This morning, like many of you I'm sure, I watched Sony's keynote address at its Playstation Experience in Las Vegas. With each new demo I became more and more underwhelmed with the quality of the graphics in the games on display. Then it occurred to me that maybe the problem wasn't the games but the video compression being used for the stream. But video compression couldn't turn an incredible looking game into an average looking one could it? Well when the compressed version is just a fraction of the size of the full fat version then, as it turns out, it really can. So this afternoon I took the time to download the full uncompressed video which you can get here. You'll notice the only option is to torrent the file. That's because it totals more than 1.5 GB of data, far more than the average computer throughout the world can stream in real time and big enough to eat up the bandwidth allotment of all but the largest websites. But if you download the video (which I would highly recommend), the experience you'll get is revelatory. Really the difference in graphics this generation is going to come down to the ability to render fine details more realistically. And those details are completely lost when streaming a highly compressed version of any video. When it comes to the perfectionists at Naughty Dog losing all of that detail is the difference between a "meh" reveal and a stunning one.

Here are a couple things I noticed when watching the uncompressed video for those who can't download it for whatever reason or just need more incentive:

- About 2/3 of the way through the demo Nate smashes an enemy's head through a small waterfall. In the compressed version this doesn't look especially impressive but in the uncompressed version what occurs is something I have literally never seen before in a game. As Nathan's head passes under the water his hair becomes wet. And I don't mean like in the previous generation where a wet texture is placed over Nathan's body. I mean that the actual physics of his hair changes and then slowly changes back as his hair dries in the sun over the remainder of the demo. Note that his hair blows accurately in the wind up until that point in a way that looks far more realistic than Lara's hair in Tomb Raider. That's a tiny detail but its the type of tiny detail that make's Naughty Dog's games so impressive and it's something you simply can't see on the compressed video.

- Along the lines of small facial details, in last gen Uncharted games Nathan's emotions would show on his face during gameplay and his lips would move while he talked but both of these things weren't done in very high detail. In a sequence a bit later than the one I just mentioned Nate smashes another enemy's head into a wall. That's fine and all but what is really cool is watching Nate's face as the enemy approaches him. Note how Nate's eyes follow what he (or you as the player) are looking at and how his face changes expressions as the enemy moves closer and when he eventually takes him out. It's another tiny detail that is unnoticeable when all the detail is lost in compression.

- I saw several people on the web saying the textures on both the character and the environment had seen a downgrade since the E3 reveal. They haven't. The textures are basically photorealistic but they are heavily blurred on any streaming version of this video no matter how high a quality they claim the video is.

- Small lighting details were also lost with compression. Towards the end of the demo when Nate uses the rope to flee his enemies take a look at the leaves at his feet. You'll notice how each individual leaf on every single plant is correctly receiving the sunlight. In previous generations foliage often didn't receive light or cast shadows at all, and even in the super impressive The Vanishing of Ethan Carter many elements of the foliage were just fancy alpha effects with a lot of crazy blending. But these leaves are full 3D models and the way the light bounces off of the leaves is just stunningly realistic. Think about how when the sun hits a leaf the leaf almost shimmers as the individual crevices in the leaf reflect and refract the light in subtly different ways. When your leaves are just a moving 2D image it can't have crevices and therefore the light cannot accurately bounce off the leaves as it would in real life. But in this demo the light does in fact correctly bounce off each individual leaf, showing that not only are the leaves 3D objects, but are either tessellated or textured in a way that allows the light to take into account depth based on texture opacity or something to that effect. It's another tiny detail but it makes the jungle look borderline photorealistic at times.

- In the last generation games, Nate's shirt would become dirty over time but this was basically a texture swap. It didn't actually change the physical makeup of the shirt and because it was a texture the dirt appeared in preset locations. After Nate slides down a hill of mud late in the demo you can see that his shirt has actual mud on it. Not a texture swap where it now has a brown texture. No this was actual mud that was attached onto his shirt, not part of the shirt itself, and that mud changed how the light reflected off of Nate, proving that Naughty Dog is using an incredibly advanced physically based lighting system more impressive than anything I have seen thus far this generation.

- There were a ton of other minor incidental details you missed in the low quality video. At the very end of the video as the rocks are sliding, Nate grabs onto the top of the cliff and as his hands scrape along the ground trying to get a good grasp, individual pebbles are pulled out of the ground that have fully modeled physics that correctly react to Nate's hands. There are a ton of tiny little things like that which show just how far reaching Naughty Dog's attention to detail goes and how much of a disservice streaming video does to this game.

While full quality videos aren't going to enhance every single current gen game they really are going to be required to appreciate the detail in more and more games. If you really think about it, it's as if you are watching a DVD quality video of a blu-ray quality game. Just like a DVD won't give you all the detail captured by the latest professional cameras, these streaming videos aren't going to give you all the quality allowed by the latest game consoles and PC's. So if you hear your friends bashing the quality of the graphics in a game they have only seen a video of, make sure to ask them if they watched the full quality version or the streamed version. And if you are trying to compare graphics between different versions of a game using a streaming video just stop. Digital Foundry has full quality, uncompressed captures of all the games it examines available for download. If you don't have the bandwidth to download these videos, at the very least hold your judgement as, more and more, judging a game based on compressed videos is doing them a major disservice.