Welcome the latest edition of DF Direct Weekly – Digital Foundry’s regular show on the latest gaming and technology news. Perhaps not surprisingly, the lion’s share of our news discussion this week concerns the release of Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on PC. We’ve discussed the various trials we had in delivering our coverage – not least the arrival of a major (and welcome!) patch on embargo day. However, in this week’s show, we talk about our discussions with Nixxes, remaining performance hurdles and the title’s remarkable CPU burden, especially with ray tracing enabled.
However, we also spend a fair amount of time talking about the rising cost of gaming – or more specifically, the huge increases in energy costs. In the UK at least, we’re looking at a potentially gigantic and disastrous increase in the cost of electricity in October – and the recent news on next-gen GPUs raising their TDPs has got a lot of people concerned. First of all, I do think that the biggest TDP increases will be found on the more expensive GPUs, but ultimately, perhaps we should be looking at the energy savings brought about by frame-rate limiters.
As we discuss in this week’s show, you never really fully utilise a CPU – you buy a more expensive processor to mitigate against the worst case scenarios… so why not adopt the same strategy with a GPU too? I’m perfectly happy to play most triple-A fare at 90-100fps, effectively a 10-11ms render time per frame. Beyond that, my perception barely sees much difference – but the energy cost in running a GPU unlocked is significantly higher. So setting an arbitrary frame-rate cap that sits at the sweet spot of the game you’re playing seems like a good idea to me, the idea being that your extra GPU performance is only deployed where needed in the service of a consistent experience. It’ll be interesting to see if Nvidia, AMD or Intel consider some kind of energy efficiency mode – but of course, using DLSS or FSR 2.0 is also a big energy saver too.
