Titanfall 2 On Xbox One X Can Run Above 4K Resolution
The Xbox One X is one powerful beast, and this helps prove that.
In case you weren't paying attention to this month's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), you might have missed Microsoft's full product unveiling of Project Scorpio, or now known as the "Xbox One X." It's not just Microsoft's competitor to Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro, but it's leaps and abounds ahead of it on a technical level.
While we don't know which upcoming third-party games will benefit from the Xbox One X and how, there's at least one game already out that's going to make good use of it come the console's launch, and that's Respawn Entertainment's Titanfall 2. Posting on the video game forum NeoGAF, Titanfall 2 producer Drew McCoy (DKo5) talked about how the Xbox One X can render the game at a higher resolution than 4K.
When it comes to X1X it means there are times it'll render at higher than 4K and then downsample to whatever resolution the X1X is outputting to. Its is truly glorious on a 4K display. This quote will come back to haunt me, I'm sure, but there were times on Wargames last time I was testing where it was rendering at ~3200p (6K?) internally. The internal render resolution is dictated by the GPU load, so obviously there are no guarantees as to how often it renders at particular resolutions, but essentially we're using 100% GPU all the time.
This post by McCoy naturally excited most people, and assumed that the game will be rendered in 6K on the Xbox One X. While McCoy did confirm that it can and will go above 4K, it won't stay locked at any specific resolution and will instead rely on "Dynamic Scaling." Read on for an excerpt of McCoy's rather detailed technical explanation.
In Titanfall 2 we added dynamic resolution scaling, which can dynamically lower the resolution the game internally renders at before scaling it to fit the output resolution in order to maintain 60 hz output. We do have some parts of our render pipeline that can not be scaled internally, like our UI and post-processing (color correction, bloom, etc.), so the output resolution actually still has to be set based on some performance cliffs we can fall off of. This is why the current console versions of Titanfall 2 don't just output to 4K already and then let dynamic resolution scale take over - they'd constantly be scaling WAAAAY down and it'd be fugly. I tried. We do have a lower bound so that any bugs or ULTRA intense action don't drop the resolution to 240x135 or whatever.
So! Now we can scale down to maintain that sweet sweet 60 hz, and with the extra spicy temporal anti-aliasing we cooked up its actually not that bad of an IQ trade-off for the gameplay benefits of smooth framerates. What this doesn't account for is our ability to supersample. In the shipped version of Titanfall 2 if you load it up on a PS4 Pro (which has an output resolution >1080p) on a 1080p display we're already downsampling to fit the output resolution, providing a crisper image than you'd get with a straight 1080p output. This means you don't need a 4K TV to see the benefits of the higher resolution output on your 1080p display. Similarly, if you plugged in your X1 or PS4 to a 720p TV you'd be getting a higher quality image than straight 720p.
You can read more about Dynamic Supersampling and further explanation of how it all works right here.
Haven't bough or played Titanfall 2? You're not the only one! But you should, and here's why.