ethomaz on 21 July 2015
| We'll be running an in-depth look at God of War 3 Remastered in the next day or two, but in the meantime our focus is on the Nathan Drake Collection and that 1080p60 gameplay clip released last week. Sony sent us two assets to look at - the video clip, along with five screenshots. Bizarrely, the shots are rendered at a native 4K resolution - not representative of real-time gameplay, but perhaps useful in another way. Even at the ultra-HD pixel count, texture detail seems to hold up, though understandably geometry and lighting are very much last-gen in nature. But it's the gameplay clip that is most exciting. It may be less than four minutes in duration overall, but it seems to confirm that at the very least, Bluepoint Studios are on track to deliver a remaster at least on par with Naughty Dog's excellent in-house PS4 rendition of The Last of Us. The scene is effectively cut into two sections, indicative of the typical Uncharted gameplay mix - we see an initial traversal section, where frame-rate barely shifts from the target 60fps, and that's followed up by a more action-orientated sequence, complete with intense gunplay and a signature Uncharted set-piece - a more challenging work-out for the engine. Bearing in mind that the Uncharted games are built on the same engine that is so problematic to port straight over to PS4, our contention is that Bluepoint built its remasters on the same principles, leveraging all the lessons learnt by Naughty Dog. Certainly, based on the performance profile we see in the clip, there are some commonalities with the way that The Last of Us Remastered presents itself. In the second half of the clip, there are some frame-rate drops - and it seems that advanced physics work and lavish utilisation of transparent alpha textures does appear to cause some issues. Of course, we only have a tiny excerpt of gameplay to look at here, but there is the sense that the frame-rate dips aren't quite as severe as some of those seen in TLOU - perhaps because the older Uncharted games didn't quite push alpha to quite the same degree as Naughty Dog's final PS3 title. As for whether this is indicative of performance across the whole collection, we suspect that it'll be some of Uncharted 3's more daring set-pieces that really give the PS4 engine its most thorough work-out. However, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune could well be very solid - it's less ambitious from a technological perspective, and a good deal of the effects seen in the original game didn't use alpha at all in order to save precious GPU bandwidth. |
