DF Direct Weekly: Epic vs Apple, FPS Boost, Returnal and Super Mario 64 RT

Welcome to the 10th episode of Digital Foundry Direct Weekly! It's our chance to disengage from our ongoing projects, sit down together (virtually, of course) and to discuss the biggest news items of the week. As you might imagine, the unseemly Epic vs Apple legal bunfight dominates proceedings - principally owing to some of the more astonishing documents to have been published and/or inadvertently leaked. We also discuss Resident Evil Village and offer up some first thoughts on the PC version (with a full analysis due later in the week). And as for Housemarque's brilliant Returnal, what's going on with its post-launch rollout and what's with all the patches?

The team also spend some time talking about the recent 74 game drop of FPS Boost updates for Xbox Series consoles - and again, we'll be returning to this with more detailed coverage later in the week. Suffice to say that it's great to see so many games getting huge performance uplifts, but is FPS Boost all it can be on Xbox Series X, where so few titles are fully tapping into the Xbox One X feature sets and sometimes run at Xbox One S resolution targets? Other topics up for debate include Genshin Impact - which launched on PlayStation 5 in a sub-optimal state then saw a dramatic frame-rate upgrade literally within days of launch.

We also spend a little time talking about the Digital Foundry Supporter Program, which last week offered up early access to video content including an excellent interview with Modern Vintage Gamer (now available to all), an exclusive DF Retro Play (a time-limited exclusive, we should add) a behind the scenes video on how we're upping the game with our frame-rate analysis technology, plus we revisited Battlefield Bad Company 2 on PS3 and Xbox 360 in our 'classic FPS Remastered' series, where we reformat performance videos over a decade old for consumption on modern screens. Oh, and of course, supporters get access to the DF Direct on Saturdays too, ahead of the Monday public release. Here's the complete line-up of discussion this week in a packed 90 minute show.

• 00:00:00 Introductions
• 00:00:52 Resident Evil Village
• 00:15:59 FPS Boost update
• 00:28:20 Epic vs Apple
• 00:36:16 Returnal post-launch impressions
• 00:43:57 This Week's Patreon Content
• 00:48:28 Super Mario 64 RT
• 01:00:20 Genshin Impact's PS5 Upgrade
• 01:04:18 Supporter Q+A

One of our favourite bits in creating this show is supporter Q+A and there are some great questions this week. Do we miss the era where consoles were built from entirely different architectures? Will games ever support 40fps caps for use on 120Hz screens? Is the tech seen in the Unreal Engine 5 demo more promising for next-gen than ray tracing? And when will we actually see UE5 games any way? And finally, what library OG Xbox and Xbox 360 titles would we like to see added to Microsoft's backwards compatibility library? The Q+A generally is really thought-provoking but just generally, we love putting this show together and hope you enjoy it too.