The streaming tech is really impressive - the Shift mechanic is seamless, you feel that you have instant access to any part of the city, and any vehicle (all of them officially licensed and nicely modelled). Missions are preceded by talking heads that keep you entertained while the actual gameplay streams in the background, and only by skipping them do you need to wait. Only at the beginning of the game do loading screens intrude on the action. Despite use of the Bink codec, video quality holds up well as the FMV is mostly used just for talking heads - easy to compress effectively.Īnother element where Driver: San Francisco deserves praise is in its attempts to load game assets seamlessly. Reflections' ability to run FMV simultaneously with a 60Hz game engine is used to excellent effect in the cut-scenes. Bearing in mind that Bink is also used for the in-game talking heads that pop up mid-mission, we must assume that the video decoder is lightning-fast and light on RAM - obviously it works out to be less of an impact on processing power than rendering the characters natively. While we would have liked to have seen the weaker video elements mastered to a higher quality on PS3, we really can't be too fussy here. Only on the "Previously in Driver: San Francisco" recaps does the image take a noticeable hit in quality.īased on our captures it appears to be the case that all the video elements are identical between the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game, with the exact same data being utilised. The Bink codec is used here for the FMV elements, but as it is utilised mostly for talking heads, video quality holds up rather well. The notion that the developer is running a 60FPS engine while at the same time decoding video is quite remarkable - we've seen FMV used in this way before (TV screens in Alan Wake and The Darkness map the FMV to a texture) but we've never seen a level of integration this close before.
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