DF Direct Weekly: Is Intel's Rocket Lake really that bad?

Yes, it's a public holiday, but Digital Foundry Direct Weekly continues nonetheless! In this 91 minute episode, myself, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia tackle a number of topics, kicking off with the controversy surrounding Intel's Rocket Lake. From our perspective, it's certainly performant in games but with the Core i9 dropping two cores and the entire range debuting on a platform that will be phased out within the year, there's plenty to count against it too. Regardless, is it really as bad as the PC tech channels say it is?

The discussion moves onto to a bunch of Xbox Series X performance tests - John took a look at Octopath Traveller and Samurai Shodown's 120Hz patch, while also revisiting Crash Bandicoot 4 on Xbox Series X. Is it really less performant than the PS5 version? After that, the team mourns the loss of the PS3 and PlayStation Vita digital stores and ponders Sony's commitment to its hugely important console back catalogue.

After a collective moan about the state of the Windows Store, we move on to our favourite part of the show, where we take questions directly from users on the Digital Foundry supporter programme. What do we expect specs-wise from PlayStation VR 2? What about Elite Dangerous' new planetary rendering technology? And if we didn't have image quality and performance metrics to consider, what would Digital Foundry video content actually consist of... and are we able to enjoy video games regardless of technical issues? These are just a few of the highlights - be sure to watch or listen for the full-fat experience!