GOW Origins HD cinematics in full 1080p

Developer Ready at Dawn has re-mastered all of the cinematics from PlayStation Portable games God of War Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta in native 1080p for God of War: Collection Volume 2.

"Between Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta we had over an hour of pre-rendered cinematics, and the gap in video resolution between our PSP source footage and full HD was so extreme that no matter how many custom video up-scale solutions we tried, there was just a glaring quality difference between the 1080p real-time gameplay and the video," wrote art director Nathan Phail-Liff on the EU PlayStation Blog.

"It was pretty demoralizing for us to play the game in beautiful HD and hit a cinematic trigger where Kratos looked like he was rendered through a dirty sock, so we realized we would just have to bite the bullet and properly re-render all cinematics in full 1080p.

"To do this we ported all of our cinematic scenes to the PS3 and, months and terabytes of data later, had every single frame re-rendered in HD through the new Collection’s engine. From there we had to up-rez all of the post production effects and re-composite every single cinematic again in HD, giving us a final result that blended seamlessly with the in-game quality."

In re-mastering the two PSP games Ready at Dawn went through every single character in the game and doubled or tripled their polygon count by hand. The studio also up-rezed and re-painted every texture across both games.

That's on top of implementing full stereoscopic 3D support.

"The quality of the final result of the 3D on Collection II so surprised us that it actually sold myself and a number of others on the team 3D TVs in general," Phail-Liff continued.

"Personally I wouldn’t want to play the games any other way after being able to experience it firsthand."