Digital Foundry tech analysis channel at Eurogamer

[FirewalkR]

Seems like grandmaster's new blog is up! At Eurogamer no less, right here: http://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry/.

Two long awaited and extremely detailed articles are up, the FFXIII tech analysis with framerate measurements (and a bit of speculation on how it will perform on 360) and the tech analysis (without framerate graphs) of the Uncharted 2 video that hit the net a few days ago.

The videos are available in your regular Eurogamer streaming player or the new HD version.

Excellent work, grandmaster and Alex Goh

Spoiler

ummm.. Quaz51?

. Congrats on the new blog.

 

[FirewalkR]

Detailed tech analysis of the latest Uncharted 2 gameplay vid up at grandmaster's new blog:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/uncharted-2-tech-analysis

PS: You posted the FFXIII one, ultragpu, how did you miss this? :smile:

 

[DrJay24]

Too much speculation IMO, grandmaster is going beyond his expertise.

 

[ultragpu]

Detailed tech analysis of the latest Uncharted 2 gameplay vid up at grandmaster's new blog:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/uncharted-2-tech-analysis

PS: You posted the FFXIII one, ultragpu, how did you miss this? :smile:

Hm, might just missed it, good to see you fetched it up for us. And guess I was right that the HD vid was indeed compressed and not of direct feed quality. Also love that GI solution in the game, no wonder the lighting felt so alive.

 

[FirewalkR]

From Christophe Balestra's (Naughty Dog) Twitter:

cbalestra: Take a look at this Uncharted 2 tech analysis http://bit.ly/17pJp3

Seems like even ND themselves are interested in reading about all the tech.

 

[deepbrown]

From Christophe Balestra's (Naughty Dog) Twitter:

cbalestra: Take a look at this Uncharted 2 tech analysis http://bit.ly/17pJp3

Seems like even ND themselves are interested in reading about all the tech.

Which is good, because there's some criticisms in there too. Also, if they back up - then they must be confirming with everything that's said.

 

[FirewalkR]

Which is good, because there's some criticisms in there too. Also, if they back up - then they must be confirming with everything that's said.

Yeah, he could easily have said something like "it's mostly correct" or "there are a few innacuracies" etc...

Now that I notice, Balestra had asked grandmaster when the tech analysis would be out a few days ago, also through Twitter. Perhaps they even had access to it pre-release so they could check for errors.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'm very pleased to see Grandmaster's new home and I really hope that's paying out for all his hard work. It's decidedly exciting to see ND offering at least a form of moral support. What I hope comes from this is a maturing of gamers and an honesty enter the industry. When there are no secrets, finally people will be in a position to actually embrace reality, the compromises that need to be made, and to treat games with a load fmore rationality than currently. Okay, I'm being optimistic, but I hope for a day when people look at a game say 'oh that's nice/ugly, I wonder what technical compromises they choose to achieve that' instead of 'oh, it's rendering at less than 720p - it's rubbish! doesn't have HDR - it's rubbish' etc. Developers can then lose all the pretence of PR speak and be honest. 'In order to get this look, we are rendering at 640p with 4xAA' instead of 'Well, it's outputting 720p, so let's call it a 720p game so we don't look inferior to all the other games that claim as much'.

As for games to be analysed, Sacred 2 sound like a good contender because of the many complaints with framerate, especially in the day versus night. How much screen tear and jitter is there?

 

[2real4tv]

Great job! Can some of the framerate issues in FFXIII come from loading some seem to symmetrical?

 

[L. Scofield]

From Christophe Balestra's (Naughty Dog) Twitter:

cbalestra: Take a look at this Uncharted 2 tech analysis http://bit.ly/17pJp3

Seems like even ND themselves are interested in reading about all the tech.

GI? Other than SSAO there's no evidence of GI. No apparent indirect lighting/color bleeding.

 

[Neb]

GI? Other than SSAO there's no evidence of GI. No apparent indirect lighting/color bleeding.

Maybe baked into textures. After all the game has no daytime cycle so it won't be obvious.

 

[L. Scofield]

Maybe baked into textures. After all the game has no daytime cycle so it won't be obvious.

Yeah, that's what I thought. It's weird they mention it in the video though since it's basically a common thing among games.

 

[grandmaster]

Horrendously OT, but here we go

First of all, a big "up" to the people of this forum who've provided a lot of inspiration and encouragement for doing the stuff we do. Plus the contributors who make the content so much more than just a bunch of frame rate tests.

Moving the site into a big arena like Eurogamer is a chance to see just how the stuff we discuss here on a day to day basis can be turned into an interesting standalone website. I could probably have swallowed the bandwidth costs (which were beginning to spiral out of control) but I'd really like to establish the DF channel as a standalone site doing unique stuff you just won't find elsewhere online. Maybe it will prove popular and we can move beyond being a simple blog with the occasional feature. But regardless, it's moved beyond a Wordpress template I set up in less than 24 hours and now looks the part!

The real challenge will be to keep the site fresh with daily updates. The good thing about the move being so protracted is that we have a fair bit of content saved up (InFamous demo analysis tomorrow). But we're also looking at having a bit of fun too. For example, we've captured the InFamous equivalent to the Agency Tower ascent in Crackdown so you can see how good the city looks from the highest point in the game. And moving on from that, we go back to Crackdown and have some fun with its explosive physics engine. Plus the original Uncharted stuff is still to be completed (static lighting plays havoc with FPS analysis).

Other stuff I want to do: reports on hardware, championing PC as a worthy living room gaming contender, input lag tests, getting the real story on next gen hardware, investigate stereoscopic 3D properly, OnLive testing etc etc. When a developer has a new technology it wants to showcase, I'd like our site to be the place they want it to be seen.

The move to Eurogamer has been long and fraught and the behind-the-scenes dev team who've put up with tons of my most anal of requests really deserve a lot of credit. The streaming HD stuff took a long while to get right. We're adopting a quality first approach - we use the same amount of bandwidth as YouTube HD, but just one minute of HD footage takes an hour to encode on a 3.33GHz i7. But I honestly think it's the best streaming video for gameplay online right now.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Other stuff I want to do: reports on hardware, championing PC as a worthy living room gaming contender, input lag tests...

That'd be well worth seeing. Indeed, the various technical issues that affect gaming should be being covered somewhere. Lag is a huge issue and yet I dare most gamers are completely unaware of how their setup is affecting them with unresponsive controls. Likewise how games on PS3 perform in 1080p versus forced 720p. Would be nice to see pressure on Sony to incorporate per game resolution settings instead of requiring us to change the settings back and forth. The more people who know and whinge, the more likely we'll see improvements. Ooo, another one, the technical aspects of voice chat, and why it's often crap! How much difference does the right headset make, and why? What about the PSEye mic array? Why's that not doing anything at all useful? And related, camera based technologies, what works and what doesn't, and why? So I can see this idea having loads of room to grow. I'll echo the sentiments of some other posters here though that, IMO, the editorial needs a bit of tightening. It doesn't appear to know exactly what it's trying to portray. The comment

"And despite the arrival of great-looking games like Gears of War 2 and Killzone 2, Uncharted remains a technical marvel that has still yet to be equalled,"

is going to be pretty inflammatory (which may of course be the point, as hot topics tend to be more popular!). References to unequalled technical achievement aren't easy to prove!

I dare say more people will offer their feedback. I'll spawn a thread to keep this one track.

 

[AlNom]

Yeah, that's what I thought. It's weird they mention it in the video though since it's basically a common thing among games.

The annotations regarding that reference the first game, which didn't have it; it was about looking at how ND has progressed. The annotations appear focused on just the video anyway.

 

[Nesh]

Something I noticed about the Killzone 2 analysis.

It says "When th egun is held up when in cover, it looks like a flat texture with uniform lighting and blur, even as it moves. The 3D model returns as it shifts back into aiming mode".

Does it suggest that the model while in cover is a 2D texture? Does this count for every weapon?

 

[AlNom]

Something I noticed about the Killzone 2 analysis.

It says "When the gun is held up when in cover, it looks like a flat texture with uniform lighting and blur, even as it moves. The 3D model returns as it shifts back into aiming mode".

Does it suggest that the model while in cover is a 2D texture? Does this count for every weapon?

Keyword being "looks" I think; it does have a weird look to it when it does that though (just a peculiarity rather than factual ). It seems they keep the gun in just that single position the entire time until you let the gun back down, hence the "2D look"

 

[Nesh]

Well its kind of ambiguous though. Especially after the "3D model returns" which got me wondering

Edit: Additionally I was wondering if the angle changes while the gun moves slightly in that position. If its just a 2D object no matter how much left or right on the screen it moves it will stay the same. Whereas a 3D model will have a tiny change in angle.

Although I think some of the reflections do change a bit on the gun while you move. Which might suggest a 3D model

 

[AlNom]

Well its kind of ambiguous though. Especially after the "3D model returns" which got me wondering

Edit: Additionally I was wondering if the angle changes while the gun moves slightly in that position. If its just a 2D object no matter how much left or right on the screen it moves it will stay the same. Whereas a 3D model will have a tiny change in angle.

mmm... from what freeze-framing/stepping I could do, the angle appears the same with the gun held up as such.

Although I think some of the reflections do change a bit on the gun while you move. Which might suggest a 3D model

Yup. Definitely think it was just a miswording with "3D Model". Should have been "depth" or... 3D'ness? or... "non-flat look resumes".

 

[dah145]

congratulations for the new blog, lots of interesting stuff there.

BTW there is a broken link on http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/killzone-week-day-one-triple-campaign-dissection last sentence, THIS ONE: http://www.eurogamer.net/www/articles/killzone-week-day-two-deferred-rendering-and-more-analysis

at the time of this post.