http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-titanfall-beta-tech-analysis
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In our earlier exchange with Titanfall developer Respawn, the words "frame-rate is king" rang loud as its mission statement. Perhaps it's not too surprising, then, that visually the game is a composite of striking and bland elements - a vibrant effects-fest in motion, but with a clinical simplicity elsewhere that can be hard to overlook. We've seen these cutbacks before, of course, and if there's one thing that can get you off the hook for taking this approach, it's a low-latency 60fps golden standard. In the case of the Titanfall beta, however, the results aren't entirely as expected.
What we can confirm for this build, though, is an internal resolution of 1408x792, with a pass of 2x MSAA to tackle aliasing before any upscale to your preferred resolution. This pixel count is something the team is happy to verify - even with indications that it could end up around the 900p mark for the final product. It may not be a gargantuan number as-is, but it pulls the game away from the ho-hum 1280x720 that was on most peoples' bingo cards - a step up, if not a remarkable one, in terms of the final image.
In its current form, it's difficult to understand Titanfall's resolution choice considering the variable performance. As it renders at 792p, The game relies on the Xbox One's scaler to output at 1080p. Now, we've just updated our Xbox One to the latest system software and the good news is that the harsh edge-enhancement has completely gone. We'll be looking at the improved scaler in a little more depth very soon, but while the situation is clearly an improvement on the preview code we saw previously, there's still a good deal of aliasing to contend with. It appears that Respawn is caught between a rock and a hard place with regards image quality vs. performance.
However, while the Xbox One beta has its own fair share technical quibbles, there is an undeniable entertainment factor to the game that takes precedent. It's a simple package, but the commitment to 60fps so far is strong enough to convince that the right talents are working on the project. In the meantime, while we have a firm handle on the Xbox One and PC versions of the game, we can't help but wonder how the Xbox 360 version will compare.
By and large, Titanfall is a healthy 60fps shooter as promised, but only as long as it's played with an on-foot Call of Duty mindset. With Portal 2's Source engine at its core, it's as fluid and responsive as you could hope for when pistolling Pilots and kicking AI grunts.
However, it all changes once you buckle into a Titan, and in this build we see lengthy passages of play (particularly by the end of a mission) falling within the 35-45fps range. Neither one of the levels on show is especially worse than the other in this regard, and it's clearly the barrage of alpha effects that ends up pressing the hardware too far.
It's also impossible to ignore the tearing that creeps up during such dips. Adaptive v-sync is in play, which taps in any time the engine detects a frame going over budget and missing a slot within its 60Hz refresh. Temporarily removing this lock helps to make control over the action feel smoother than it otherwise would, but at a big - and regular - cost to the overall presentation.
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