Classic FPS Remastered: God of War 3 (Patreon)

Rich here, emerging from the Digital Foundry archive with another gem. These captures date back from March 10th, 2010 and they show the PSN downloadable demo of God of War 3, stacked up against the final retail code.  On the one hand, I was never particularly keen on Sony Santa Monica's unlocked frame-rate approach. However, on the other hand, it allows us a much closer look at how much performance improved between a demo that was first seen during E3 2009 (but only appeared for download in November of that year) and the final game that appeared in March 2010.

Frame-rates are better, yes. But that's just part of the story. Sony Santa Monica revamped the lighting to produce a richer, deeper presentation. Post-process effects like bloom and per-object motion blur were added to the mix. Elements of the art also appeared to get a substantial revamp.

2010 was also the beginning of the post-process anti-aliasing era. In fact, the same archive hard drive with the God of War 3 captures also features some comparison shots of The Saboteur, where the PS3 version appeared to form some kind of nascent edge blend technique reminiscent of MLAA - morphological anti-aliasing - a technique that is very definitely in play in God of War 3. This replaced the 2x MSAA found in the demo code and likely played a key role in the performance upgrade - the system load incurred by AA would have shifted to the PS3's SPUs.

Anyway, enjoy this retrospective look back at a truly classic game. As always, we've got nearest neighbour 3x3 upscaling to turn 720p into 2160p, while our download page includes native 720p versions too: http://digitalfoundry.net/2021-05-07-god-of-war-3-classic-fps-remastered-final-game-vs-demo