PC GAMING

In the wake of the surprise ‘drop’ of the Resident Evil Village ‘Maiden’ demo for PlayStation 5 last night, the Digital Foundry team sat down to talk about their impressions of the new demo. John Linneman and Alex Battaglia are joined by series expert Alex Aniel, author of Itchy, Tasty: An Unofficial of Resident Evil. The result? The video embedded on this page!

Image quality makes for a good portion of the discussion, where the PlayStation 5 delivers a full 3840×2160, with Capcom deploying RE Engine’s excellent checkerboard-style image reconstruction technology to render up from a lower base resolution. It’s one of the more impressive implementations, looking very, very close to actual native rendering. The handling of materials and rich geometry in evidence in the demo also impressive, as does the HDR solution. In fact, the game doesn’t quite have the same punch viewed in standard SDR – blacks are … Read the rest

Hitman 3 arrived this week in what became the series’ biggest digital launch of all-time – and rightly so. As a culmination of the existing trilogy, Hitman 3 caps off the generation with the most impressive iteration of the Glacier Engine to date, with all existing current-gen Hitman content retrofitted into the latest game, while being essentially ‘remastered’ for next-gen consoles. PC owners can rejoice too – the game does everything that PS5 and Series X can and more besides, thanks to some nice upgrades and further scalability.

In delivering this article, IO interactive has furnished us with the exact PC settings for every console the game is running on. So, by using these settings on PC at the proper resolution, it is possible to see how a PC GPU fares in comparison to the consoles, with some interesting observations. First of all though, I’d like to give IO some … Read the rest

Traditionally, the cross-gen period – the awkward transition from one set of consoles to the next – hasn’t really worked out. There’s the sense that the next-gen versions aren’t necessarily everything they could be, while the software served up to owners of the older consoles often verged on the unplayable. But as move from PS4 to PS5, from Xbox One to Xbox Series, it’s clear that we’re seeing something very different this time around. IO Interactive’s Hitman 3 shows that cross-gen can actually work out just fine, and there’s the feeling that prior generation consoles are being pushed closer to their ultimate limits, while simultaneously, massive gains are achieved when playing on PS5 and Xbox Series X.

Of course, Hitman 3 is a game with additional interest for us, because IO’s excellent Glacier Engine has evolved, bringing impressive new features into the technology – while at the same time back-porting … Read the rest