DF Direct Weekly #282: 007 First Light Path Tracing, Kingmakers Gameplay, New GPUs Delayed To 2028?

Rich (0:02)

Hello there, and a very warm welcome to this, the 282nd edition of DF Direct Weekly, our weekly show discussing the latest gaming and technology news. Lots of topics to get through this week. We're going to be leading with a quick lowdown on 7 First Light Path Tracing, which is something of a double-edged sword, but remarkable nonetheless.

12 minutes of Kingmaker's gameplay. I've been watching, or looking out rather, for more on that title for quite some time, but we finally have it. Lots to talk about there. Tom? Hello, Tom.

Tom (0:32)

Hello.

Rich (0:33)

That's just to introduce you. Hello, Tom. Morgan, hello.

Tom (0:35)

How's it going? Yeah, I've got a Fire Emblem, a Fortune's Weave segment coming up later on as well, which has been in demand, and yeah, looking forward to getting to that as well.

Rich (0:46)

Okay, and Oliver McKenzie. Hello. Diablo 4 I'll take a look at that this week.

Oliver McKenzie (0:52)

Yes, Rich. I think we all have our own respective segments with our own respective captures for this week, so that should be good. I think a lot of work is going to do this particular episode, so hopefully it shows.

Rich (1:04)

Yeah, I'd like to have an episode where we can just sit back and comment on what everybody else is doing. But apparently not much this week, even with the Tokyo Game Show. Anyway, I guess we should just crack on. Okay, so our first news topic of the week, and it's basically a game release or rather a patch release. IO Interactive's brilliant 7 First Light has received its Path Tracing update and, man, this is crazy stuff. It's kind of like path tracing with the gloves off, so to speak. It's fair to say that the visual transformation that's delivered by this upgrade is, I'd say it's extraordinary. It's really, really interesting. It's a fascinating combination of, how can I describe it? Comparing sort of artists' intent without any kind of ray tracing involved versus like the full-on path traced experience. And we'll be talking about some of the A to B comparisons a bit later on. But there has been controversy about it. And it starts with the recommended specifications that were put out by IO Interactive, where basically they're suggesting that to play the game at 1080p, 60 frames per second with path tracing on the medium setting, an RTX 5070 should be able to do that. Now, you know, with DLSS, I've been able to play a fair amount of path tracing games on the 5070, just fine, right? But always at 1440p, 1080p, that's sort of pretty heavy. Then it's talking about recommended specifications where it's suggesting an RTX 5080 at 1440p. And again, that's heavy. You kind of associate the 5080 with being kind of like a 4K card, right? And then path tracing ultra and 5090 there, obviously 4K at 200 FPS plus DLSS 4.5. Now what they're talking about there is actually frame generation. And yeah, you shouldn't really be doing this on PC recommended specs, adding your various sort of caveats. You've got to be fully transparent about what you need to run the game without frame generation, I think.

And yeah, I'm just going to quickly talk about performance first of all, because it is quite important before we talk about the good stuff, because the 5070 stuff in particular is rankling me a bit, because I did actually first of all play on the 5080 and yes, it's heavy. Then I played on the 5070, expecting to be able to drop resolution and everything would be okay on the same settings.

And it kind of works, but 1440p is out of the picture. You can't use anything higher than 1080p really, and you do need to use DLSS Super Resolution on top of that.

And I eventually used Balanced Mode for that to get the kind of performance you're seeing in this performance clip, which kind of looks okay, but that is with 2x FrameGen.

Now that's looking okay, I think, but the resolution is low, this is really, really heavy. The image quality isn't quite where I'd like it to be. I kind of think the 5070 is a 1440p card. So tricky, but acceptable, because you're getting a taste of the experience. Acceptable, but not great. But then you get to this section here, the sort of chase scene before the big airfield fight. It's just a mess, I don't know what's going on here. I think maybe we're running out of memory because the performance collapse here is just extraordinary. It's, you know, I can't recommend 7 First Light Path Tracing on the 5070, and that pains me because, you know, I kind of like the 5070 It's the card that I usually have plugged in when I want to play a new game, because I can actually find a game's limitations quite easily. But, you know, you can tweak, you can get a good experience. So the fact that you can't get a good experience with a transformative upgrade like this, it does rankle, as I said. I'm quickly going to talk about 5080 performance here.