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Putting together the Digital Foundry platform comparisons aren't easy. Pristine, lossless captures are acquired quickly filling multi-terabyte RAID arrays, clips are meticulously lined up, shots are extracted, magnified and compared. And then of course, performance is tested. But what if we could carry out most of the Face-Off process in one pass? What if we could play two versions of the same game simultaneously while grabbing all the capture data we need in the background? Well, that's what we're doing here in this video presentation, where John Linneman and I play Knack on PS4 and PS4 Pro using a single Dual Shock 4 controller, with two screens side-by-side.Dual system control (we tend to call it 'dual-wield') was a hardware experiment I put together back in September 2014, in an attempt to streamline workflow and to make our comparison videos - then dominated by cut-scenes and very limited gameplay - a lot more dynamic. In fact, doing a quick search though our YouTube history, I found this never-published Battlefield 4 comparison which showed highly promising results during our first tests. But the truth is that while dual-wield produces some cool comparison clips, the combination of varying game logic and shifting analogue stick data means that de-sync happens very quickly, limiting its application.
But Knack? Well, that's different. Camera movement is carried out by the game, not the player, removing our most troublesome de-sync variable - the drift caused by the processing, averaging and smoothing of controller input. Xbox One and PS4 actually have different controller polling intervals too (4ms and 5ms respectively), and this also contributes to de-sync - but this is not a problem with Knack as we're comparing two PlayStations with the same sampling. Game logic still causes problems, but we can quickly re-sync the action by moving Knack to a corner of a room. In almost every way, we have a best case scenario here. A typical dual-wield session on most titles lasts a few minutes before we need to abort (some see immediate drift) but in the case of Knack, we could probably play through most of the game like this.
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