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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. 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.Way back in 2008, it was early days for Digital Foundry on Eurogamer. 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.
Access to these assets opened the door to techniques like pixel-counting - a form of analysis first discussed on the Beyond 3D forum. 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. 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 1152x640 on PS3, with a blur filter in effect.
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