You may remember that we relaunched the Digital Foundry merch store for Black Friday last year, with a host of DF-adjacent designs for shirts, mugs, hoodies, posters and stickers. Today, we’re happy to announce our first wave of new designs for 2024 – expertly modelled by Rich and Alex in this week’s DF Direct show – plus the return of a fan favourite.
Our two new designs are right there in the header image for this blog – we have the DF Approved shirt on the left, in white, and the Motherboard shirt on the right, in grey. Both shirts are screen printed on 100 percent cotton Gildan softstyle midweight shirts, and they’re super comfortable to wear. The DF Approved design certifies that you, the wearer of this t-shirt, are a cool and fashionable person, while the Motherboard design is a beautifully detailed take on a circuit board, complete with bespoke and full-fat embellishments of a nerdy nature.
Meanwhile, the returning design is the DF Fighters shirt in the centre, which features some incredible artwork from community member Rachel Hams, showing each of the members of the team in the style of a retro beat ’em up. After selling out fairly quick the first time around, the DF Fighters is now fully restocked and available in all sizes from S to 3XL. This is a good chance to pick up the shirt – with a matching poster, if you prefer! – while supplies last.
We’ve also reduced many shipping prices since the store first launched, so if you buy one shirt, untracked shipping to the UK should cost £3, while tracked shipping is £5. International tracked shipping is also cheaper, eg around $14 to ship to the US and €12 to ship to Germany.
As always, these items are a nice way to support Digital Foundry and the work that we do, as well as being useful apparel and/or accessories in their own right – and we greatly appreciate the support. So: please do check out the DF merch store!
Finally, these March additions won’t be the only new DF merch items released in 2024 either – we have a packed schedule planned, including some new product categories debuting in April and May which I’m really excited about, but we’ll talk about those a little closer to their release!
- 0:00:00 Introduction and DF merchandise
- 0:02:26 News 01: Rise of the Ronin preview
- 0:11:40 News 02: Nvidia announces upcoming game enhancements
- 0:35:55 News 03: Intel unveils PresentMon 2.0
- 0:51:08 News 04: Stellar Blade demo released, quickly pulled
- 0:56:48 News 05: Peter Moore questions the future of consoles
- 1:12:11 Supporter Q1: Should console platforms let you impose frame-rate caps yourself?
- 1:19:39 Supporter Q2: What rendering tech will we see pushed after path tracing?
- 1:27:22 Supporter Q3: Should more developers expose debug menus in their games?
- 1:31:43 Supporter Q4: What storage tech do you work off of?
- 1:39:38 Supporter Q5: What would Digital Foundry have looked like in the 1990s?
Meanwhile, while DF Direct started with a little merch promotion, of course there were plenty of other headlines this week that deserved their own air time. The one I found particularly interesting was Oliver’s early look at Rise of the Ronin, Team Ninja’s upcoming PS5 blockbuster. The review embargo for this game hasn’t yet expired, but a preview embargo is now up – so we’re free to discuss a bit about the game and how it’s shaping up.
From a technical perspective, there’s a clear visual evolution here from the likes of Wo Long Fallen Dynasty, the development team’s last outing in 2023. Oliver picked up on the apparent inclusion of a Virtual Shadow Map (VSM) solution, which produces extremely high-resolution shadows with variable penumbra across all three graphics modes. Those modes are performance, graphics and RT, with the RT mode including reflections on smaller bodies of water (think ponds and streams).
Both of these upgrades are impressive, especially in outdoor areas, though Oliver noted that interior spaces and cities are somewhat less impressive by comparison, with a relatively naive solution for indirect lighting and ambient occlusion that doesn’t measure up to the best examples we’ve seen on PS5. There are also some image quality concerns, including what looks like a checkerboard setup for resolution and some image breakup evident, but we’ll have to wait for the full review embargo to show this in more detail.
Overall though, it’s a reasonable-looking game that eclipses anything Team Ninja have produced so far and is fun to play, even though it’s not a graphical masterclass and performance isn’t quite up to snuff in some areas. Tom is on the review for this one, so stay tuned for that as and when!
Otherwise, the rest of the show includes discussion of upcoming Nvidia enhancements to a raft of games (think various flavours of RT and DLSS), fundamentally intriguing upgrades to Intel’s open source PresentMon performance analysis tools, the accidental release of the Stellar Blade demo for PS5 and much more.
We also received some great supporter questions this week, including the mooting of console-level frame-rate capping, a la the Steam Deck and RTSS on PC, fallout from the Spider-Man debug menu and insight into our own PC storage solutions – plus, what would Digital Foundry look like if it started in the 90s?
We’re almost always blessed with an abundance of fascinating questions, and if you’d like to ask some of your own to be answered on DF Direct or DF InDirect, consider joining us!
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