More Forza footage and an E3 tale (Patreon)

Hello, Rich here! I've just posted up some new Forza Motorsport 7 'trucks on the Mugello autodrome'  footage from our E3 cache. Yup, it's running on Xbox One X. Here's a link if you want to stream or download the video:

https://www.digitalfoundry.net/2017-06-25-patreon-exclusive-forza-motorsport-7-trucks

Yeah, ideally we'd have included this in our original analysis video, but it kind of highlights the challenges we faced with E3 with John on the showfloor, and how we could get pristine quality 4K footage back to base in the UK for detailed analysis. 

We knew that John would be acquiring 4K ProRes and we also knew how large the files would be. You can get around 50ish minutes of footage on a 500GB SSD which means you average around 8GB per minute. Meanwhile, we ascertained that the hotel could only upload at 3.5mbps (10mbps if John would waste his time sitting about in the business centre). So suffice to say, the maths were frightening.

Even more frightening were the logistics in compressing the footage down to a visually lossless h.264 - which could be transmitted over the internet. John's MacBook Air managed to compress 4K video at the quality we needed at around 2fps, meaning just five minutes of footage would take 2.5 hours to compress. So basically, we needed a high power system that John could pack that wouldn't be too heavy - or expensive (our equipment costs are large enough already).

So eventually, I dug up an i7 6700K and 8GB of Corsair low-profile DDR4 we had in the office and paired them with an Inwin Chopin chassis. It's really tiny, and comes with an internally mounted 150W PSU - good enough for the 6700K, RAM and a hard drive. Overclocking was off the table on a small chassis, so I used a bargain basement MSI H110 mini ITX board which did a great job. There was only clearance for a 43mm heat sink so I went with the Noctua NH-L9i. I was a bit worried about this as it's not really meaty enough to work with a 91W TDP CPU running flat-out at 100 per cent load for hours on end. There should be a photo of the final build attached to this post - I tested it in my living room connected to my LG B6.

Doing an encoding test run, yes, I did indeed run into thermal throttling issues very quickly, but a -0.08v voltage offset using Intel's XTU tool kept the CPU at 4.0GHz on all cores and temperatures at 80 degrees max. Encoding speed was a 6x increase over the Mac, meaning that those five minutes of footage would encode in 25 minutes instead of 2.5 hours.

But even factoring this in, the slow upload speed and the lack of time John had between appointments (or at the hotel at night before needing to sleep) meant that we had to be selective with footage - so we initially targeted the big stories like Anthem, AC Origins and Forza Motorsport on Xbox One X. And even there, John had to be selective with the cuts he made - hence why we're only seeing this Forza footage today. 

In an ideal world, we'd simply have bought a Core i7 laptop (the HP Omen 17 I looked at recently with the 7700HQ locked to 3.4GHz on all cores - not as fast as the mITX system but certainly more portable), but those things are expensive - we solved our portable encoding problem with an £80 chassis, £35 heatsink and £60 board on top of components we had in the office.

I was actually hoping to get away with just the chassis and heatsink as we already had a mITX board with an i7 4790K, but unfortunately, the SATAs on that board decided to stop working three days before John flew out. Nice timing.

Still, things worked out fairly well, and we'll be rolling out that system again for Gamescom. We should be able to do a lot more there as both John and I will be attending - E3 is really expensive for us factoring in flights, accommodation etc, but John did an awesome job on getting the assets we needed to tell the stories we wanted to tell - and there's still more to come there. Ace Combat 7 is next!