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Measuring the Xbox One Against PCs With Titanfall

Posted by Soulskill on from the now-you're-thinking-with-death-robots dept.

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."

20 of 377 comments (clear)

  1. Glorious PC Master Race by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Filthy console peasants never seem to learn.

    1. Re: Glorious PC Master Race by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not just about frame rate either. A keyboard-mouse player will always be able to defeat a joystick player easily.

    2. Re: Glorious PC Master Race by epyT-R · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why would a keyboard player sit on a couch?

    3. Re: Glorious PC Master Race by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1, Insightful

      A chair is as comfy as a sofa, unless you have a very wide butt.

      Only children and people with very wide butts play games in the living room. Proper adult gamers sit at a desk.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    4. Re: Glorious PC Master Race by smash · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because that's where his friends are, drinking beer.

      --
      I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
  2. 35 GB of uncompressed audio? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Will someone more aware of the rationale behind this tell me that this is not as retarded as it sounds?

    1. Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio? by DrXym · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So what they claw back from the CPU overhead of decoding MP3, they lose by hogging the IO and increased memory use (and paging). Sounds a pretty weak rationalisation really. Besides, if it really were an issue for dual core machines, then they could decode and cache the audio on those machines rather than inflicting this stupid overhead on every machine.

    2. Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio? by marcello_dl · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >>(35GB of uncompressed audio)
      > It was so that lower spec PCs can run it.
      OMG have you thought your answer through? that would be effective only for a PC which is powerful enough to manage the graphics and engine and does not spare the cycles for audio.

      Given that a 166mhz pc from twenty years ago effortlessly decoded mp3s in realtime, that in the meantime people have improved decoders, encoders, formats that audio playing is parallelizable, that uncompressed audio requires uncompressed IO, I think "aliens wanted that" is a better explanation. The best of course being that a 45gb game is less piratable than a 10gb one.

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      ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
    3. Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio? by vipw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's the claim, but the probable truth is that it's intentional bloat to reduce piracy.

    4. Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio? by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's the claim, but the probable truth is that it's intentional bloat to reduce piracy.

      Considering that both the pirated and legitimate versions of the game has to be downloaded, how would forcing it to be a large download prevent piracy? It would make things harder to distribute the pirated version on optical media, but who does that these days?

    5. Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio? by ultranova · · Score: 4, Insightful

      When you have 128 FLACs playing back at the same time, the dynamics change.

      You can't stream 128 uncompressed audio streams from the HDD simultaneously, which means they have to be preloaded, which means you could just as well store them in compressed form on HDD and uncompress during loading.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  3. Re:I was wondering about that... by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I wonder how much your audio problems are the result of having to load the audio files and juggle them around in RAM? Where's it get the samples from? I hope not load them on the fly, and at the same time I hope not pre-load them.

    There are many cases where compression can actually speed up things as reading and writing huge data is more expensive than doing a bit of maths on the much smaller result.

  4. Re:Piracy prevention? by jones_supa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Pirate groups are known to sometimes work around these issues. In this case they might rip away everything but English and tweak the game to still work. Then they might ship the audio compressed (MP3, for example) and a tool which does the conversion back to RIFF Wave (or whatever the game company is using). During the uncompression, that tool displays some pixel art animation and plays chiptune music, of course. ;)

  5. Re:Piracy prevention? by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Fiber is becoming the standard,

    If you call select fortunate areas in select fortunate cities a standard then by all means. I know people who would breach their monthly download limit just getting this game.

    Your type of connection is far from the "standard".

  6. sad resolution by sixsixtysix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While I wasn't expecting 4k levels of resolution, that these new consoles aren't even pure 1080p/60 is pretty fucking pathetic.

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    ...
  7. Nice but pointless for me by nehumanuscrede · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Nice but pointless for me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Please next time return the disk as it didn't work without requiring to download and install other things that didn't come on the disk. Probably no where on the box did it say you'd have to download more patches before the game would work. If the store doesn't take software returns, do a charge back on your credit card claiming the produce was defective (didn't contain everything needed to run) or didn't work as advertised.

      Destroying the disk can be fun, but it doesn't send a message.

    2. Re:Nice but pointless for me by ildon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      For starters, you already did the work of installing Origin and setting up an account. So even if you deleted Origin, you still already have an account so that work is a sunk cost. Second of all, you would have had to install that multi-gigabyte patch regardless of if Origin existed or not because you wouldn't have been able to connect to the game servers and play without it, so that has nothing to do with Origin. Third, the browser plugin is specific the the Battlefield Battle log feature. The game was designed to use a web browser as its server browser. It's something specific to BF and you would have had to do that to play it regardless of if Origin existed or not, and it's not a feature of Titanfall so you wouldn't have had to do that again to play Titanfall.

      So right now, if you wanted to play Titanfall, your steps would be:
      1. Install Origin.
      2. Install Titanfall.
      3. Log into Origin.
      4. Possibly download a Titanfall patch (I don't know if there's a patch because I didn't buy it because I'm not a fan of CoD style shooters), which you would have had to do regardless of Origin's existence or non-existence.
      5. Play.

      That's it.

      Seriously, 90% of your problems with "Origin" were problems with Battlefield.

    3. Re: Nice but pointless for me by nehumanuscrede · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Chuckle. Anyone who has been playing PC games ( and console games for that matter ) knows that within a month of launch, you can expect one or more patches to fix the product they rushed out the door to meet some deadline. Guaranteed.

      I'm pretty much done with jumping through all the hoops for this. If you want to make it a pain in the ass just to play it, then I just won't play it. Pretty simple really.

      Not that they care as they have legions of folks who are willing to put up with the BS to play at any cost, but in time they too will become jaded with the system and become ex-gamers as well.

      Steam seems to have finally got it right in my opinion. I have zero issues with that platform now and the majority of my games come from there.

    4. Re:Nice but pointless for me by Sibko · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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 Steam, cuss, install Steam, 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...

      About the only thing Steam doesn't require here, is a plugin for your browser.
      Sorry, I just feel like pointing out the slag that other distribution systems seem to get when Steam does the exact same thing, or is worse. It reminds me of the kind of love Apple used to and still does get.