Over the weekend we got the chance to go hands on with the open multiplayer technical test of Titanfall 2. Being a technical test we were keeping our expectations low with the game’s performance but we were surprised with how well the game runs on the PS4 and Xbox One. But before we jump into the specifics, we must note that this build is still a work in progress so things will definitely improve when the game launches this October.
The very first thing that you will observe right off the bat is how good the game looks now. Unlike the original, Respawn has modified the Source engine to support a full physical based rendering pipeline along with enhanced dynamic lighting and post processing effects. The original game had a sort of flat lighting so upgrades in this department are definitely appreciated.
As far as image quality goes, the PS4 version runs at 900p resolution whereas the Xbox One renders at 720p. The latter is a bit disappointing because the original game ran at 792p on the Xbox One. It will be interesting to see whether this will be fixed by launch but a full 1080p native resolution might be out of the equation. However, the game uses temporal anti-aliasing, something we have already seen in the likes of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and DOOM. This kind of solution drastically helps in reducing any unwanted jaggies by softening the edges. This results into a slightly softer image quality but is way better than the conventional AA methods.
Just like the original, Titanfall 2 targets 60 frames per second with v-sync engaged and it seems that the game is indeed running at that benchmark for the most of the time. Drops were observed when there was an increase in particle effects such as when two Titans ferociously firing rockets at each other but for the most part we are quite impressed with what is being displayed. We witnessed no screen tearing at all however it will be interesting to see whether Respawn will opt for a dynamic resolution in the final build so that the frame rate never drops below 60fps.
Tiatnfall 2 will be an interesting product to analyze once it comes out. The current build is already a step above anything we saw in the original and it implements high resolution cube maps, improved lighting, super fast depth of field, excellent quality bloom and Global Illumination in some places.
With the amount of development time left, Titanfall 2 is shaping into a rather well performing game on consoles. We are also eager to see how the single player campaign performs and whether it will deliver a 60fps experience or stick to the conventional 30fps cap. We will keep you updated when we go hands on with the final version of the game in the coming months.