Welcome to the 45th edition of Digital Foundry Direct Weekly, where – as you may expect – the aftershocks of Microsoft’s Activision acquisition continue to dominate discussion with a quarter-hour of chat in addition to the DF Direct special posted last week. I have little to add to this particular debate, except to say that the news continues an age-old tradition where you can guarantee that a major news event will kick off should I dare countenance taking a few days off. Yes, the rumours started to emerge as the doors shut at home, with the official Microsoft announcement arriving while on the road. Perhaps I should go on vacation more often, simply for the purpose of spicing up the news cycle.
Beyond the seismic Microsoft/Activision news, the team also cover the bizarre GPU that is the Radeon RX 6500 XT (see Will’s more fully featured review right here. The product’s attracted a lot of flak, lacks key features and performance is not great but it has led me to think about how GPUs are reviewed. The standard MO is simply to whack everything up to ultra then compare the new GPU to existing ones. From there we get a number, typically a percentage differential against a nearby-priced competitor. It’s entirely fair enough, but the more GPU reviews I see, the more I tend to wonder whether we shouldn’t be benching at optimised settings instead. It may well be that the percentage differentials will be the same, but then again, it may not – I’m curious to find out!
