Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 29 2026)

Hi everyone, last week I talked about new innovations we're looking into with regards to measuring PC performance and before we kick off with the details on what the team's up to this week, I thought I'd share the image above.

A while back, Intel updated the industry-standard PresentMon benchmarking tool with interesting new metrics - CPU Busy and GPU Busy. This measures the per-frame time taken (measured in milliseconds) to render a new frame in terms of CPU and GPU. This - and every PresentMon metric - is available for our custom graphing now and in the above image what you're seeing is the render-time CPU/GPU cost of Crimson Desert's Bug Hill running at Cinematic settings (max lighting dialled back hence the *) at 4K DLSS on a 9950X3D/5090 system. And with a non-X3D run.

Crucially though, we've converted those millisecond metrics into frame-rate to give you an fps read-out of how fast CPU(s) and GPU are running. It's an attempt to show hardware balance. Here, the 9950X3D is extremely close to fully feeding the 5090, hence the green/red parallel lines. However, the 9950X non-3D falls way short and has far spikier frame-times. While the gap closes up with 4K DLAA where GPU becomes more of a limiting factor, the fact is that X3D is still delivering more performance and less spikier frame-times.

Quite pleased about this, not least because these new features are coming from our new Adobe Premiere graphing filter we've been working on which is an order of magnitude faster and doesn't crash in the latest versions of Premiere (thanks for that Adobe).

Anyway, let's get on with the weekly #content update.

Rich (ie me) is looking to complete the project discussed above. It's based on our Alienware sponsorship and demonstrates that X3D processors provide good gains to gaming performance outside of the "1080p-with-5090" benchmarks you typically see in reviews. There are good reasons to adopt that approach (we do it!) but absolutely people are within their rights to say "what about 4K?". This whole project has been very enjoyable - not least because we can use the sponsorship opportunity as a way to sink time, effort and money into revamping our tools and improving coverage across the board. Beyond that, back to Linux on PS5 and BC-250 plus helping out Tom with a project.

Tom actually now has two embargoed projects to work on. One came out of the blue last week and that's the one I'm providing a small assist with. No clues there but it will quote-unquote drop this week and it will be cool. Also working on Splatoon Raiders and yeahhhh... OK, we will have to cover COD BLOPS 1 and 2 on PS4/PS5 won't we?

John is working on our Halo Campaign Evolved tech review. This one's going to take some time but we're hoping to have it ready before the main release next week.

Oliver is looking likely to be working on the Halo Campaign Evolved platform comparison video which will probably appear before John's work. But before that, well... Oliver's quite excited about the PC Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Shader Injection mod!

Happy to say that Rayan will be looking at Halo Campaign Evolved for the PC review/optimised setting breakdown.

Will is working on stuff that doesn't just include the website - we'll be putting together some hopefully enticing merch bundles for you really soon: a mystery box of sorts where you just tell us your shirt size and you'll get a bunch of great merch that fits you with a substantial discount. Also working on a nice new merch project which will be right up your street if you enjoy beverages decanted into a pint-sized glass receptacle.

We've not forgotten about the DF Direct Q+A Show and thanks for some excellent questions which I reviewed this morning. It's a tight week as we're behind schedule on Halo but expect that later on, more towards the weekend.

As usual, feel free to suggest topics, ask questions, anything really. Thanks!