The new DF Direct Weekly arrives, with myself, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia diving straight into a packed week of news... though we kick off with our own God of War Ragnarök impressions a whole week after the preview embargo lifted. Unfortunately, media outlets were prohibited from showing their own captured footage which essentially precluded us from producing a video, but in the wake of the impressions pieces that did follow, we did feel compelled to share some initial thoughts - and the extent to which Ragnarök leverages the power of PlayStation 5.
As you'll hear in our discussions, this seems to be a very different proposition to Horizon Forbidden West, where there was a clear night and day difference between PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions. I won't spoil John's hands-on thoughts too much, but I think it's perfectly valid to consider the PS5 version as similar to the idea of what a PC version would look like: the same core game, but ramped up significantly in terms of clarity, performance and other 'ultra settings' niceties. We'll be sharing our full tech review as soon as the main embargo lifts.
It's also fair to say that we're hugely excited about the reveal of the new RDNA 3 graphics hardware later this week - and it represents a golden opportunity to AMD in the wake of the highs and lows of the Nvidia RTX 40-series launch. RTX 4090 is a simply tremendous - but extremely expensive - piece of hardware, but questions marks around the RTX 4080 were enough to see the 12GB model 'unlaunched' while the 16GB edition has it all to prove. There's also the RTX 4090 power adaptor issue adding to the controversy (a story that took a new turn over the weekend after excellent GamersNexus coverage)