DF Direct: our weekly show celebrates 200 episodesPlus: do we need a DF input latency rating system?Image credit: Digital Foundry Blog by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry Published on Feb. 10, 2025 DF Direct, our weekly news and Q+A show, recently celebrated its bicentennial - in the sense of reaching 200 episodes, not marking a 200-year anniversary! All four not-on-holiday members of Digital Foundry assembled for the occasion, sharing stories of those early episodes and other highlights from the show's nearly four-year run thus far. As part of the on-holiday contingent, it was a lot of fun to watch the show back - I heartily recommend viewing at least that initial segment if you're a fan of the channel, as it contains some nice reminisces from Rich, John, Alex and Oliver. It also got me thinking about the show from my own perspective, as it has perhaps a bigger impact on the way the DF team operates than most people realise. For example, our weekly show is the biggest source for the DF Clips YouTube channel that started in 2023 and is now on the cusp of 100,000 subscribers. As DF Direct has gotten longer and longer over the years, being able to repackage segments into more shareable chunks has been a godsend - and allowed us to ensure that the most critical information is in the wild without the need to produce a whole scripted video. Watch on YouTubeWith five full-time members of Digital Foundry testing, scripting, recording and editing their own videos - Rich, Tom, John, Alex and Oliver - we only have the capability to cover around three or four topics a week, which just isn't enough when we have to contend with the volume of game releases and updates. Having the Direct means that those smaller topics can be tested by one or two members of the team over the course of minutes or hours, then reported off-the-cuff, enabling much broader coverage than we'd otherwise manage. The Direct is also one of favourite ways to maintain a dialogue with our community, in the form of the questions submitted for each episode. Like the news portion of the show, the questions-and-answers segment has gradually grown over the years, and our community continues to step up its game both in terms of insightful questions and comic memery. Everyone on the team really looks forward to selecting questions for the week's show, and there are often many more slots on the docket for questions than there are news topics. The questions on this week's Direct are, as always, high-quality ones. I particularly liked Michael Giles' enquiry into the establishment of a DF Latency Rating, which he proposes could be based on millisecond thresholds - thereby giving viewers an easy way to know whether the experience delivered by various levels of frame generation had good, acceptable or unacceptable levels of input latency. 0:00:00 Introduction0:02:07 News 1: DF Direct celebrates episode 200!0:32:01 News 2: Nintendo sets Switch 2 price expectations0:46:17 News 3: Next Battlefield shown in brief teaser0:55:45 News 4: Monster Hunter Wilds beta, benchmark tested1:09:05 News 5: RTX 5080 overclocking tested1:26:52 News 6: Epic admits Unreal Engine has a #StutterStruggle problem1:34:17 News 7: Star Wars Outlaws updated with new PSSR version1:41:07 Supporter Q1: Could you test the 5090 with no AI features vs. the 5080 with all AI features?1:47:23 Supporter Q2: Could DF establish a latency rating system?1:54:41 Supporter Q3: Would increasing resolution and AA quality be enough for Nintendo Switch 2 games?1:57:53 Supporter Q4: Is a Bloodborne remaster imminent?2:03:32 Supporter Q5: Could 1080p actually be preferable to 4K for Switch 2 games?It's an interesting thought, and perhaps has an equally interesting answer. This concept and others like it have been suggested a few times as the answer to giving an intuitive way of classifying varying input latency at equal frame-rates, and there's certainly merit in that. However, the problem facing such a system is that acceptable levels of input latency vary quite substantially depending on the input method, game and even person. You may find that an action-adventure game played on a controller is perfectly acceptable latency-wise with 4x frame generation, but a mouse-and-keyboard shooter is intolerable with even regular 2x frame gen. To put this in historical context, we've often seen quite dramatic shifts in input latency from one console generation to another, with Rich picking out PS3 being a notable downgrade over PS2. That's because of a confluence of factors, notably an industry-wide switch to 30fps games rather than 60fps, game engines becoming more complicated to handle more advanced graphics, and early LCD TVs replacing CRTs. All three changes caused input latency to increase substantially - we saw measurements in Killzone 2 of over 200ms, even factoring out the display latency! - yet in the absence of good measuring tools, little was made of the change. In the current context then, perhaps we need more personalised tools to judge where the threshold is for input latency that's too high. I like Rich's idea of someone like the makers of 3DMark producing an input latency test with various game genres represented, then randomly varying latency with the user marking when things become too unresponsive. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. With those two discussion points out of the way, I should close with this final thought: Digital Foundry would not be where it is today without the support of its viewers. We massively appreciate everyone that reaches out to offer their feedback, questions and good humour each week, or just reads and watches what we put out. Thank you. If you are interested in joining our brilliant community, take a look at the DF Patreon. You get some neat perks, including access to our private Discord server filled with some lovely individuals, weekly reports on what we're working on and high-quality video downloads of every video we've put out for nearly a decade. Higher tiers get all of the above plus extra rewards, including early access to non-embargoed videos, behind-the-scenes content, and even early access to DF Retro episodes and exclusive retro extras at the highest tier. As always, thanks again for watching and supporting Digital Foundry.