Titanfall currently runs at a native resolution of 792P during its Beta on Microsoft’s Xbox One console, this news comes to us from Abbie Heppe, community manager at Respawn who spoke to Titanfall Blog. Titanfall’s resolution isn’t yet set in stone, and there’s a possibility that in the final build we could be seeing a resolution of 900P. 1408×792 isn’t exactly a common resolution, but so far is getting pretty damn reasonable results in game, with Titanfall staying ‘mostly’ in the 60FPS region.
“They can now, they just have to make serious cutbacks. Forza is 1080p/60fps and the framerate is steady even with tons of cars on screen. But when you look closely at the game the assets they use outside of the cars are really awful. The PS2-like crowds. The trees that look like they were made with a polygon budget of 4. None of that matters when you’re driving fast, but the point is that cutbacks had to be made to get it to that resolution,” Began FamousMortimer on his response to someone asking if the Xbox One would be regularly capable of 1080P/60FPS.
“The tools will get better but developers will always have to choose between resolution/framerate/effects when making games. That’s true of the PS4 also, of course, it just has a higher ceiling. The only way to have everything no matter what is to have a beefy PC. But then you don’t get console exclusives and PCs are decidedly lacking in sports games as well.”
FamousMortimer also gave brief mention to the SDK improvements of the XBox One, “I can’t say with any form of certainty that is what will do it. All I was told was that they think it can be done. Abbie isn’t just blowing smoke up our asses.”
Despite there being a lot of news recently on the Xbox One’s GPU and eSRAM woes. Recently, it’s been confirmed that Sniper Elite 3 is running better on Sony’s Playstation 4 too. But as FamousMortimer pointed out, the PS4 doesn’t get a blank pass. The Order 1866 also hit the news due to it using large black bars, thus making it closer to 1920×800 and only at 30FPS. This all goes to point out that console developers, even in this new generation are required to make choices in how their games will be presented on screen.
These same choices were alive and well back in the Xbox 360/PS3 era, and even before – but now in this latest generation, where games expect so much more, they seem to be hitting the news even more frequently. The only choice left for Microsoft at this point is to push and focus on improving their drivers / SDK and for developers to learn the tricks and tips of the hardware. MS have reduced the Xbox One’s OS GPU reserve from the previous ten percent down to only two percent. This is certainly going to help the Xbox One, but it merely means more of the 1.32TFLOPS of X1’s performance is available to games, not add additional.
Clearly the Playstation 4 and Xbox One are still very early in their lives, and both machines have a lot of maturing yet to do. It’s important to realize games will visually improve as developers learn to optimize, improve and utilize the hardware available to them. I for one shall remain very interested in Microsoft’s Xbox One improvements for software, and await to see if Sony has further tricks up its own sleeve.
