Slashdot Mirror
Measuring the Xbox One Against PCs With Titanfall
An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week, Respawn Entertainment launched Titanfall, a futuristic first-person shooter with mechs that has been held up as the poster child for the Xbox One. The Digital Foundry blog took the opportunity to compare how the game plays on the Xbox One to its performance on a well-appointed PC. Naturally, the PC version outperforms, but the compromises are bigger than you'd expect for a newly-released console. For example, it runs at an odd resolution (1408x792), the frame rate 'clearly isn't anywhere near locked' to 60fps, and there's some unavoidable screen tear. Reviews for the game are generally positive — RPS says most of the individual systems in Titanfall are fun, but the forced multiplayer interaction is offputting. Giant Bomb puts it more succinctly: 'Titanfall is a very specific game built for a specific type of person.' Side note: the game has a 48GB install footprint on PCs, owing largely to 35GB of uncompressed audio."
Filthy console peasants never seem to learn.
Will someone more aware of the rationale behind this tell me that this is not as retarded as it sounds?
Whatever the rationale for the uncompressed audio, I've got a 3.20GHz hexacore, and it has trouble sometimes. A couple rounds I've had the audio completely cock up from what I can only describe as it trying to play too many sounds at once...then just playing broken bits...then completely breaking down, requiring me to tough it out until the audio is reinitialized with the start of the next round.
I'd also like to note that it took me about 45 minutes to download the whole game, and a whole hour and a half for the installation...most of which was spent extracting the audio.
That said, the game is abso-fucking-lutely amazing and I love it. I need to fix the cooler on my other 6870 so I can put it back in, SLI the suckers, and turn the graphics up to 11. :D
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
TitanFAIL !!
The cynic in me wonders if the retarded idea of using uncompressed audio and not giving you the option to install just a subset such as the language of interest is some way of attempting to prevent piracy.
Maybe someone had the bright idea that people wouldn't bother trying to pirate that much data.
Maybe I'm just jaded.
Why the odd 1408x792 resolution?
Man a game like titanfall is for the hardcore gamer, a hardcore gamer worth its salt has a SSD these days. Asking for 35GB of SSD space just for audio is ridiculous.
That is an absurd amount of space to use for Audio, but on the PC with headphones, I noticed right away that the audio was stunning. especially noticeable during the tutorial level when narrator is speaking.
"compromises are bigger than you'd expect for a newly-released console"
No, they aren't. They are big and that is exactly what I'd expect from a newley released console designed for low power usage and a low price point compared to a gaming rig designed at 2-3x the price and 2-3x the power use.
They were only mildly competitive in the past (like when the 360 was released) because then, most GPUs were not as power hungry (I even had a passively cooled high end gaming card) so the gap between a high end discrete card and the chip in the console was not as large. Plus, consoles were running PowerPC, meaning they could be more powerful for the amount of power they drew, and dramatically optimized. The newer gen x86 consoles are all about lowering development costs and game production costs, at the expense of efficiency and optimization.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
While I wasn't expecting 4k levels of resolution, that these new consoles aren't even pure 1080p/60 is pretty fucking pathetic.
...
I have a strong gaming rig and I won't bother with Titanfall for one simple fact: The PC version requires Origin to play it.
I tried it with Battlefield the last Battlefield game and it was such a trainwreck I uninstalled it and tossed the game in the trash before ever getting to play it. It went something like this:
Buy the physical media ( dvd ) install game. Try to play, find out you have to install Origin, cuss, install Origin, register and do all the BS required. Try to play, find out there is a multi GB PATCH to install before I can play, cuss some more, start download ( which takes HOURS coming from their servers ) finally get it all downloaded, try to play, discover my browser opens up instead of the game, Origin now wants to install some plugin to the damn browser. At which point I gave up from sheer anger and uninstalled the entire thing, Origin and all.
I put the Battlefield disc in the microwave then ran it through the shredder resolving to never again touch any game that had an Origin requirement.
So, Titanfall may be the most amazing game ever made but due to the Origin requirement, it is a game I will never play.
If you've ever written software that is ported to multiple platforms, you know that the performance of the ported version can only match the original, if serious performance tuning is done. Performance of ported software is not a measure of the hardware, but of the effort put into making it work better.
Does the Xbox install use the same amount of space? Considering you have a fixed 500GB and games have to be installed to the drive, I would be slightly upset that one game takes up that much space.
I couldn't imagine trying to do the digital only thing they were trying to push last year. That's so much data being downloaded at once you would probably get flagged as an evil file-sharer by your ISP.
XBOX !!!11one: 0
PC: 0
Steam OS PC: 1
When I had only a 120G SSD, I did that with my whole user folder. instead of just changing my libraries. My HDD messed up and I lost all the important users\application data. You would only have to re install the game.
To lazy to log in and not liking having no green header separating comments.
Seems legit, must be actual game footage!
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
most tvs are designed to display 720p
The tool that does that is just another decoder for wav files. This decoder is around since 1995 (available from Fraunhofer) and allows the wav container to hold mp3 encoded streams and decode it on the fly. It was a great tool when hard drives were small and sampled audio became mainstream.
Ooh surprise result...just kidding. But they did sort of bury the lead. It's a first person shooter game. Let me put it this way. If I'm steering a car in a game, I'd rather have a 16-level variable sensitivity joystick instead of a single state key on a keyboard. It's just more accurate and better. If I'm shooting a gun, pseudo-absolute positioning from a mouse beats the crap out of relative positioning from a joystick. Aiming a gun with a joystick is like driving a car with your ass instead of your hands. Yeah, you can sort of get it done and pretend you're good at it but if you were doing it the correct way, you'd do better.
So resolution, screen tearing, FPS, prettiness, all that is great and everyone knew PCs were faster but the game really crashes and burns when you consider the thumbsticks you're forced to use. That just simply is not how you control a gun.
What a filthy piece of spin. The PC that runs "faster" was purposely built AT THE SAME PRICE POINT as the Xbox One, so the fact that from day ONE, a PC is actually directly better value as a AAA gaming platform is MASSIVE news.
Every previous generation of games console used the scale of production, and investment in unthinkably expensive state-of-the-art components to gain significant performance per price advantages over general computers. And a console, taken as a whole, is VERY cost reduced compared to a 'big tin' PC, when one excludes the handful of custom chips.
Vile Microsoft shills will say this argument ignores the 'value' of the insanely expensive (to build) NSA sensor block- the Kinect 2. Indeed it does, but AAA games don't use Kinect 2 (just look at the Xbox One's 'saviour', 'Titanfall' for a clear example), so Kinect2 is a strictly cosmetic feature when considering a PC vs Xbone.
WORSE, games like 'Titanfall', rather than being Xbone 'exclusives', are actually only banned on the competing platform (Sony's PS3 and PS4), and available on the PC.
So the PC is FAR more powerful at the same price. Upgradeable in the future. Has access to a massive back-catalogue of games. Has access to a market of VERY cheap near-current games on Steam. AND is a PC when it isn't a AAA gaming unit.
The 'downside' of a PC is it uses more power- who could possibly care when the device is mains powered?
PS for the braindead shills, YES the PC can site under the TV, connect to the TV, and use the same types of wireless gaming controllers if you so wish. ALL the convenience of a console exists in the PC too, with NONE of the restrictions.
If you bought an Xbox One, you are a moron ten times over. And, BTW, it is far harder to make the same argument against the PS4 at current prices. By being much cheaper and VASTLY more powerful than the Xbox One, the PS4 would pose an incredibly challenge to even the most skilled PC bargain hunter to beat it on a price/performance basis. And PS4 exclusives are unlikely to hit the PC.
On Titanfall's release day, I posted a user review on Metacritic giving the game a zero, saying that I got a refund on Origin (they have a return policy for games, lucky me) and that I felt that the game was basically a super-modded Call of Duty - a sentiment that has been echoed even by more traditional gaming outlets. I also mentioned that when it comes to liking or disliking TItanfall, there are two types of players, 1) players who still enjoy Call of Duty and 2) players who don't. If you still enjoy the old CoD gaming formulas, give this game a try, otherwise pass on it. After a couple of days, the review was taken down, presumably because it was considered trolling? Not sure. I couldn't have been more honest.
Titanfall is not a great game, but opinion aside - some odd facts. Has anyone noticed that the textures on the PC version almost seem excessively low res? I find this particularly baffling. The other thing that troubles me is that Vincent Zampella aparently tweeted on October 29th that he wasn't aware that Titanfall was going to be an Xbox One exclusive until just then (http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/18380/article/titanfall-perpetually-a-microsoft-exclusive-respawn-unaware-ea-made-a-deal/). So, the only way he could have been unaware is that they were already working on a PS4 version and that the exclusivity deal announced in October quashed it. It just feels like a couple of these points kind of add up that Microsoft needed to make sure that it was exclusive and that the PC version wouldn't outshine the Xbox One version in the inevitable side-by-side comparisons. And, for its part, I must confess that I'm hard pressed to find much difference inthe Xbone-to-PC side-by-side videos.
In the end, I think the effort was wasted. There weren't many players broadcasting Titanfall on Twitch last night. And, as an avid gamer, it just feels like a lot of jockeying when versions of already-finished games are stopped with exclusivity contracts. I just can't get behind the Xbox One platform at all.
The answer is "sample theory". Anti-aliasing on a modern computer game is frequently achieved with a variety of methods. Pre-filtering in the textures. Algorithms in the shader code. Use of hardware MSAA sampling. Temporal techniques. Post processing of scene 'edges'.
the '792' is going to be scaled up (sampled) to '1080'. The mathematical relationship between 792 and 1080 is clearly designed to give some 'free' anti-aliasing 'improvement' from the up-scaling, when combined with the other anti-aliasing methods in play.
Most game companies use dreadful, ancient, third-party audio libraries that save them effort, but ensure lousy performance on anything but an Intel i7. Intel likes this situation. Microsoft likes this situation. After all, the main means of PC Wintel profit has been upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, UPGRADE.
And what slows down a PC enough to force the average naive user to upgrade- never anything real. For non-gamers, it is a machine gradually filled with trojans, anti-viral bloat, and 'table' algorithms that get geometrically slower (by design) as the table size grows across time.
For gamers, it is FORCING coding methods that are so dreadfully inefficient, getting new hardware is the only way to stay ahead of the curve.
Most games still use 'Blink' for video, for gods-sake. The world's worst video CODEC. They are forced to use DirectX to communicate with the GPU, the most inefficient API/driver imaginable.
In fairness, sound is one of those areas of PC gaming only noticed when an incompetent developer or engine gets it badly wrong. 'Titanfall' uses the absolutely putrid game engine from Valve- which has no merit whatsoever. It is decades out-of-date and was only so-so when new.
Unfortunately, few modern PC games engines are optimised for 'twitch' shooters. COD uses a heavily customised version of the Quake 3 (NOT the later Doom 3) engine.
Given the the developers behind Titanfall had an unlimited budget (which is NOT the same as saying they spent an unlimited amount of money), and 3+ years working on a very limited scale multi-player only game, they did a VERY poor job.
I thought Titanfall was another battlefield DLC , except it costs three times as much.
Only children and people with very wide butts play games in the living room. Proper adult gamers sit at a desk.
So where do proper adult gamers sit when they spend quality time playing a game with their own children or with the children they're babysitting?
As if there aren't other things it could be doing besides being a glorified DSP.
What percent of one of the cores of your quad core does the DSP take?
It can process all those vertices too, but you don't hear anyone rushing off to kill hardware accelerated graphics for ... reasons.
Unless you're Intel. Its GMA integrated graphics processors (nicknamed "Graphics My Ass") offloaded vertex transformation to the CPU. Only during the Bridge era did Intel graphics catch up with the PS3.
How many MP3 files were you trying to decode at once? Decoding music is one thing, and even a Nintendo DS can do that. Decoding 50 layers of environmental noises and sound effects is something else entirely.
I'd just like to point out that, even a 48 GB install will not tax the resources of most PC's. And, if that's an indication of the overall design choices of the game makers, then the game is likely a steaming POS.
Thing is, it's just as likely that the design team made that choice because it wouldn't significantly affect their marketing and it saved them some time somewhere. Like all modern computing there's a lot of inefficient choices being made because modern hardware makes inefficiency hardly noticeable. Most of the time.
This isn't so certain when the game in question is clearly designed for joystick.
Actually a DS is much more powerful than my example, and has dedicated sound hardware as well. If implemented well and it's not doing anything else those "50 things" may well be within it's reach. There's an emulator of a real multitrack synth that runs on the DS which has got to be more complex than native decoding and playing a few tracks. "50 things"? Let's get to that.
I think that this stuff must be modelled very badly in the first place if your "50 things" are happening and implemented very badly if close to cutting edge hardware can't do however many things the real task, and not imaginary "50 things" task, involves.
These things do not model walking through an orchestra pit in exacting detail.
You've got to be kidding. Are you really that inpatient? I personally find Origin to be a better service than Steam (which many laud):
1.) I get faster downloads on Origin; Origin will saturate my 52gb bandwidth, Steam will not.
2.) Origin actually provides refunds (Gee, I guess you were too angry to bother checking that out).
I find your reaction to having to fill out one simple form & installing a plugin absolutely ridiculous. Are you this inpatient with everything?
And why would you want to bother with physical media these days anyway? Do you know how long ago I lost my Half-Life 2 disks? Me neither. But who gives a shit, because I can download the game off of Steam. Do you know how many save games I lost when my HDD died (twice)? Hardly any, because they were saved on the Steam & Origins servers.
Digital distribution for games on PC is now the default, and has been for years now. It's far more convenient than physical media. Get with the times, buddy.
I wonder if you complain about the convenience of services like Netflix, too.
(And +5 Insightful? +5 acted-like-a-big-baby, more like it.)
Don't worry... this article isn't for you
'nuff said.
So you're not a Battlefield player is what I'm hearing, because that game takes up over 60GB on my hard drive and hours to download.
Are the reason I'm barely on Slashdot anymore. This is the most unintelligent group of assholes I've ever seen.
If only Microsoft licensed their codecs for PC master-race usage: oh wait, the Codecs that the Xboxen have hardware for are also provided in software in DirectX 11. It's almost as if Microsoft was a PC company...
Also, if only people provided open source codecs with fewer licensing issues than even that...
OK , I'm not a diehard gamer at all , in fact it starts and ends at pinball.. so perhaps it's not surprising I missed a recent development over that last decade.. Buit "Naturally, the PC version outperforms"?. Last that I paid any attention, it was "naturally" a dedicated unit like a console would outperform a PC. So what happened? Did PCs really get that much better, and I somehow am missing it, even though I still am paying attention to that side of things, or do consoles suddenly suck, from, I would assume, no development? Which is it? Have I somehow not noticed PC hardware getting *that* much better, right under my nose?
the overhead of a bit of audio compression and mixing should not tax the system (vastly more powerful than what I mentioned above)
But is it enough more powerful to guarantee running several dozen full-blown decompressors at once, plus game and rendering logic, even on an older dual-core? Making a PC game is like making a console game that can scale up and down between Xbox 360 and Xbox One CPU specs.
Also I suspect the I/O time of obtaining these large files may be approaching or exceeding the fairly trivial cpu time (or in this case GPU even though it's audio) of decompressing smaller files containing the same data.
Hello! everybody, give you recommend a good shopping place. cheap sunglasses http://www.shoesctv.com/ NFL cap wholesale http://www.shoesctv.com/ designer handbags http://www.shoesctv.com/ cheap jordan shoes http://www.shoesctv.com/ designer sunglasses http://www.shoesctv.com/ handbags On Sale http://www.shoesctv.com/ all jordan shoes http://www.shoesctv.com/ jordans shoes http://www.shoesctv.com/ jordan store http://www.shoesctv.com/ michael jordan http://www.shoesctv.com/ Air jordan 13 http://www.shoesctv.com/ discount jordan shoes http://www.shoesctv.com/ cheap designer handbags http://www.shoesctv.com/ NBA cap wholesale http://www.shoesctv.com/ best handbags http://www.shoesctv.com/ cheap jordan http://www.shoesctv.com/ Jordan for cheap http://www.shoesctv.com/ Air jordan 11 http://www.shoesctv.com/ ray ban sunglasses http://www.shoesctv.com/ handbag store http://www.shoesctv.com/ handbag patterns http://www.shoesctv.com/ mens sunglasses http://www.shoesctv.com/ imitation handbags http://www.shoesctv.com/ replica rolex http://www.shoesctv.com/ jordan release dates http://www.shoesctv.com/ NHL cap wholesale http://www.shoesctv.com/ wholesale from china http://www.shoesctv.com/ Jordans For Sale http://www.shoesctv.com/ cheap designer handbag http://www.shoesctv.com/ designer handbags wholesale http://www.shoesctv.com/
Calm down pc fanboys