where you either had a pretty decent 30 FPS experience or you'd have a lot of those titles that were just like unlocked and they'd run at like 40, 45 FPS on average, which I didn't love. And all of these different generations had stuttering issues, especially on PC.