Digital Foundry Direct Weekly 136: Tech, Gaming & Hardware

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Campaign Analysis

The PC Experience

• John Linneman shares his impressions of the latest Call of Duty campaign.
• While the lack of ray tracing is disappointing, the game’s visual quality, especially character rendering, is considered top-notch.
• The use of frame generation alongside DLAA provides a crisp, smooth experience on high-end hardware, though some streaming texture issues were noted.

Campaign Design Shifts

• The campaign introduces open-ended missions that break away from traditional linear "tunnels," utilizing the IW9 engine shared with Warzone.
• A later internal follow-up clarifies that while the concept of open maps had potential, the execution feels more like a multiplayer experience against bots, lacking the carefully curated cinematic feel of previous titles.

Apple M3 Silicon and Gaming

Performance and Market Position

• The new M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips represent a steady, impressive yearly iteration.
• The jump to a 3.0nm process brings hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading, essentially bringing Mac GPUs up to current console specifications.

Gaming on the Apple Ecosystem

• The main obstacle remains the software library. Despite the Game Porting Toolkit, the platform still lacks a significant catalog of native titles.
• Testing Resident Evil Village on iPhone 15 Pro reveals thermal issues and performance hitching, suggesting limitations in sustained mobile performance.

Hardware and Performance Deep-Dives

SSD Stress Testing

• An experiment testing Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on the slowest possible SSD reveals that modern game engines are heavily optimized for I/O efficiency and decompression, making raw sequential speed less critical for core traversal.
• A warning was issued regarding add-in M2 drives on PS5 causing crashes in certain titles, recommending moving affected games to internal storage.

News and Updates

• Gran Turismo 7 Spec 2: Refreshes the UI, adds a new snow track, and introduces 4-player split-screen functionality.
• Super Mario RPG Remake: Praised for its aesthetic, though performance suffers from occasional stuttering.
• Switch OLED Durability: A 2-year torture test of the OLED screen confirms that even at maximum brightness, the hardware is remarkably robust, proving to be a 'tank' in real-world scenarios.

EA Sports WRC Discussion

• Early impressions of the PC version indicate profound stuttering and shader compilation issues, with criticism aimed at the transition from the proprietary Ego engine to Unreal Engine 4.
• Discussions suggest that while the shift allows for longer tracks, the current state of the title feels unpolished compared to Dirt Rally 2.0.