Titanfall 2 is a 60fps first-person shooter. On paper that might not sound particularly special. After all, it is the signature element that defines the Call of Duty experience, the standard that has come to dominate top-tier console-based first-person shooters to the point where 30fps challengers have had to evolve to match it. Case in point: both Battlefield and Halo have now joined the 60fps club. But what makes Titanfall 2 different, what makes it special, is that it does more than targets 60fps - it comprehensively delivers it. It feels great, but crucially, even in the most intense multiplayer action, it's consistently brilliant to play.

Performance is important to this game because it's an integral component of its feel. The mechanics in this title are exceptional - it starts with a supremely tight interface between player and game - and a commitment to the lowest possible latency. And the good news is that this all-important element of the experience is pretty much identical on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

The team's attention to detail across platforms goes beyond the rendering set-up too. Respawn has optimised the movement of the game according to the controller you're using, as opposed to implementing a one-size-fits-all system. Handling of inertia and dead-zones is spot-on, regardless of the system you're playing it on. Titanfall 2 relentlessly processes your inputs with pinpoint precision and crucially, provides exceptional feedback. The melee is a supreme case in point - animation, physics and audio working together to produce a highly satisfying result from an audacious close-up kill.

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings A three-way face-off of Titanfall 2 running on PS4, Xbox One and PC. We'll return to check out the PlayStation 4 Pro enhancements very soon.

Respawn's latest isn't the most beautiful shooter on the market, but for Respawn, pretty visuals don't take precedence over the feel of the game. The franchise kings like Battlefield and Call of Duty will drop frames in order to service the visuals, or to support gargantuan 64-player battles in the case of DICE's epic. They're willing to compromise on the feel of the game in order to deliver improved graphics, signature set-piece moments or a more ambitious networking feature set. But Titanfall 2 doesn't. The quality of the action, the absolute consistency in the feel of the experience - that makes it different, that makes it special.

Titanfall 2's rock-solid frame-rate delivers similar results to 343's Halo 5 - a game that introduced a number of technical check and balances to ensure a sustained, consistent 60Hz refresh. And in employing a dynamic resolution scaling buffer, Respawn Entertainment is actually using a very similar technique in ensuring its consistency. When we looked at the beta, Respawn had seemingly settled on a fixed, sub-native framebuffer for the Xbox One and PS4 releases, backed up by an impressive temporal anti-aliasing solution.

First impressions suggested that this remained in place on retail code, but further investigation confirms that pixel-count scales in the final game according to GPU load. For the majority of the experience, this actually works out to be a positive. For much of the game, PS4 resolves at around 1000p, and Xbox One around 810-828p. Gaining absolutely accurate metrics is difficult owing to the temporal super-sampling anti-aliasing, which makes it very difficult to find the hard geometric edges essential for pixel-counting.

Titanfall 2 on PC at max settings versus PS4 and Xbox One. A dynamic resolution is used on console, causing the image to scale its pixel output up and down based on the demands per scene. The result is a softer image on PS4, and softer still on Xbox One. Shadow quality is lower on consoles. Notably, this affects the filtering cascade for shadows, meaning you see a visible filtering line across the floor on PS4 and Xbox One. Texture and water shaders are a close match for PC's best settings. However, consoles miss out on PC's ambient occlusion effect -shade noticed around grass blades here. Model detail is also the same on all three formats, but from afar, the lower resolutions on PS4 and Xbox One can dull textures a tad. Another shot to illustrate shadow resolution differences up-close. Shade outlines to the top-left are lower resolution on PS4 and Xbox One. Based on matching scenes, particle and alpha effects quality are matched between the three formats. Ambient occlusion is enabled on PC, producing shade between geometric elements in a scene, such us the rocks on the left. Draw distances are ultimately close between PC, PS4 and Xbox One too - and all three show LOD transitions on foliage at the same point.

However, the Titanfall 2 beta dropped frames hard on both systems, so yes, resolution will drop below the beta's fixed framebuffer standard - we've seen PS4 drop to 720p in the most intense of scenes, while Xbox One will fare worse. We've yet to determine how low it drops - temporal reconstruction is really difficult to work with, but it can look bad. We've actually recorded edges that range from 480p upwards - however, Titanfall 2's post-process pipeline may be working with lower resolution alpha effects, reducing pixel count where transparencies intersect with geometric edges.

By and large, Respawn's gamble pays off though - especially on PlayStation 4, where the substantial drops to pixel-count are less sustained, and where the image is palpably cleaner, especially in multiplayer. But it's interesting to note that the PC version delivers a marked improvement to image quality - even without moving resolution beyond 1080p. The softness in the presentation lifts somewhat and it's clear that the image is resolving significantly more detail, though the impact is mostly reserved for areas of gameplay where the game's impressive post-process pipeline isn't quite getting a full work-out.

What's impressive about the PC's fixed resolution framebuffer is that the TSAA option actually works here in a similar manner to Far Cry 4 - the combination of 1080p plus the super-sampling offered by the temporal component adds an additional layer of sheen to the game. Without the dynamic resolution scaling, the PC version's TSAA also seems to lack the occasional pulsating edge artefacts seen on console.

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings Titanfall 2's 60fps lock is impressive, but can we break it? We engineered a series of stress tests and the game still managed to impress, even in the most intensive Titan on Titan action.

Additional performance testing: PS4 vs Xbox One campaign frame-rate analysis

The PC's impressive showing at 1080p is good news for the PlayStation 4 Pro too - speaking to Respawn about this, the upper and lower bounds of the dynamic resolution scaler are tweaked here - native pixel-count will move significantly higher than 1080p if you're playing on a 4K screen, while those with full HD screens get a downscaled output. In effect, PS4 Pro offers both temporal and spatial super-sampling - it should look very nice, and we'll report back on that as soon as we can.

PC offers refinement elsewhere too, but game-changing improvements are few and far between. Asset quality in terms of textures and geometry is a match with both console games - and it's worth noting that art in general is an almost generational leap from the first Titanfall, to the point where everything still looks great at 4K. However, in terms of nuts and bolts improvements, the boosts are fairly mundane. Shadows - of course - get a resolution upgrade, while the quality cascade shows a big improvement. The further away you get, the less defined shadows become on the consoles, while retaining quality on PC. The PC also benefits from additional depth with the use of an ambient occlusion post-process, which appears to be absent on the console renditions of the game.

We would also expect to see improvements in the post-process pipeline, but owing to Titanfall 2's highly dynamic nature, recreating the like-for-like situations is very difficult. The bottom line is clear though - PC adds scalability to an already excellent console experience, though the base feature set is mostly a match.

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings 4K PC gameplay at 60fps? Why not? We roll out the Titan X Pascal to get the job done.