Another week, another DF Direct Weekly and our show kicks off with the re-reveal of Halo Infinite's campaign - the source of much controversy upon its initial showing last year. From my perspective, it's a solid showing with clear improvements in many areas of the visual presentation, plus a lot more thought put into the edit. However, questions persist: we're still only seeing just one environment when the initial engine reveal promised so much more. Also, it's not yet clear what Halo has to gain from its metamorphosis into a full open world beyond upgrade paths and resource management - but with just over a month before release, answers should be forthcoming in short order.
Beyond that, the team discuss last week's full-throated reveal of the Intel 12th Gen Core architecture, which is perhaps so radical, Intel might have perhaps considered dropping the Core brand altogether and coming up with something new to hammer home the scale of the achievement here. Running on a new fabrication node and combining more powerful performance processing cores with smaller efficiency cores, single thread performance looks state of the art, while multi-core capabilities seem to be up there with AMD's brilliant Ryzen 9 5950X - the CPU that I chose myself for my own workstation. Power efficiency? Well you can ramp up the processor to max power for best performance, but there are still remarkable perf per watt gains against prior Intel chips at lower power points.