Digital Foundry Direct Weekly DF Direct Special: Digital Foundry's Best Gaming Hardware 2025
Jan 7, 2026
The podcast dives into the best gaming hardware of 2025, with handhelds taking the spotlight. The GPD Win 5 and Lenovo Legion Go S are fan favorites for their standout performance and ergonomic design. Discussions also cover the powerhouse Ryzen 9 9950X3D and the exciting potential of Nvidia's Blackwell and RDNA 4. Alongside hardware highlights, the hosts maintain an optimistic outlook for 2026 amid market challenges, anticipating breakthroughs in handheld tech and graphics innovations.
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Strix Halo In A Pocketable Handheld
- Rich describes the GPD Win 5 as a surprisingly small handheld that packs a Strix Halo chip and external battery options.
- He reports near-PS5 performance at high wattage and ~70% of PS5 on battery, calling it "kind of nuts."
Resolution And Power Scaling Make Handhelds Viable
- Scaling resolution and wattage on handhelds yields near-console parity due to VRR and upscaling.
- Rich shows 86%–93% of PS5 throughput when lowering resolution and using FSR modes on the GPD Win 5.
Avoid Raw Windows Frontend For Now
- Oliver warns that Windows on handhelds still has stability and sleep/wake issues that hurt the experience.
- He suggests using SteamOS or installing alternatives like Bazite until Microsoft improves the handheld Windows frontend.