Why Titanfall Framerate Drops: Particles And Physics

Titanfall is finally out in most territories, and many of you will probably be too busy playing it instead of reading about it, after many months of strong hype. Still, there’s a very interesting interview published by the German website PCGamesHardware.de: one of the supposed weak points of the game is graphics, which is quite limited by the fairly old Source Engine, and on top of that performance isn’t top notch, as even PC users often experience short but nasty framerate hiccups from time to time.

Respawn‘s Technical Director Richard Baker tried to explain why in Titanfall framerate drops so frequently, despite the less than spectacular result; he also added that there is still hope for improvements via patches.

Titanfall is an online-only game, so we will try to provide a very good support after release. There are some points that may improve performance on which we are still working. We are trying to better distribute the particle rendering on multiple processor cores. There is potential power, just like physics calculation. Therefore, the framerate drops when tons of simulated physics objects are flying through the area and countless particles are shown. Therefore, we are also working to improve these two systems. And then of course we have taken care of many things that we noticed during the beta. We have also resolved SLI and Crossfire problems, you can have better performance there now at higher resolutions. We will continue to add features and improve performance in the future.

He also shed some light on the extremely limited environment interaction in Titanfall’s maps.

We wanted to keep control of the maps, which is ultimately very important for the gameplay. So for example, should be there cover and where, or certain routes that players can learn and use to their to benefit. We have experimented with destructible elements and level objects, but did not like how we would have thereby lost control of the game flow of the maps. So, we decided against it.

This is consistent with the physics engine they’re using, which is still essentially the same Havok introduced in Half Life 2, just tweaked.

We still basically use the version of Havok physics engine which was also used in Half-Life 2. We have made ​​a lot of performance and stability improvements, but it is in essence still the same. In the future we will probably look around for other physics engines, because the version used here is somewhat outdated. Titanfall is therefore using a very early version of Havok, which was then heavily revised by Valve for Half-Life 2 and optimized by us. But it is not at the same level of current, more modern versions of Havok.

Overall, I’m still fairly baffled by their choice, which resulted in so many limitations. Baker claims that designers were “particularly productive with the Source Engine”, and that they didn’t use Frostbite for “business reasons”.

When we started working here at Respawn, we have evaluated many different engines and mainly let our designers experiment with it. For example, we looked at the Cry-Engine and the Unreal Engine. We even played around with a few people at Unity - that was indeed not really a serious option, but we tested it once. We also tested some in-house techniques and tries to make something worthwhile to put on the legs. And it was at the end like this: with the Source engine, our designers were particularly productive.This is the answer basically. We have tried a lot of techniques and with the Source engine, our designers were able to achieve the fastest results with the elements of the desired game designs. We knew of course that the engine would still require a lot of work for adaptations and modernizations, but we were able to quickly implement our ideas for the gameplay, it was worth to us in the end. 

As for Frostbite, I can say nothing definite, but we didn’t even consider it for business reasons. 

Well, let’s hope those business reasons get squashed for the inevitable Titanfall 2, because I’d really like to see it powered by Frostbite, with Titans destroying the environment.