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It's one of the most frequent questions we get asked at Digital Foundry - especially on our YouTube channel. Just how do we measure console frame-rate and create our performance videos? Is there some kind of console equivalent to the classic PC performance tool, FRAPS? It's a long story, and one we've partially covered in the past, but one of the aspects that most excited me about expanding our video output was the opportunity to use the medium to demystify a lot of what we do, to show our tools and processes. And that begins right here.The tools have developed immensely since we first started analysing console performance back in 2008, but the basic principle hasn't changed. We use a high-end capture card to grab uncompressed video direct from the HDMI ports of our sources, and compare each individual frame to the one before it, searching for duplicate data, locating tear-lines, and calculating frame-rate from there.
Initially, we just had a command line tool - FPSdetect.exe - that could scan a captured video and tell us how different one frame was from its predecessor - effectively all the data you need to analyse games running with v-sync active. This was later joined by FPSgraph.exe, another command line tool that used the .txt files generated by FPSDetect to create transparent TIFF files with the familiar graphs. That's one TIFF per frame, overlaid onto the source video in Adobe After Effects - it was pretty torturous to work with and preview options of the final video were limited. Any errors in the calculations required manual editing of the .txt file, and a repeat of the whole enterprise. We needed to streamline the process, so we went one step further with the beginnings of the tool showcased in the video below - FPSGui.
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