Watch Call of Duty: Ghosts at 60FPS
See the Xbox One reveal trailer at full frame-rate. Woof.
In the latest of Digital Foundry's 60 frames per second video blog posts, our focus shifts to the first next-gen title from Infinity Ward - Call of Duty: Ghosts.
Possibly the highlight of the meagre games showing at the Xbox One reveal last week, the footage was described as running "in-engine" on Xbox hardware - a careful choice of words which usually refers to video being rendered offline (i.e. not in real-time) at the studio's choice of resolution and detail level, albeit using the actual engine and in-game assets. To give you some idea of what "running on actual console hardware" can really mean, look no further than Naughty Dog's "render farm" of eight networked PS3s, used primarily for generating cut-scenes for The Last of Us. Perhaps it was a set-up similar to this that produced the Uncharted 3 60FPS video that Sony released a while back.
Surprisingly, for Call of Duty - a series where the 60FPS experience is a defining aspect of the gameplay, and indeed the success of the franchise - acquiring a full frame-rate version of the trailer proved to be difficult, with journos directed to the YouTube release which runs at half the frame-rate. We ended up grabbing a 1080i60 version from SpikeTV's coverage of the Xbox One reveal, deinterlacing the footage and scaling down to 720p60 (the Forza trailer was a locked 30FPS if you were wondering). The quality of the original transmission stream isn't exactly wonderful, and you can expect the final game to be operating at a higher resolution than what you're seeing resolved here - though what that actually is was a question Infinity Ward wasn't so keen on addressing directly when Eurogamer's Wesley Yin-Poole spoke with executive producer Mark Rubin.
"This is very political because there's a lot about the consoles I can't talk about," Rubin said. "But we will be whatever the consoles are going to run at natively."
Politics aside, we know that'll be 1080p on PS4 based on the games we've already seen, and we'd hope that would be the same on Xbox One.
"Watch Colin the dog and his two-legged Ghost colleagues do their thing at the COD-standard 60 frames per second."
Alternative 720p60 version: Capable hardware required for smooth playback
In terms of the video itself, getting the full temporal resolution wasn't quite the revelation we were hoping for - the trailer itself has very few fast action scenes that make the most of the super-smooth frame-rate, but, regardless, unless you saw the original SpikeTV transmission, to the best of our knowledge this is the only place you'll be able to see the 60FPS edition of the asset.
We recommend Google Chrome for the best chance of squeezing out those 60 frames from a browser, but for those having issues getting smooth playback, we've prepared an offline version: