Measuring the Xbox One Against PCs With Titanfall 377
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."
Glorious PC Master Race (Score:4, Insightful)
Filthy console peasants never seem to learn.
35 GB of uncompressed audio? (Score:2, Insightful)
Will someone more aware of the rationale behind this tell me that this is not as retarded as it sounds?
Re: Glorious PC Master Race (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.
Re: Glorious PC Master Race (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would a keyboard player sit on a couch?
Re:I was wondering about that... (Score:4, 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.
Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Piracy prevention? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Piracy prevention? (Score:5, 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".
Re: Glorious PC Master Race (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.
Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio? (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.
sad resolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the claim, but the probable truth is that it's intentional bloat to reduce piracy.
Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio? (Score:4, 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?
Nice but pointless for me (Score:5, 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 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.
Re:Nice but pointless for me (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.
Re:Nice but pointless for me (Score:4, 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.
Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Glorious PC Master Race (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Nice but pointless for me (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nice but pointless for me (Score:5, 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.