It’s unfortunate that a game like Titanfall 2 is struggling to receive the commercial reception it deserves. Blame it on EA for setting the release date ridiculously wrong or whatever, Titanfall 2 is by far one of the best first person shooter games you need to play this year. We recently got our hands on the PS4 and Xbox One versions and it’s quite clear from the get go that Respawn wanted laser sharp focus on maintaining a locked 60 frame per second experience on both the PS4 and Xbox One, and they have managed to do the same.
Titanfall 2 is one of those rare modern AAA games that run at a rock solid 60 frame per second on both the PS4 and Xbox One. However in order to achieve this, the developers had to employ a dynamic resolution and TAA. This means that whenever the engine is under load during intense gaming scenarios, the GPU will render most of its resources into maintaining frame rate performance and post processing effects instead of rendering more pixels on the screen.
In order to avoid aliasing, Respawn have used TAA which softens the image quality so that jaggies don’t become apparent when the engine is under load. However unlike many other games which employ a dynamic resolution to maintain a 60fps cap, Respawn’s efforts with Titanfall 2 prove that they were indeed very serious about getting a locked 60fps. This meant that the game is consistently running below Full HD resolutions on both consoles, even worse on the Xbox One during intense sections. It’s fair trade-off in our opinion and although the end image quality could be quite bad at times, this happens quite rarely.
Compared to the original Titanfall, the sequel introduces lighting improvements, fantastic texture work, enhanced volumetric and alpha effects along with improved cutscenes during the campaign mode. The non-interactive sequences of the game run at a higher image quality with enhanced post processing effects which may result into frame rate deductions but the performance seems to be back on track once the player takes over control.
Overall, it’s quote difficult to gauge a better version of Titanfall 2. Both versions fail to achieve a full HD presentation but manage to run at a rock solid 60fps. This is a clear cut case of compromising image quality over gameplay.