Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter - PC Retro Time Capsule vs Xbox 360/PS2 - Old-School Cross-Gen! 

My first ever Xbox 360 game. I'll never forget how cool it felt controlling the UAV. Wish we could get another single player focused Ghost Recon.

This game right here in 2006 on X360 is really the last time I remember being blown away by what a new console could pull off. It really felt "next-gen".

GRAW and R6 Vegas was really fun in co op on 360. This was a trip down memory lane.

The 360 version is backwards compatible on the Xbox Series X and actually runs at 60fps, its amazing. Definitive way to play the game. Same with GRAW 2 as well. Future Soldier(closest we ever got to GRAW 3) is also back compat but still runs at 30fps I think.

Graw was a technical showpiece on 360 at the time

When you talked about destruction, I realized I‘d love a DF Retro or Time Capsule about the PS2 Criterion FPS BLACK, that featured an absolutely stunning display of destruction especially for it being a PS2 generation game.

This game, along with the great "Need for Speed: Most Wanted," was the reason I bought my Xbox 360 on launch day in 2005. I was so obsessed with the lighting, especially in Ghost Recon. The sun felt so real back then I mean, it was something we had never seen before.

This game felt like the future, specially the 360 version indeed. It was so immersive. The sound design was also superb. When you run you can actually hear your different gear rattling.

I find it so disappointing that phsysics simulation has taken a back seat ever since the Xbox One/Ps4 gen. It was the most fun thing to do in games for me. I remember Star Wars The Force Unleashed let you really feel the impact of your Force attacks enabled by Havok physics. Respawn's Jedi Games don't come close to that.

GRAW on the Xbox 360 was the first time I'd experienced a game where you could shoot through walls with a sufficiently powerful rifle. Dunno why but that blew my socks off at the time.

Legendary game. It truly looked amazing for the time and it's probably the last time I was truly blown away. Thank you for doing these videos; they're very special.

sad physics and destruction are gone in most modern games. a step backwards. looking at you battlefield.

The 360 versions of G.R.A.W. 1 and 2 are some of my favorite games. I still enjoy playing them and fondly remember originally going through them. I bought G.R.A.W. 2 on PC, and it's interesting, but I wasn't quite as into it and never got too far. But a big issue was how it ran with a stuttery frame rate for me, which is probably the main reason I didn't stick with it. As much as I love The Division, I don't see it as much of a Tom Clancy game in the same vein as classic Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and Splinter Cell games, and did everything in Wildlands and played a lot of Breakpoint, but those games do not compare to the games that came before. When they canceled Patriots and announced Rainbow Six Siege and how it was an online multiplayer game, to me it was all downhill. I love The Division, I loved Splinter Cell: Conviction, and liked Blacklist and Future Soldier, but after those Ubisoft went in the wrong direction. I just wish we got campaigns again without as much focus on online play as they go too big and rely on mindless fun which you'll notice if you explore Auroa and even Wildlands, with its repetition and silly, superfluous side quests. I hope the remake of Splinter Cell is getting taken care of because all signs point to trouble right now.

This was my first game on the Xbox 360 and on the back of the box it said, "a masterclass in what the 360 can do." They weren't wrong, and I absolutely loved that quote. My second game was PGR 3 and then I got Condemned: Criminal Origins. Which to this day is still one of my all time favourite games. The next game I got after that was the legendary Gears of War. And I ran that game through a surround sound home cinema kit. It was absolutely nuts. From what I can remember you can dive and slide in this game, which was pretty cool.

You can never go wrong with Digital Foundry Time Capsule and DF Retro, the best series on the channel, keep them coming John

The 360 versions of the GRAW games definitely needs a remaster for modern platforms. One of the best militarty shooter campaigns ever, the multiplayer was also a lot of fun.

Ahhhh Lost Planet shoutout! Would love to see a video about that game in the future lol. It’s a favorite of mine

There's also an OG Xbox version which isn't that terrible lol. It actually got animations and some physics, and your teammates bodycam. Clearly the PS2 version was a cutdown port of the Xbox version.

The thing about GR:AW on PC, it was not only pretty much unsurpassed graphically until Crysis came around; and unlike Crysis, it ran smooth as Irish butter even on a midrange gaming PC/ It was also one of the last games to rely more on actual polygons rather than texture mapping techniques.

Ironically the PC versions (especially GRAW2) had enemies that would spawn in close when the player hit certain trigger points which was so obviously artificial and gamey and made doing RECON with the drone utterly pointless.

Man, I miss this game so much. This era on 360 got me into split screen online gaming before everyone took everything so serious. The custom lobbies on this game were insanely fun. This, rainbow, gears, dead rising were my childhood.

Oh fuck, I'm old now.

Smoke physics are better than new recent games, that is awesome

There is a distinct and special joy in listening to two specialists in their element breaking things down, regardless of my own familiarity. Never even heard of this game but I will forever be here for these comparisons and conversations. In today's squalid sea of content, DF/DF Retro are islands of pure Good.

I remember that I knew about this game after watching the movie Disturbia, in which Shia Labeuf's character, Kale, plays it online on Xbox Live. Purchased it myself a couple of weeks later, it was amazing!

I used to always be jealous of the console version of GRAW, but today I appreciate how good and realistic the pc version is. Still enjoy it today

These are some of the most fascinating stuff on YT. It manages to encapsulate a contemporary tone while bringing us back contextually to a point in the past, as if we’re existing in that moment with the foresight of the future.

This brings back so many memories! Great video as always! Cheers from Brasil

Co-op was incredible in this game with the camera of your pals streaming in real time. Always having positional awareness of your team made triangulating opponents on the map so easy and fun. Made my sessions feal more like couch co-op than online play.

It was one of the last times I got my mind blown by videogame graphics, back in 2006 those visuals were insane. Great times

I just did a playthrough of these 3 versions a couple of weeks back. Great timing! Love this era of gaming. Also - OG Xbox and PS2 have differences. The Cross-Com displays your teammates perspective on the OG Xbox in the top left hand corner but at a very, very low refresh rate whereas the PS2 has a mini map in its place. The OG Xbox animations update at a higher rate than the PS2 version but framerate on the OG Xbox can still drop during firefights, particularly in the opening level when you regroup with your squad.

Please consider comparing Splinter Cell Chaos Theory on PS2 and PC. They're very different, most people don't know.

I have never clicked on a video this fast. Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six are two of my most beloved franchises growing up. I’m presently playing through Breakpoint after picking it up on a Steam sale.

Played a lot of this on co-op on PC. So goddamn hard, you die of only few hits and no respawn in the middle of a mission, just stare a blank screen until others pass or fail the mission. It was very tense and frustrating and fun, but we never succeeded on the last missions and had to cheese a bit on others with rifle grenades. Found out much later the PC and 360 versions are completely different.

that fucking intro music hit me like a brick wall. God damn Jet Force Gemini

For some reason it blows my mind that Graw released on the same console as gta 5.

Wow, I never realised GRAW was so different between platforms.. My memories from this fantastic game are all from the 360 version. Thanks for the super comprehensive video showing off each version and comparing them. I really enjoyed it 🙏🏆👍

Lmfao, the Jet Force Gemini music at the beginning was spot-on. It's epic enough to be the opening score for literally any video.

This is peak digital foundry

I remember playing GRAW at launch and telling myself that better gfx wasn't just possible :)

One of my favorite ghost recon games full stop.. i still remember and adore the part where your hunkered down getting shot from all sides as a musical score blares out as you try to hold out until extraction.. so good.

I still remember the first time I played GRAW and being blown away by how good it looked.

I would love to see more videos showing the cross-gen difference between the PS3/X360 and the PS2/GC/DC/Xbox, not only because the generational leap in this generation was huge but because the PS2 managed to live for a long time receiving games until 2014. Some games like Call of Duty 3, Tomb Raider: Underworld and Need for Speed: ProStreet really show how the PS2 hardware was already quite dated back in 2009 and was starting to struggle to run the same games as the PS3/X360/Wii (which justifies some late games being ports of PSP instead of PS3/X360 or even Wii version like SpiderMan: Web of Shadows and Toy Story 3 ), I really think it was an interesting time in the transition between generations.

Takes me back to times when next-gen was a thing. I wanted to play X360 version so bad bacause PC version looked cheap in comparison (same with NFSMW) and I couldn't run it properly on my outdated Radeon 9600 128mb.

One of the first games I played on my 360 back in 2006, along with Hitman Blood money. Will never forget how amazed I was at gaming. Will always be of of the pivotal moments of gaming for me

12:07 Tango simply refers to an enemy target.

Oh boy, the OG XBox and PS2 versions of this game were a trip back in the day! Truly the final glory days of ports being buckwild and different to their main platform counterparts. The PC was just a weird mishmash of GRAW 360 assets and silly tech gimmicks in a new engine. Weird stuff.

Great timing. I was never into Ghost Recon and I only just recently got into them with Breakpoint and Wildlands. Last week I went back and bought all the older games and have been playing through Advanced Warfighter this week (XBox version as I prefer the third person setup).

Damn watching this made me realise that I really miss those early Xbox 360 years

Holy cow you guys are hitting on all my favorite games recently, Mercenaries, GRAW, NFS: MW. This was the era right here, so many solid games launching together.

Not even gonna lie, seeing "Pee-Pee Filter" on the back of the box is what really convinced me to buy the game. The game made me GRAW all over the place, especially that one surprise explosion in Surround Sound the first time it happened.

0:54 Man. That Matrix demo looked awesome even back then

GRAW 360 doesn't look like an 18-year-old game. I miss the 7th generation when games were pushing more attention to detail, an emphasis on physics and destruction, etc.

Wow... Ageia PhysX... Back when I first got into computer hardware. Feeling old all of a sudden. Great vid as always!

I absolutely loved you guys going through the damage of objects. I did not remember this at all playing it 18 years ago... Crazy to say that lol

The first game demo I downloaded when I got went from dialup to dsl.. took forever to download but demo had multiplayer for free to try out.. truly felt next gen gaming at the time

I appreciate the MS-DOS Commander Keen music that plays once the PS2 version comes out!

This was on a short list of games that I bought for 360 early on that I was so pleasantly surprised by. This game really had a lot of “advanced” stuff going on. I remember being so impressed by the the simulation of light bleeding through cloth on some of the outdoor environments.

Thanking you kindly for the tunes @ the beginning from jet force Gemini.👍

I have very fond memories of this from the 360 era. I just found my old disc and tried it in the Series X..... WOW. It looks super clean and plays so well. I think I am going to have to play through this again, not just for nostalgia, but because it's a genuinely good game still

I didn't even know there was a console version of the game until the 360 version became backwards compatible on Xbox One. I only played the PC version that I got bundled with Geforce 8800GTS. There was like 2-3 games with PhysX support bundled with that card :D Oh btw there was ads in PC version too. I vividly remember an Axe ad on the first level.

Was that the Jet Force Gemini intro music at the beginning of the video? Takes me back 😊

Ubisoft was doing some weird stuff during this time. Splinter Cell: Double Agent also had a release where the PS2 version and Xbox 360 version were completely different games.

I was so blown away playing this game on the 360, the character movements, the combat and tactical mechanics, chef's kiss.

On the topic of ageia cards, a retro time capsule video about Cellfactor would also be amazing - it was a very unique game in how it explores how far PhysX technology and dedicated cards can go.

really love these. Keep it up!

13:18 John giggles like a schoolgirl finding out he can destroy this cardboard box block

I used to play this on an 2007 HP Laptop back in 2010, practically the game that introduced me to the whole Ghost Recon series, and it was like at 15FPS slow slow.

Another great retro time capsule, thank you for doing these, they're very fun to watch! I'd love to see a retro time capsule for Rayman 2, which has vast differences across platforms!

like many here this was my first game on the 360. I remember plugging it into my 32" Sony CRT and being like wow! Good times

I miss when making a big impact on the culture, filling the game with detail and nuance and pushing the industry with new features were what sold games. Now it's literally cosmetic skins for games that have half as much effort put into them that dominate most publishers minds. This sucks.

Y'all unlocked some core memories today. I had the PC version first and then the PS3/360 version. Forgot all about the PC version

IIRC Redstorm worked on the multiplayer portion - which btw, was amazing. 16 player co-op campaign is something that really needs to come back.

This level of destruction is missing from modern games. I remember when physics were such a driving force in games. Around the time the half life 2 demos came to light all games were pushing for physics… then somewhere along the line the thirst for it disappeared. Far Cry 6 is a great looking game but the destructive environments are so limited..

Seeing that Ageia card in your Twitter post I instantly knew this video was coming.

This video brings back memories of me seeing trailers of the 360 version of the game and wanting to play it...then playing the PC version for 10 minutes only to realize it is NOTHING like the trailers I saw (i.e. 3rd person action shooter in the trailers, first-person tactical shooter in reality on PC), wondering if I got the wrong game and then just abandoning the game altogether. 😂 I didn't know the game's PC version was meant to be different. Seeing DF mention that in this video had me yelling "RIGHT?!" and feeling so seen. 😂😂😂

4:14 There were OG Xbox games like Sudeki (2004) and Far Cry: Instincts (2005) that used real-time shadow mapping for the environment and characters well before GRAW, albeit with a more aggressive fade-in (with either no cascading or very limited cascading). Even Jurassic Park: Trespasser (1998) uses shadow mapping on the vast majority of objects populating the game world and in a way that suggests it isn’t all just baked-in (shadows cast from both dynamic/physicalized and static objects all perfectly blend into each other). That’s without mentioning that it’s all done in software rendering (CPU only) along with per-pixel grayscale bump mapping.

The 360 ​​multiplayer still works today, it gets busy in the evening (London time) around 10:30 p.m. It's still great...

Every so often I revisit this game on the Xbox! Still such a good game

Yeah, that first aerial view of Mexico City made my jaw drop at the time.GRAW on PC is one of those games that needed to be played back then - if somebody remakes it now , most players would just take a lot of it's features for granted in a post COD/Battlefield world. Another great Retro time capsule by you, guys. And, if you are accepting recommendations for next PC Retro Time Capsule - i have to recommend you guys to show off Severance : Blade of Darkness. It's an early 2001 hack 'n' slash that, despite it's modest level geometry, features incredible real-time shadows, planar water reflections and the best pre-Havok physics I've seen in a game. The dismemberment system is a worthy competitor to Soldier of Fortune, and i have to yet play a game where the blood starts steaking down the stairs once it reaches the edge of the staircase.

This was the game that convinced me to get a 360 at launch. That CGI trailer from E3 2005 is iconic. I watched it so many times.

Hello ! is there a way to run physx on nvidia cards without an ageia card?

I was just thinking of going back to finish this series on my Xbox 360 finally this year. Ghost Recon got me into the Xbox ecosystem and was my first experience to online gaming. Such a great game series!

I love these kinds of videos with Alex & John. Peak Vibes.

I hope the Jetforce Gemini music is a hint to the next DF retro video

funny you should post this. steam just added it to my account after a support ticket because it was somehow deleted. love the game.

I'm actually a big fan of semi-transparent shadows like the ones in the PC version. What they got going for them is the fact that they blend way better into the environment than those deep black moving "papercuts" ever did. It's the same with RT reflections which - because all other graphics are still so basic even now - tend to pop in a way they never do in real life. To me the impression of an "even", homogenous environment serves immersion a lot more than one or two highly articulated effects.

I love this kind of videos, interesting and fun to watch can you guys do GTA IV comparison next?

For the 360 version, Ubisoft Paris worked on the Single Player campaign while Red Storm did the Coop/PvP Multiplayer. It would have been interesting to also take a look at the MP mode for the 360 since it was essentially a completely different game compared to the campaign in terms of graphics assets and even gameplay mechanics.

Great video guy's keep up good work

I just played this game on the Series X for the first time yesterday. still very good

Please look at Morrowind on the original Xbox, or DOOM 3 on Xbox. You've done both PC versions, but the console version were much more impressive in terms of what they accomplished.

Fact check: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter came out in 2006, the same year as the 8800GTX. The 8800GTX was much more advanced than the hardware on the 360. In fact, the 8800gtx I bought came bundled with GRAW.

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 and a PhysX card was mind blowing back in the day. it took static items and made them move in a special way. Like the trees bending in the wind. I still think they should use PhysX for physics in games. Not many do anymore even though it's build into nVidia GPUs.

I kinda miss when games differed in weird ways across platforms.

I remember buying this for 360, when i still had a CRT. Part way through I upgraded to a hd TV using VGA, as I didn't want horrible ghosting that LCD had at the time through hdi, and man the resolution Jump and clarity was mind blowing, that it felt like a different game.

My 1st experience with ghost recon was advanced warfighter on pc, thought it was a technical showpiece back in the day. Multiplayer was mad back then

For this Game, i kicked my CRT in my Retro-Gaming Room and buyed a Toshiba HD-Ready Flat Screen for way to much Money. But the first time i fired up my 360 with this Blockbuster, i was blown away by this Graphic and Clearity-Boost. Amazing Game-Milestone for me.

The music on the PS2 clips hahaha. We are Full Spectrum Dorks!

Nice! I would love a look at Star Wars The Force Unleashed that also has multiple versions in different generations.