GameSpotting


 David Toole
Senior Producer
Recent Favorites: Frequency, Wave Race: Blue Storm, Halo, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3
Most Wanted: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, Super Smash Bros. Melee

Capturing the Fuzz in Screenshots

One of the most crucial parts of GameSpot's coverage of video games is constantly presenting you, our reader, with fresh new screenshots of games whenever we can. But as we do this, more and more people keep asking us why some screenshots look picture-perfect and others have a slight blurry haze to them. We've even been occasionally criticized over the inconsistencies. What most people don't realize is that there are legitimate reasons for the differences in screenshot quality, so I'm going to take some time to try to explain them here.

screenshot
Look and see the difference for yourself.
GameSpot takes the quality of our videos and screenshots seriously, so we do try to use the best capture cards available (while keeping costs to a minimum, of course). It's basically impossible to take perfect screenshots unless you snap them direct from the game's frame buffer. The video signal has to cross through the A/V cable into a capture card, and then our PCs have to process the shots, and as such the screenshot's quality diminishes greatly. We have tested taking screenshots using cheaper cards such as the ATI TV-Wonder, various DV cards (using analog-to-DV converters), the Matrox RT2000, and various versions of Pinnacle Systems' high-end Targa video-capturing cards. In the end, while some cards capture better screenshots than others, the difference isn't significant.

 
 Should we provide our own high-quality screenshots of Xbox games, even though we are unable to take high-quality PS2 or GameCube screenshots?

Yes
No
I'm not sure

 
Just about all the picture-perfect screenshots that you find on GameSpot are given to us directly by developers or publishers. You see, the only way to get these quality screenshots is take snap them directly from the system's frame buffer using some type of application that can tap into it. Developers and publishers are able to tap into the frame buffer directly when playing games with their development kit, which usually has a utility on it specifically for taking screenshots from a game. The screenshots are directly saved to the hard drive on the development kit, and from there they are sent to GameSpot for us to display. (It's worth noting that sometimes publishers and developers "clean them up" a bit in Photoshop, but I'll avoid naming names.)

Recently, Microsoft gave GameSpot a cool little application that allows us to grab screenshots directly from the Xbox's frame buffer. By simply connecting the Xbox to our network, the application is somehow able to take screenshots directly from the Xbox's frame buffer and save them to a PC hard drive. When we first received the application, we were skeptical that it could take perfect screenshots through our network, but once we tried it out, we were stunned. The screenshots are astonishing--as if they were taken directly from a development kit. There are two screenshot comparisons included in this column, one from SSX Tricky and one from Circus Maximus. I strongly suggest that you look at the comparison shots just to see how big a difference in quality there is between using our capture equipment and taking screenshots directly from the Xbox's frame buffer.

screenshot
Another comparison shot, this time of Circus Maximus.
While high-quality screenshots like the ones the Xbox capture application allows us to take is something we're sure you want, the problem now is that it will probably confuse other GameSpot readers who don't know much about how taking screenshots works. It will probably cause them to think PS2 games and GameCube games look worse than they actually do, which might be unfair to PS2 and GameCube developers. But should we hold back on providing high-quality Xbox screenshots? I don't think so. I think it would be unfair to punish our readers in that way. To make everything fair, we would need to be provided with utilities or hardware for the PS2 and GameCube to take high-quality screenshots. Will that ever happen? Trust me, we're working on it.

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to e-mail me.
 

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