Titanfall 2 Review And PC Benchmarks Quick Take: Fantastic Mech Fun

Name: Titanfall 2
Brand: Titanfall

by Shawn Sanders — Friday, November 04, 2016, 11:03 AM EDT

Titanfall 2 Graphics & Benchmarks

Titanfall 2 features "only" 20 in-game graphics settings, which may seem low versus Gear Of War 4’s whopping 30 graphic settings, but there is still plenty to tweak and tune in this game. And as it turns out, TF2 is highly scalable title. Users can alter settings for Field of View, Smooth Sprint View, Model Detail, Impact Marks, Dynamic Spot Shadows, Ragdolls, Adaptive Resolution FPS Targets, and more. That last one is only available if the TSAA anti-aliasing setting is enabled, however. It is greyed out when AA is off or when using any of the MSAA settings.

For testing we cranked all graphic settings to their max values. But note, there is no in-game benchmark in Titanfall 2 so all of our performance data was captured using FRAPS. For our benchmark scene, we selected the “Cooper’s Log” mission, which is about mid-way through the 5-7 hour campaign. The mission features a wide variety of scenery, textures, unit types thanks to a time traveling gameplay mechanic.

V-Sync was disabled for all tests and we went with the TSAA anti-aliasing option, as it offers the best balance between performance and image quality. Some images and textures can appear softer when MSAA is used, yet the performance hit is more severe. We also noticed quite a bit of unsightly edge shimmering and other graphic anomalies when MSAA was enabled on the NVIDIA cards, though they were less prominent on the AMD cards.

Titanfall 2 scales very well on midrange GPUs at resolutions of 1080p and 1440p. Things get pretty demanding when we crank things up to 4K, though. While NVIDIA claims a GeForce GTX 1080 is all that is needed for max settings at 4K, just shy of 50 FPS is not ideal for such a fast-paced shooter. However, there are plenty of settings to tweak that would easily propel the GTX 1080's performance up a few percentage points and into more playable territory. We should also mention the multiplayer portion of the game performs similarly to the single player campaign, though it may be somewhat more demanding in sport. During multiplayer testing we saw framerates trend downward by about 4-9 FPS.

Beyond what's available in the options menu, there are additional tweaks users can make if they are comfortable editing the game's config file. You can do things like quadruple the level of Model Detail, increase Impact Marks, play with the number of particles in Effects Detail, and more. Also it is advisable to update the game to the most recent version to enable support for SLI on NVIDIA cards and to add the Adaptive Resolution FPS Target option.