Most PC shooters grow old and wrinkly fast. A little known fact: Quake’s levels shrivelled like prunes through the noughties – so embarrassing the game that it covered its shrunken scenery with cardboard boxes, now commonly mistaken for polygonal architecture.
Titanfall – which we rather liked in our Titanfall review – will escape the fate that’s befallen its predecessors, at least for a short while: Nvidia are determined to work with Respawn to keep their vertical shooter “at the cutting edge of image quality”.
Support for high-definition 4k displays will headline a series of collaborative updates between Nvidia and Respawn.
The developers are taking advantage of Nvidia’s GameWorks – a collection of technologies and tools including visual and physical simulation software, debuggers, algorithms, engines and libraries.
Nvidia’s people are working with Respawn’s engineers and artists to incorporate as much of this menagerie of stuff into Titanfall as possible. On our end, we can expect to see things like temporal anti-aliasing – a space-age cinema technique which reduces flickering when in motion. Which is great, because motion is what Titanfall’s about.
“TXAA creates a smooth, clear image by combining high-quality multi-sample anti-aliasing, post processes, and Nvidia-designed filters,” write Nvidia. “It’s the highest quality anti-aliasing technique out there, and delivers the stunning visuals that a groundbreaking game like Titanfall deserves.”
Elsewhere, Titanfall will take advantage of horizon based ambient occlusion: lifelike shadows, in laypilot’s terms, which use advanced algorithms to react accurately to the position of nearby objects.
This is all “high-end PC” stuff, as you might imagine, and you’ll need to own a Geforce something to take advantage. But do you think you might?