However, beyond that, our understanding of how games worked was still very much in its infancy and we wanted to do better: GTA4 was the release that made us fundamentally reappraise the way we looked at games, and how we would present them on the page - and it was almost certainly the first console game that underwent the now standard performance analysis.īack then, there were no frame-rate analysis tools and certainly no means by which to plot performance over game video in the way we do now - the fact that various outlets were confidently saying that both versions had the performance advantage didn't help, so we decided to do something about it. Pixel counting is an example of how a proven methodology could provide actual metrics to better inform our articles.
We could tell from screenshots that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of GTA4 ran at different resolutions - native 720p (with 2x MSAA) on the Microsoft console and an upscaled 1152圆40 on PS3, with a blur filter in effect. Here, long horizontal and vertical edges are isolated and analysed, with the ratio of rendered pixels compared to actual screen pixels, giving us the dimensions of the final framebuffer before it is scaled to 720p and dispatched via HDMI to the display. A couple of years earlier, at the dawn of the HD console era, we developed our own direct-to-disk capture solution, giving us complete access to lossless digital feeds from the HD consoles that formed the basis of our comparisons - but it was the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 4 which made us wonder what more could we do with this material aside from the standard screenshot galleries.Īccess to these assets opened the door to techniques like pixel-counting - a form of analysis first discussed on the Beyond 3D forum.
Way back in 2008, it was early days for Digital Foundry on Eurogamer. At Digital Foundry, we're aiming to bring you our findings on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game as soon as we can, but in the meantime we thought we'd take the time to pay tribute to its predecessor, not least because so much of what we do and the way we approach games today hails from the seismic release of GTA4 five years ago, and that Face-Off we produced at the time. We're just three days away from the release of Grand Theft Auto 5 - closer to two if you're planning to attend a midnight launch for the year's most eagerly awaited game.