A video journey from GT1 to GT5.
In last week’s Gran Turismo 5 tech analysis, Digital Foundry delved into its gaming archive and compared the new game to sections of gameplay from GT4. This got us thinking. Could we trace a tech lineage through all major versions of the game released to date, right from the franchise’s beginnings in 1997?
The video below is the end product of our experiment. We’ve got the same five courses and the same five cars, running in GT titles from PlayStation, PSP, PlayStation 2 and PS3, and the comparison is quite extraordinary. It’s a bit of a shame that replay angles were not standardised earlier, as the jump from PS1 to the other platforms can be rather jarring, but rest assured, these are the same corners on the same tracks – an evolution of both Polyphony Digital’s development prowess and indeed the raw hardware power of the PlayStation consoles.
Putting the video together was an interesting exercise. First up, having reviewed video samples, we decided to omit footage of Gran Turismo 2 and Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec. The PS1 title couldn’t help us as there was no way to turn off HUD information in the replays – a shame as this potentially could have opened up many more cars and tracks for comparison. GT3 got cut because its content limitations were such that getting a match in cars and tracks across all hardware platforms became effectively impossible, plus there was no progressive scan for a high-quality image (PS3’s backwards compatibility runs both GT1 and GT2 non-interlaced). Getting a match car-wise across all games was problematic already as we deliberately limited ourselves only to the premium cars in GT5.