Reports surfaced on the weekend that Respawn Entertainment’s Titanfall would be shipping at 792p resolution, and this was confirmed by Digital Foundry in an interview with lead engineer Richard Baker. This is despite rumours that the final resolution would be above 792p and closer to 900p when the game launches.
“We’ve been experimenting with making it higher and lower. One of the big tricks is how much ESRAM we’re going to use, so we’re thinking of not using hardware MSAA and instead using FXAA to make it so we don’t have to have this larger render target.”
Baker did reveal that the resolution is likely to increase going forward though whether it will be 1080p or 900p will depend. “We’re going to experiment. The target is either 1080p non-anti-aliased or 900p with FXAA. We’re trying to optimise…we don’t want to give up anything for higher res. So far we’re not 100 per cent happy with any of the options, we’re still working on it. For day one it’s not going to change. We’re still looking at it for post-day one. We’re likely to increase resolution after we ship.”
As for the frame rate, Baker stated that, “A lot of the performance is on the GPU side. There’s still room for optimisation and we’re still working on it,” Baker commented. “Ideally it would have been a rock-solid 60 all the time when we shipped but obviously when there’s big fights going on, lots of particle effects, lots of physics objects…we’re still working to condense the systems, make them more parallel so we can hit 60 all the time, ideally.”
“There was an issue with decals taking a lot more time than they should which we fixed for launch. The worst-case scenarios are better, I think. The average is probably about the same as the beta.”
Titanfall will release on March 11th in North America and March 14th in Europe for Xbox One and PC. The Xbox 360 version will be out on March 25th/28th.