Image quality is also well taken care of. All three titles operate at full 1080p with excellent anti-aliasing coverage and what looks like at least 8x anisotropic filtering. Aliasing is kept to a minimum and surface textures remain sharp even at oblique angles. Along with increased resolution, we also see LODs pushed out further along with higher resolution shadowmaps. So we're not just looking at more detailed art here - but more objects visible further into the scene, producing a richer presentation.
Then there is the matter of performance. We expected frame-rates similar to The Last of Us Remastered, but the results are actually significantly better. The majority of gameplay operates at a locked 60 frames per second, providing a very fluid, consistent experience. A number of scenes do suffer from minor performance dips but these drops really go no lower than 55fps, and even that is relatively uncommon - though alpha transparency effects do seem to be the main cause for the frame-rate dips that do occur. We're told that a day one patch is incoming, addressing minor bugs, so the door is perhaps open to some small performance boosts by launch, but even now, the frame-rate is fine.
We can also confirm that vertical sync remains engaged at all times. Of course, once again, this makes the biggest difference in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, which suffered from pretty serious screen tearing on PlayStation 3. By eliminating this artefact and bumping performance up to 60 frames per second, the game is improved substantially. All three games benefit from this improvement and they each turn in similar performance numbers.
What of motion blur then? We originally expressed concern over the lack of this effect in pre-release footage, and several developers have expressed a preference in removing it from 60fps remasters - as we saw in Journey, for example. The good news is that this effect most certainly is in the collection. What we didn't expect is the amount of control given to the players with this feature. Players are able to enable object motion blur independently or utilise both object motion blur plus camera blur (just the former is enabled by default). You can disable the effect completely as well, if you prefer. It's an unexpected feature and one we greatly appreciate. We'll put this feature through its paces in our next piece in order to determine if it has any performance impact, but for the moment, it does not seem to incur much of a penalty, based on first impressions. We should also point out that the effect is enabled for Drake's Fortune too - in the original PS3 games, motion blur only debuted in the sequel, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.
Overall then, first impressions are highly positive. With the game in hand and hundreds of gigs of lossless PS3 footage banked in advance for comparison purposes, we're looking forward to putting more time into this title. We're planning to roll out detailed coverage on a per-game basis in order to truly understand the amount of work that has been poured into this project. It's clear that this project was a labour of love for those involved, and it's equally evident that Sony spared no expense in bringing this remarkable collection to life. We have so much more to share, but in the here and now, the initial takeaway is this: our expectations for this release were sky-high (perhaps unfeasibly so) but everything we've played to date suggests that Bluepoint has delivered - in spades.
