Titanfall runs at 792p resolution on Xbox One — and it may get a postlaunch upgrade

Titanfall may look good now, but it may get better.

The final retail release of publisher Electronic Art’s sci-fi mech-battling shooter runs a resolution of 792p on Xbox One (which refers to the number of horizontal lines the game renders for each frame), according to tech experts at Digital Foundry. That’s the same as the beta test that EA and developer Respawn ran last month. It’s also a bit more than a hundred lines of resolution short of the 900p that developer Respawn said it was targeting. Now, with Titanfall going live tomorrow for Xbox One and PC (and Xbox 360 later this month), Respawn is still looking to improve its visuals.

Titanfall isn’t ugly on Xbox One. Our review is pretty happy with its visuals, but things can always look better. Respawn engineer Richard Baker told Digital Foundry that his team is still experimenting, and that a higher resolution could come in a future update.

“The target is either 1080p [without anti-aliasing] or 900p with FXAA,” Baker said. FXAA stands for fast approximate anti-aliasing, which is much better at smoothing edges than standard anti-aliasing. These improvements might make for a slight overall visual improvement even if the difference is imperceptible to most people.

“We don’t want to give up anything [to achieve a] higher resolution,” said Baker. “So far, we’re not 100 percent happy with any of the options, and we’re still working on it.”

Don’t expect the update any time soon. When you pick up Titanfall on day one, it’s going to run at 792p on Xbox One.

“We’re still looking at [an update] for post day one,” he said. “We’re likely to increase resolution after we ship.”

Baker also said that Respawn is still working to optimize Titanfall so that it runs at 60 frames per second at all times. It is currently at 60 most of the time with occasional dips that cause the game to stutter.

“Ideally, it would have been a rock-solid 60 [fps] all the time when we shipped, but obviously when there’s big fights going on, lots of particle effects, lots of physics objects — we’re still working to condense the systems, make them more parallel so we can hit 60 all the time.”