DF Direct Weekly returns once again, with myself, John and Alex taking a time-out from our various individual projects to discuss the latest gaming and tech news. Our chat kicks off with the arrival of new Apple Silicon found with the brand new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros. M1 Pro and M1 Max look absolutely monstrous and from a GPU perspective alone, we're looking at a doubling then a quadrupling of the already impressive M1. In the new Direct, we share our thoughts on strategy but ask the fundamental question beyond some truly impressive tech: will this extremely capable, super-efficient technology ever really be put through its paces in gaming? Is a profound commitment to gaming beyond the iOS ecosystem even worth considering for Apple, when its mobile ecosystem is likely to be so much more profitable?
Beyond that, discussion moves on to last week's announcement of God of War for PC, complete with select new graphical features, unlocked frame-rates, ultrawide support and the pleasantly surprising inclusion of Nvidia DLSS. It's not clear just how much of an improvement the new features add, but it'll be interesting to see if DLSS and other upscaling features are added to other Sony titles, such as the forthcoming Uncharted collection. We also discuss Sony's global vision: in a recent gamesindustry.biz video interview, Jim Ryan talked about addressing addressing millions more users with Sony titles, which inevitably leads to discussions about the cloud and therefore the concept of PC ports happening as a matter of course. Unless, of course, Sony is intent on packing out datacentres with PS5 hardware - which seems unlikely, especially in light of the mooted deal with Microsoft.