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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."
It was claimed that uncompressing the audio would tie up an entire core. The large amount is also because they stupidly install all languages at once, even if you select a specific language at installation time.
That doesn't make any sense. Why not offer an install option to decompress the audio if that is the case?
I could see them wanting lossless audio, but FLAC isn't very computationally expensive, and fuck we have so many cores these days you could just dedicate one of them to this and only this and you wouldn't lose anything. It is also quite literally impossible to improve audio quality beyond 48/16 FLAC if you have normal human ears, and it costs all of nothing to implement.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
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*
Will someone more aware of the rationale behind this tell me that this is not as retarded as it sounds?
"Respawn Entertainment, the game's developer, claims the uncompressed audio was included for the benefit of slower PCs. "A two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio," says Richard Baker, Respawn's Lead Engineer. "We couldn't dedicate those resources to audio." The Xbox One decodes audio in hardware, so it has no such limitation."
Good thing disk I/O doesn't take any processing power!
It is as retarded as it sounds. There is absolutely no justification for it in this is this day and age. Using look ahead decompression and caching would be a net equal, or perhaps a smidgeon higher CPU usage. It means they are in effect wasting DMA bandwidth and CPU cache by streaming uncompressed files.
I'm a DSP guy by trade, and it's one thing that's obvious - game programmers don't know how to do sound properly.
They continue to insist on driving audio by the "main" game engine thread (see Valve's games with looping audio and stutters when things get busy). Or even when they dedicate a thread, they continue to use a push model for sound - when almost all modern audio APIs have agreed that a callback based model is the "correct" way. (The notable exception being OSS which is broken for this reason).
The pro-audio guys have pretty much nailed how you do low latency high priority audio, and the game programmers continue to get it wrong.
>>(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
That's the claim, but the probable truth is that it's intentional bloat to reduce piracy.
Pirate groups do a lot of necessary cleanup already. For example, they made it possible to play the latest Sim City at release day, something that was not possible when you bought the game instead of copying it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.