WipEout HD's 1080p Sleight of Hand

Namco's Ridge Racer 7 has been the standard bearer for true 1920x1080p on PlayStation 3 since the system launched, and to this day nothing gets close to what this game is achieving at full raster 1080p. Sure, GT5 has a tangibly superior look overall but its mixture of 1280x1080 (in-game) and 1440x1080 (replay) resolutions precludes it from the discussion.
Sony Liverpool's WipEout HD is the first big game for a while to be touting true 1080p credentials and regardless of its technical prowess, it's stupidly good value at $19.99/£11.99. It's also a superb technical effort, great to play and accessible to a level that recent releases in the series have failed to achieve.
And 1080p? True 1080p? Well yes. And no. OK, most of the time, it is. I mean look at these shots... scrutinised and measured by the ever-reliable 'Quaz51' who cast his expert eye over a number of Digital Foundry TrueHD 1080p captures:



There's still something about Ridge Racer 7 that makes it a phenomenal 1080p game, but there's no doubt that WipEout HD is the better-looking 1920x1080 effort with some beautiful shader effects and excellent art direction. But what's going on the two shots below?



They're not 1080p in the sense that the resolution is no longer 1920x1080. WipEout HD is now rendering at 1280x1080 (with some screen tear to boot), which I'm fairly sure is the game's lowest resolution - but still a 50% resolution increase over 720p. So what's happening? Basically WipEout HD is the first game I've come across that seems to be operating with a dynamic framebuffer. Resolution can alter on a frame-by-frame basis. Rather than introduce dropped frames, slow down or other unsavoury effects, the number of pixels being rendered drops and the PS3's horizontal hardware scaler is invoked to make up the difference. It's an intriguing solution that works with limited impact on the overall look of the game (the tearing has far more of an impact on image quality - I'm assuming that kicks in when the framebuffer can't scale any lower).



The actual amount of horizontal resolution being dropped can change on a frame by frame basis: 1728x1080, 1645x1080, 1600x1080, 1440x1080. All have been seen in the Digital Foundry TrueHD captures. The shots above appear to be 1500x1080.
The dynamic framebuffer is really quite an innovative solution to the perennial 1080p problem. Even though we're seeing major differences in resolution, the human eye really will have trouble realising the difference when the detail level is changing so rapidly in such a fast moving game.
In short, it's making an advanced-looking game like WipEout HD work at 1080p60 and that's pretty damn awesome.

720p Zero Compromise Console Comparison Videos

It's been bugging me for some time that the Eurogamer comparison videos I produce are horrendously over-engineered in relation to the actual end result, so I decided to make more use of the HD captures and produce download-only files that show the full resolution and frame rate of each game, running in realtime.
The first one I produced, Soul Calibur IV, was beautiful enough to convince me to carry on with all the others and incorporate the whole process into the existing workflow. Enough bandwidth has been thrown at these videos to make them look almost passable for the actual game running on the console itself.
The edited files are encoded into VC-1 using Microsoft Expression Encoder 2, and the resultant WMVs are playable on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and fast PCs (any dual core unit should work fine).
So, here are the links required to get your hands on the downloadable goodies:

Soul Calibur IV: click here
Mercenaries II: World in Flames: click here
Beijing 2008: click here
FaceBreaker: click here
EA Sports Compilation (Tiger Woods 09/Madden 09/NHL 09): click here

Don't expect scintillating gameplay here, nor expertly mixed audio. The clips are specifically captured to be synced for technical comparison. As it is, in all of the releases above, the actual gameplay is identical cross-platform any way.

Digital Foundry on the Big, Bright Screen

Question: how do you go about displaying real time PlayStation 3 gameplay on a screen the size of a wall? That's the intriguing question posed by my new friends at Belgium big-screen specialists Brightboard. The obvious answer would be to use projection, but in daylight conditions, obviously this would be a complete waste of time.
Brightboard specialise in the use of LED screens - similar to the kind of displays used in football pitch ad hoardings, and also for displaying advertising in city centres. Such screens are absolutely enormous and require dedicated PCs to control the image. That being the case, direct connection from console to screen is not the solution - a capture card, interfaced with the LED screen's controller is. Enter Digital Foundry TrueHD Express.
This was a great case to work on. Brightboard sent me a copy of their controller software and with just a couple of registry tweaks to the TrueHD driver I was able to get realtime PS3 gameplay working with no problem whatsoever. However, without an actual screen to work with, positive results could not be guaranteed, so it was with some trepidation that the TrueHD Express card was sent to Belgium...


Success! Click on the pics for some idea of just how massive that LED screen actually is. Multiple screens can be daisy-chained together for an even more colossal image.

PS3 Media Playback Update

First of all, kudos to Sony for producing what I think must be the first 1080p60 AVC file to playback on PlayStation 3. Posters on the AVSForum tipped me off to the 1080p download available at WipEout HD website. Encoded at 20mbps with peaks at 49mbps, it's a worthy workout for the PS3 - but it's a shame that the gameplay footage has so much v-lock screen tear.
The video is also noteworthy in that I could not match this performance initially whatsoever, despite matching its encoding profile as closely as I could using x264. It turns out that the video divides the image into 'slices' which PS3's Cell CPU decode in parallel... and x264 doesn't support slices.
However, the Mainconcept Reference encoder does and while it's horrible to use compared to x264, I quickly had 1080p60 material playing back nicely. I'll have to consider updating the Devil May Cry demo on DigitalFoundry.org to replace the existing VC-1 encode as I get the same quality at a lower bitrate and AVC is clearly more suited to the PS3's media playback capabilities. That's if I can find someone with the full version to do the encode for me, as the demo version watermarks output and I'm not paying $1,999 for an encoder that is inferior to x264 in just about every way.


PlayStation 3 WipEout HD supports 1080p60 (with one or two interesting technical tricks I might go into at a later date) and the AVC video Sony produced for it is well worth downloading and checking out on your own PS3...

Website Revamp Now Live

Well, after lots of behind-the-scenes mucking about, the new Digital Foundry website is now live. Contained therein is a stronger focus on the hardware offerings we've developed, including a pretty remarkable 1080p60 demo of Devil May Cry 4's superb intro sequence, running from PC. Encoded into the VC-1 codec and optimised for playback on PS3, it's well worth a download as an example of the quality of final deliverable asset Digital Foundry TrueHD provides. There's a good-looking 1080p30 AVC file based on Gran Turismo 5 that should playback nicely on both PS3 and Xbox 360 too.
Also revealed is the first work on the notebook version of Digital Foundry TrueHD that'll allow for 720p60 and 1080p30 HD capture 'on the go'.
While putting the website together, checking the logs also revealed that many of the shots posted on this blog are being hotlinked from elsewhere - and with it, the astonishing statistic that 5GB (!!) in JPEGs were downloaded at my expense last month, mostly from MySpace mouth-breathers stealing the Kasabian images from a previous blog posting. The shots have been moved and if they're stolen again, they'll be replaced with far more 'colourful' images I'm not sure your mother would appreciate seeing plastered over your profile!
Not too much else to report otherwise - my personal time has been vacuumed up preparing video material for the Leipzig GC games event currently taking place in East Germany. I've visited the event in the past, and while I'm never too keen on shows like this, the conference centre's surrounding area is truly beautiful - away from the city centres, Germany is a lovely place to visit; like rural England, but with space to breathe...

1080p60 Video Playback: PS3 Supreme

It's all very well having hardware capable of 1080p60 capture; the only problem is that once you have created your wondrous edit, the only playback mechanism available is a quad core PC running the CineForm NEO Player software. Great (incredible, actually) for event usage on a huge display, not so great for final asset delivery to the masses.
Sure, 1080p30 can be played back with much aplomb on both Xbox 360 and PS3, but all my previous efforts in getting demanding video working at full fat 1080p60 have failed miserably, with only mediocre 1440x1080 performance possible via the Xbox 360's dashboard WMV player.
PlayStation 3 recently had VC1 decoding added to its media playback arsenal and it's outperforming my 3.0GHz Core 2 Quad system, and indeed the Xbox 360. Easily. My previous 1440x1080 anamorphic edits which gave 360 'pause' play back beautifully on PS3. Handle the encode carefully and the PS3 will even stream 40mbps VC1 without a hitch!
Sure, there are limitations with Sony's console, as you might expect from a consumer-level piece of hardware bent over and molested at gunpoint into doing things it really doesn't want to do. In an ideal world, you'd want to use all of the encoding power of VC1 - in-loop and overlap filters, dequant, true chroma motion estimation, B frames, the works. But in dealing with 60 frames, the poor old PS3 simply can't cope. The answer is to turn off varying amounts of this stuff and compensate with sheer bandwidth. The amount you'll need will vary with your source material but for 1080p60 you're looking at the top end.
So... what's the catch? Weirdly, PS3 supports VC1, but support is patchy for the Microsoft audio codecs. Plus you need to 'Enable WMA audio' on the XMB, which nobody ever bothers doing any way. The answer is to demux the WMV, transcode audio into ac3 then plonk everything into a transport stream (.ts) container.
As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. My whole objective here is to get some semblance of the magnificence of TrueHD 1080p60 captures but playable on everyday hardware; getting that level of quality is going to take some time, so no downloadable goodies for now, but at least now I know it's actually possible...



Kudos to Microsoft for Expression Encoder 2 and its 30 day trial period I'm ruthlessly exploiting as we speak. It's based on the same code that produced spectacular VC1 encodes for HD DVD and Blu-ray, but it ain't cheap at $199. However, encoding quality seems to leaps beyond Microsoft's previous Windows Media Encoder offering

PC Gaming Renaissance

I'm currently in the process of revamping the woefully out of date digitalfoundry.org website. There'll be new pages detailing all our HD offerings and streaming video rather than cumbersome HD downloads. Tomorrow one TrueHD unit will be capturing the other in order to create videos showing the new system in action.
I can't be using Ridge Racer 7 to showcase 1080p capture for the rest of my life, so I knocked together a basic PC out of spare parts lurking in corners of the Digital Foundry lair, then bought a brand new 512MB nVidia 8800GT for a mere £90.
The results were spectacular and the revelation clear: for much the same price as a PlayStation 3, you can have a gaming machine that massively outperforms any current console. Devil May Cry 4 with 2x MSAA at 1080p60 is spectacular - an inordinate leap visually over the console versions. So-called system killer Crysis? Performance a touch choppy at 1080p with all settings on 'high', but still perfectly playable. Scale back to 720p and once again we have 60fps gameplay. Unreal Tournament 3 ran without a hitch at the full fat 1080p60 and predictably, blew the console versions out of the water graphically: over twice as much detail and double the frame rate.
The irony is that as pundits confidently predict the end of PC gaming, we've finally reached a point where basic PC technology is sufficient enough to feed consumer level HDTVs with a graphical experience far beyond what the set-in-stone, unupgradable consoles can achieve. In my view, there's never been a better time to get into PC gaming, and it needn't cost the earth...



A quartet of images derived from TrueHD 1080p60 captures using the CineForm encoder. Clockwise: Crysis (PC), Devil May Cry 4 (PC), Gran Turismo 5 Prologue (PS3) and finally Virtua Tennis 3 (PS3). Click on the thumbnails for full images.

Pushing Back The Boundaries

An exhausting week with over 800 miles covered across the UK, but plenty to get excited about. First of all, I recently upgraded to CineForm's Prospect HD editing solution; loaded up Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, and imported a few 1080p60 captures into the timeline. Lo and behold, not only is Digital Foundry TrueHD the only high definition capture system on the market capable of the most extreme resolutions and frame rates, it's also capable of doubling up as a realtime HD workstation.
Yup, 1080p60 streams on the timeline, playing back in realtime.... while conforming the audio at the same time. Bearing in mind that Prospect HD gives you change from $1,000, this is a pretty staggering state of affairs - especially as I believe that an overclocked Q6600 based system running in the region of 3GHz, combined with RAM running at 1066MHz will also do the job. It's a theory I'll put to the test sometime next week, but with Intel's new Nehalem hardware coming along, I'm all but certain that mid-range consumer level kit will soon be outperforming the current top-end server-based technology. And that's fantastic for HD, while posing interesting questions to those of us  in the HD hardware market.
Secondly, a brilliant meeting yesterday with the engineers behind the TrueHD hardware. I went in with a wishlist of stuff that can make the best HD capture solution bar none better yet, and I was amazed at the response. Plans are afoot to include the analogue component support currently absent from the hardware, improve precision 24-bit RGB performance, introduce hardware scaling, and finally, I'm very confident that an iteration of TrueHD will soon be available for notebook users. Bandwidth and CPU limitations prevent full-on 1080p60, but 720p60... 1080p30... some level of support for precision, lossless RGB capture, all the CineForm bells and whistles. It'll all be there in a package you can fit in a travel bag.
And lastly, in a sleep-deprieved, non-stop week of action, I spent a fantastic day at Criterion Games this week installing their new TrueHD station, demoing its capabilities and helping out with their video encoding on the Crash TV podcast they regularly produce.
If you don't know, these are the guys behind the Burnout and Black videogame series, pushing back technical boundaries themselves with each new game they release. Any way, check out that podcast on iTunes if you're in any way interested in games development (search for Crash TV). In an industry increasingly obsessed with PR spin, it's refreshing to see a bunch of talented developers letting the customer into their world, withholding very little and having some fun at the same time. Having spent a fair amount of time with these guys, a lot of the content is almost back like being in the room with them.

Streaming Video Comes of Age

A long break between blogs, but with so much going on behind the scenes, time really is at a premium. For the time being though, it's back once again to my Eurogamer contributions.
I was recently asked by new editor Tom Bramwell to introduce video to the Xbox 360/PS3 comparison features I put together for them. In theory, it should be easy: Digital Foundry TrueHD already provides lossless dumps of the HDMI ports of the respective consoles, so I already have the videos, it's just a case of formatting them courtesy of Adobe After Effects.
Well, no it's not. Matching up specific screenshots takes time enough, but synchronising entire feeds of video at 60fps is exponentially more difficult. And working with uncompressed video as I do all the way up to the h.264 encoding stage also takes a long time, but is important for features where the user really has to have faith in the workflow used. It's worth pursuing as nobody else appears capable of achieving 24-bit precision with games capture and more than that, they're often working with some pretty awful compression methods, compromising the quality right from the initial capture phase.
Bearing in mind the large audience these features attract, I think it's worth pursuing the highest quality results.
The video linked below basically took around 4-5 days of work (including time taken to play both versions of the game up until the end of Chapter One), producing two versions: one at 728x544 for the video Eurogamer site, and one at 632x400 to embed into the feature itself.


Click through to see all eight minutes of the original Grand Theft Auto IV comparison piece, including a fair few clips that were never seen in the actual article. Thanks to Eurogamer for hosting.

I've just spent the last few days working on the latest feature, five games (four with video) and you can see that here.
Introducing video at all was a tall order. Up until that point I thought that video comparisons were a complete waste of time; streaming video just isn't up to the job. However, Eurogamer's video player is state-of-the-art - as far as Flash goes - and definitely the best on the market if given decent enough material to work with. x264's HQ-Insane profile is used for the very best possible results and to ensure minimal macroblocking or picture break-up, I slow the video down to 50% or 25% speed. It sounds far from ideal, but as you can see from the link above, it works in that it gives you more time to analyse the video differences. The video is cropped so that one HD pixel is one pixel in the player. Another advantage of slowing the video down is that typically, streaming video online runs at 30fps. Usual form is to dump every other frame, but some games do not update at an even frame rate - so in many cases, video information is being thrown away. Using the slo-mo method, every frame is retained.
The more experience I have making these videos, the more I learn about streamlining the process. The GTA footage was done clip by clip, with both the embedded and Eurogamer.tv versions individually rendered. Now I have a process whereby all clips are joined together, rendered as one file, with that file then used as the basis for the smaller embedded version. A quick Premiere Pro edit can then be used on both renders to make both videos in quick succession.

TrueHD: The Proof of the Pudding

So it's been a while since I've updated with progress on Digital Foundry TrueHD. While the core of the product has been complete for quite some time, there's been a fair amount of engineering work going on in the background to make the whole thing stable. I've been doing a fair amount of beta testing with a client since my January blog entry and I was surprised at how easy it was for me to work around bugs, but not so easy for someone who's never laid hands on the hardware before. Thankfully now, the system is very robust and I've got some great feedback on how to improve the product still further.
Overall though, TrueHD is now good to go, so it's time for a screenshot or two, this time with a difference. The left hand side of the shot shows a captured image using our lossless 24-bit RGB codec (which supports 720p60 and 1080p30). The right hand side shows the quality we have using CineForm HD (support for any resolution at 60fps up to 1080p). For a complete comparison download both images here. Yet another testament to the quality of CineForm HD, which makes 1080p60 capture possible.
If you're wondering why I have an obsession with Ridge Racer 7, it's because it's a superb way to stress-test 1080p capture. And pretty much the only way we have right now until more advanced gaming hardware hits the market. First of all, it runs consistently at 60fps - give or take the odd dropped frame. Secondly, it's full raster 1920x1080 while most PS3 titles that offer 1080p support actually run at 960x1080, 1280x1080 or 1440x1080 - if they support 1080p at all. Thirdly, it's packed with detail, fast motion, and zero anti-aliasing. All of these details combine to make compression an absolute nightmare - in short, it's the best way to put TrueHD through its paces.
So, with TrueHD effectively done and dusted, what next for Digital Foundry? News early next week. It's gonna be big, or rather small.



Our old friend Ridge Racer 7 on PS3 versus Digital Foundry TrueHD, captured at 1080p30 in full 24-bit RGB (left) and YPrPb 4:2:2 CineForm HD (right). Click on the image for the full picture.

New Hardware Announcement: Full 1080p60 Capture with the 'Digital Foundry TrueHD' WorkStation

Earlier in the New Year I mentioned some exciting new equipment being worked on here at the Digital Foundry lair. Now I'm actually in a position to be able to make an announcement of sorts before a full press release goes out in the next week or so.
Digital Foundry TrueHD is the first piece of brand new technology we've been working on. The best kit available (soon!) for hardcore professionals and media outlets, but really targeted at games developers, it's an ultra high-end unit designed to be the last word in video games capture.
It's also the first HD system available capable of acquiring full raster 1080p high definition video at 60 frames per second, while simultaneously running an on-screen preview window scalable to any resolution at the same refresh rate. In this mode, files are encoded into the CineForm HD codec, which regular readers will know offers the best quality, spectacular compression rates and allows for cross-platform usage of the video files on PC or Apple Mac in all major editing systems.
Other stuff we're looking to include? How about enhanced support for full mathematically lossless 24-bit RGB? Digital Foundry TrueHD can capture 720p at 60fps with full 24-bit precision, up from 30fps on our previous hardware. Literally every single byte of video information from the HDMI port is captured with zero loss of quality. That 24-bit support extends upwards too, with 1080p support included at up to 30 frames per second.
So is the new TrueHD offering a direct replacement for the current portable DFHD? Not really. There are no plans for a portable version of TrueHD, but more than that there is no planned support for analogue component (VGA/DVI/HDMI only) nor interlaced sources - all handled easily with our existing product. So consider TrueHD a top-end device designed to complement Xbox 360, PC and PS3, while DFHD remains the best games media swiss army knife on the market - able to handle any input (SD or HD), any resolution, anywhere.
Screenshots, videos and everything will be released in the next week or two.

Cross-Platform HD Video Files

It's difficult to write any blog entry about Digital Foundry HD without evangelising the CineForm compression technology we have used since day one. I recognised the sheer quality of the codec right from the very beginning of our project way back in August 2005, but its incompatibility with Final Cut Pro on Apple Mac has always been a concern, being as it is - rightly or wrongly - the industry standard for video editing.
CineForm has been working on the Mac implementation of its technology for some time, but just before Christmas I finally took the plunge and invested in a Mac Mini. Partly to see what all the fuss was about (my last Mac was a monochrome powerbook that died sometime in 1994!), partly to investigate just how good the CineForm implementation was, and finally because I like to dismantle electronics and the Mini looked like a lovely design (that PCI Express Mini Card socket is very interesting...)
As it happens, CineForm have been good to their word. Our captures open in Quicktime and Final Cut Pro with no issues whatsoever, and no conversion required. The decoder required for running captures on the Mac is free too, meaning that distribution of those captures is no problem at all.
Going into 2008, we have some pretty exciting new stuff lined up that's been in gestation for quite some time. We're expanding the Digital Foundry HD hardware options, and introducing some revolutionary new capture options - stuff that's literally never been seen before - but practicality, flexibility and sheer quality are our bywords and as such, CineForm remains at the heart of everything we do.


Digital Foundry HD .avi files playing in Quicktime Pro on OSX 10.5, and imported into Final Cut Pro. Thanks to the CineForm HD codec, Digital Foundry HD captures are not only small and compact with industry-leading quality, they'll work on all major editing systems on both PC and Mac.