• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Titanfall 2: PS4 Multiplayer 'Tech Test' Frame-Rate Analysis

DKo5

Respawn Entertainment
Look at Calen, being all humble. Incoming "lets get real" post about how build like this usually work for us.

Coders (like Calen!) have been working their butts off since this build was made to get the game running as smooth as possible. As was stated, this build is off an old branch of code and was made specifically to test our new server hosting system with Multiplay, Networks infrastructure, matchmaking, etc. This is not a new-school style "beta", aka demo, of a finished product - this a the real deal pre-alpha; bugs and all. I think I branched off our main dev line about 8 weeks ago. At this stage of development that is a huge amount of time, not to mention the time we have left before ship. The guys have put in serious effort and there's some tricks up their sleeves yet for performance and IQ. Obviously we can't go into any specifics, since nothing is guaranteed to ship yet (gotta get QA approval on any features and all that), but I would wager dollars to donuts you guys will see much more stable performance in the retail game. These kinds of publicly playable test builds are always tricky - they usually come right around the time all the departments are trying to jam in their last bit of content goodness, and right before we have had the time to really optimize as much as possible around a not-changing-quite-as-much content set. In a perfect world content would have been done months earlier so you'd all be seeing much more "finished" performance - but then the game wouldn't have as much rad stuff in it. Regardless, the first year or so of development had the engineering department doing some serious effort on optimizations on core engine stuff. Compared to the first game, Titanfall 2 is MUCH more consistent and solid. Comments from the DF crew are legit on that front - we're doing way more every 16.67ms compared to the first game.

Also, if you'll notice on the DF video the drops are usually due to overdraw from particles. I know there's been a lot of work done on mitigating that since this build. If DF had done any framerate testing on the 8v8 Pilots only mode (where Titans aren't throwing giant walls of fire or exploding in your face all the time) we're pretty much at 60fps 95% of the time even in the Tech Test build. Thats the kind of performance we're striving for - whether we'll hit it or not on the crazier MP modes with tons of AI? We'll see. I don't think any of us would say we'll be locked 60fps 100% of the time, though, as that is just unrealistic for a game that can have such intense peaks of insanity with Pilots+Titans+AI all on screen at once. We'd have to set the ceiling for res + IQ so low just to compensate that it would hurt the rest of the game.

Anyways! I hope everyone has fun with the Tech Test and likes that shiney new PBR renderer! Lots of goodies have been jammed in since the first game - special shout out to Calen and the guys who did the heavy lifting on the PS4 version of the engine, including our own temporal AA, high quality bloom/streak, superfast DOF, (much) higher res cubemaps, and more!
 
Look at Calen, being all humble. Incoming "lets get real" post about how build like this usually work for us.

Coders (like Calen!) have been working their butts off since this build was made to get the game running as smooth as possible. As was stated, this build is off an old branch of code and was made specifically to test our new server hosting system with Multiplay, Networks infrastructure, matchmaking, etc. This is not a new-school style "beta", aka demo, of a finished product - this a the real deal pre-alpha; bugs and all. I think I branched off our main dev line about 8 weeks ago. At this stage of development that is a huge amount of time, not to mention the time we have left before ship. The guys have put in serious effort and there's some tricks up their sleeves yet for performance and IQ. Obviously we can't go into any specifics, since nothing is guaranteed to ship yet (gotta get QA approval on any features and all that), but I would wager dollars to donuts you guys will see much more stable performance in the retail game. These kinds of publicly playable test builds are always tricky - they usually come right around the time all the departments are trying to jam in their last bit of content goodness, and right before we have had the time to really optimize as much as possible around a not-changing-quite-as-much content set. In a perfect world content would have been done months earlier so you'd all be seeing much more "finished" performance - but then the game wouldn't have as much rad stuff in it. Regardless, the first year or so of development had the engineering department doing some serious effort on optimizations on core engine stuff. Compared to the first game, Titanfall 2 is MUCH more consistent and solid. Comments from the DF crew are legit on that front - we're doing way more every 16.67ms compared to the first game.

Also, if you'll notice on the DF video the drops are usually due to overdraw from particles. I know there's been a lot of work done on mitigating that since this build. If DF had done any framerate testing on the 8v8 Pilots only mode (where Titans aren't throwing giant walls of fire or exploding in your face all the time) we're pretty much at 60fps 95% of the time even in the Tech Test build. Thats the kind of performance we're striving for - whether we'll hit it or not on the crazier MP modes with tons of AI? We'll see. I don't think any of us would say we'll be locked 60fps 100% of the time, though, as that is just unrealistic for a game that can have such intense peaks of insanity with Pilots+Titans+AI all on screen at once. We'd have to set the ceiling for res + IQ so low just to compensate that it would hurt the rest of the game.

Anyways! I hope everyone has fun with the Tech Test and likes that shiney new PBR renderer! Lots of goodies have been jammed in since the first game - special shout out to Calen and the guys who did the heavy lifting on the PS4 version of the engine, including our own temporal AA, high quality bloom/streak, superfast DOF, (much) higher res cubemaps, and more!
Thanks for this post. Nice to see you guys upgraded the material / lighting to be PBR compliant and have TAA.

Love the near weapon depth of field (I have always had a soft spot for it in the games that do it).
 

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
Look at Calen, being all humble. Incoming "lets get real" post about how build like this usually work for us.

Coders (like Calen!) have been working their butts off since this build was made to get the game running as smooth as possible. As was stated, this build is off an old branch of code and was made specifically to test our new server hosting system with Multiplay, Networks infrastructure, matchmaking, etc. This is not a new-school style "beta", aka demo, of a finished product - this a the real deal pre-alpha; bugs and all. I think I branched off our main dev line about 8 weeks ago. At this stage of development that is a huge amount of time, not to mention the time we have left before ship. The guys have put in serious effort and there's some tricks up their sleeves yet for performance and IQ. Obviously we can't go into any specifics, since nothing is guaranteed to ship yet (gotta get QA approval on any features and all that), but I would wager dollars to donuts you guys will see much more stable performance in the retail game. These kinds of publicly playable test builds are always tricky - they usually come right around the time all the departments are trying to jam in their last bit of content goodness, and right before we have had the time to really optimize as much as possible around a not-changing-quite-as-much content set. In a perfect world content would have been done months earlier so you'd all be seeing much more "finished" performance - but then the game wouldn't have as much rad stuff in it. Regardless, the first year or so of development had the engineering department doing some serious effort on optimizations on core engine stuff. Compared to the first game, Titanfall 2 is MUCH more consistent and solid. Comments from the DF crew are legit on that front - we're doing way more every 16.67ms compared to the first game.

Also, if you'll notice on the DF video the drops are usually due to overdraw from particles. I know there's been a lot of work done on mitigating that since this build. If DF had done any framerate testing on the 8v8 Pilots only mode (where Titans aren't throwing giant walls of fire or exploding in your face all the time) we're pretty much at 60fps 95% of the time even in the Tech Test build. Thats the kind of performance we're striving for - whether we'll hit it or not on the crazier MP modes with tons of AI? We'll see. I don't think any of us would say we'll be locked 60fps 100% of the time, though, as that is just unrealistic for a game that can have such intense peaks of insanity with Pilots+Titans+AI all on screen at once. We'd have to set the ceiling for res + IQ so low just to compensate that it would hurt the rest of the game.

Anyways! I hope everyone has fun with the Tech Test and likes that shiney new PBR renderer! Lots of goodies have been jammed in since the first game - special shout out to Calen and the guys who did the heavy lifting on the PS4 version of the engine, including our own temporal AA, high quality bloom/streak, superfast DOF, (much) higher res cubemaps, and more!

I always love and appreciate posts like this in technical threads.

The TAA, DoF, and PBR are pretty cool features to get working so well in something that started out as Source. I loooove close gun DoF and the TAA looks really clean.

Ewe, no. Death first.

LOL
 
Top Bottom