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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.
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.
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.
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. ;)
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".
>>(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.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
While I wasn't expecting 4k levels of resolution, that these new consoles aren't even pure 1080p/60 is pretty fucking pathetic.
...
That's the claim, but the probable truth is that it's intentional bloat to reduce piracy.
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?
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.
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.