Classic FPS Remastered: GTA4 Episodes (Patreon)

We're going back to 2010 once again to take a look at the pseudo-sequels to one of the biggest/notorious Digital Foundry face-offs in history: Grand Theft Auto 4. Microsoft secured timed exclusive rights to the excellent 'Episodes' - the standalone expansions, The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. After a year or so, the exclusivity window expired and PS3 and PC owners got the content too.

The result? Well, on the face of it, PlayStation 3 looked cleaner in its Episodes than it did in the original release (a blur filter seems to have been removed), but it seems that the game still ran at 1152x640 on the Sony console, up against native 720p on Xbox 360. Performance analysis - replicated here - suggested that PS3 was closer to Xbox 360 than GTA4 was, though with the benefit of hindsight, I think what we might be seeing are the advantages of triple-buffering vs double-buffering in low performance scenarios. 

As for whether PS3 performance had improved in the Episodes vs the original game - a popular 'fan theory' of the time, I actually answered that question in this Inside Digital Foundry article on Eurogamer which goes into extreme depth on what GTA4 did for us over the years, but a key test I carried out in that piece  traced the same route through the city in both OG GTA4 and Gay Tony... and frame-rates were essentially identical: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-what-gta4-did-for-us

It's essentially very similar technology to Red Dead Redemption 2, but Xbox 360's biggest performance 'wins' actually seem to come from the fact it ran with an unlocked frame-rate. Truth is, performance isn't great on either. That unlocked frame-rate did pay off eventually though - Series S and Series X ran this game locked at 720p60 and it's a genuinely game-changing experience, both in terms of eliminating the dodgy performance and getting a grip on input lag.

As for the classic analysis remastered video content? Here's the download linkage: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/2021-06-17-classic-fps-remastered-gta4-episodes