Titanfall Texture Resolution & Graphics Comparison: Low, Med, High vs. Insane

There's been a lot of discussion about Titanfall's performance lately. Our most recent Titanfall GPU performance benchmark showed that the game still exhibits serious issues on certain devices; nVidia cards showed severe stuttering, SLI has micro-stuttering and works better disabled, and the game is simply needlessly large. All these taken into account, the performance issues feel almost unjustified for the visuals -- the game looks fine, sure, but it's not melt-your-GPU level of graphics and certainly isn't spectacular to look at. It's another Source Engine game with adequate graphics. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, so please don't get me wrong -- just that the performance isn't perfectly-tuned, at least, not yet. More drivers and patches will smooth that out.

I don't want to come off as too harsh, though. The mechanics are enjoyable for certain types of players and the game overall seems 'good,' it's just experiencing some (now-standard) launch issues with PC optimization. All is survivable, though.

Anyway, if you're having trouble getting the game to run at a reasonable FPS or otherwise want help optimizing the graphics settings for your video card, this might help you out. In this Titanfall graphics comparison article, we'll look at low, medium, very high, and 'insane' resolution textures, then compare low vs. medium vs. max game settings. The idea is to showcase that the textures don't differ much in a noticeable fashion (after 'low'), so users can easily drop texture resolutions in order to afford higher framerates.

Titanfall Texture Resolution Comparison & Methodology Notes

I showcase some of the differences in the above video and highlight graphics setting impact in actual live gameplay, but let's look at Titanfall screenshots below. I've listed each specific location in a row, with the settings in columns. The settings are listed from lowest to highest, left-to-right, so low -> medium -> very high -> insane. The screenshots are in a gallery, so you can press the left and right arrows to tab between them quickly for comparison.

Note: In testing, I wanted to set up a recording macro to track mouse input and precisely replicate my training course walkthrough on various settings, that way there'd be absolutely no variance between demonstrations. Unfortunately, it seems that mouse macros don't pass through the DirectX API very well (it's too low down on the stack), so I ended up doing the walkthrough manually for now. I took each screenshot & video with identical settings, sans texture resolution (our only variable). I needed an environment where I could exactly reproduce video walkthrough, so the below two pilot training levels were used.

Texture Setting, Left to Right: Low, Medium, Very High, Insane

Vent

Sign

Tank

Character Arms + Gun

Wall + Vents

Metal Plate

Boxes

Conclusion: Choosing the Best Graphics Settings for Titanfall 

The overall conclusion here is that Titanfall doesn't vary all that much in its settings. I previously defined which settings you should tweak from a GPU and CPU perspective (depending on what is throttling you) in our Titanfall benchmark, so check that for help with the advanced settings. As for texture resolutions, if you're experiencing any stuttering or tearing at all, just drop to 'very high' from insane; in fact, even 'medium' has very little noticeable difference from 'insane,' so if it gets you a more consistently smooth FPS, just go for it.

Oddly, unlike most other games, changing texture resolution has very little actual visual impact, but (like most games) has a large performance impact. This makes it the best item to tune when trying to eek out an extra few frames per second.

- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.