Lots of speculation about what I said. Time to get
way too real for this random conversation and lemme break it down a bit. Sorry for the long post, I like typing and really love this kind of tech. Also, none of this is work I did - we have an amazing engineering team that manages to pull off absolutely mindblowing stuff. All credit goes to them!
Before the advent of dynamic resolution scaling, you had to set an output resolution that hopefully kept performance at your target - regardless of what action was happening on screen. In a game like Titanfall this sucked because you could go from a handful of pilots on screen running around (low GPU resource usage) to having ten giant Titans exploding while dropships dropped off a dozen AI (too much GPU usage). That is to say, the game is extremely variable in what is happening.
In Titanfall 2 we added dynamic resolution scaling, which can dynamically lower the resolution the game internally renders at before scaling it to fit the output resolution in order to maintain 60 hz output. We do have some parts of our render pipeline that can not be scaled internally, like our UI and post-processing (color correction, bloom, etc.), so the output resolution actually still has to be set based on some performance cliffs we can fall off of. This is why the current console versions of Titanfall 2 don't just output to 4K already and then let dynamic resolution scale take over - they'd constantly be scaling WAAAAY down and it'd be fugly. I tried. We do have a lower bound so that any bugs or ULTRA intense action don't drop the resolution to 240x135 or whatever.
So! Now we can scale down to maintain that sweet sweet 60 hz, and with the extra spicy temporal anti-aliasing we cooked up its actually not that bad of an IQ trade-off for the gameplay benefits of smooth framerates. What this doesn't account for is our ability to supersample. In the shipped version of Titanfall 2 if you load it up on a PS4 Pro (which has an output resolution >1080p) on a 1080p display we're already downsampling to fit the output resolution, providing a crisper image than you'd get with a straight 1080p output. This means you don't need a 4K TV to see the benefits of the higher resolution output on your 1080p display. Similarly, if you plugged in your X1 or PS4 to a 720p TV you'd be getting a higher quality image than straight 720p.
What dynamic supersampling does is the same as the downscaling to maintain 60 hz, but in the opposite direction. We internally render everything HIGHER than the output resolution when possible and then downsample it to fit the output resolution - much like how the PS4 Pro version looks better on a 1080p than it would if we rendered at just 1080p. The end result of this is that we can have the GPU cooking at 100% utilization regardless of action on screen since we're scaling down and up to maintain 60 hz.
All that said - Titanfall 2 running on the X1X devkit at my desk does NOT reliably run at any internal resolution. The output resolution is 4K, but its rarely sitting on just 4K. It'll dip and rise constantly, the same way as a PC game running uncapped will never sit at just one framerate. What we've essentially (in theory) done is gone from a locked resolution and variable framerate, to a "locked" framerate and variable resolution. This does not mean the game is always 60 hz, as there are points in the game where we are not GPU limited (or we are GPU limited, but the lower bound isn't low enough to maintain 60 hz - try getting a dozen Scorch Titans all throwing incendiary traps in one spot
). In instances where we are CPU bound, we actually increase resolution until we become GPU bound. Keep that GPU pumping!
None of this is new tech we're adding to Titanfall 2 as a game. It is already present in the PC version you can play right now, we're just getting it to work on console for the X1X launch. Someone could easily showcase the end result of this by taking screenshots of the PC game with dynamic supersampling on/off and their framerate target set really low, like 5, to ensure the scaling goes as high as possible. I do not know if it'll make its way to other console SKUs, but it might be possible? Would be interesting to see how the PS4 Pro fares, for sure.
As for the "6K" comment - given the previous explanations - I was playing some
on Wargames and happened to see the scale factor was at ~1.5X while shooting some grunts. 3840x2160 x 1.5 = 5760x3240. As I originally said - no guarantees on internal resolution at any time - but it was pretty amazing to see how high it was going. Good times.
*Whew*
Oh, and "true 4K" - whatever that means. Titanfall 2 on X1X will output at 4K and render at a multitude of resolutions depending on action. There is no such thing as needing "4K assets" to make this happen. If you're playing on high-end PC at 4K you're experiencing an extremely similar game as I'm describing. We will be playing with some detail knobs for X1X (much like how PS4 Pro has some higher details - but nothing major), but it is not "Ultra" PC settings. Specifically, since it was mentioned in here, our ambient occlusion isn't console friendly. As for those asking for higher framerates instead - consoles are limited to 60 hz because of TV displays. If you want higher framerate, play on PC! I love my 1440p 144hz GSync monitors.
OK - back to my corner.
