Titanfall is one of the hottest titles of 2014. Being the pioneer title from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare veterans, Vince Zampella and Jason West in their newly formed studio Respawn Entertainment, this game has a lot riding on it. The game has been well-received and EA has made it a point to make sure that servers are in top condition always unlike other EA titles suffering massive service issues.
Titanfall is a purely online experience and one key factor to be successful in competitive FPS games is having a smooth gaming experience, particularly visually. Titanfall is powered by the Source game engine, which powers many of the popular titles from Valve including Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress and DOTA 2.
The Source Engine may not be graphically intensive but Respawn Entertainment has taken it upon themselves to use the highest quality textures along with audio to bring the most detailed worlds in Titanfall and in-game, Titanfall is indeed a visual feast. To highlight the superiority of PC graphics, Respawn has worked closely with NVIDIA to include NVIDIA Gameworks technologies in the game, which aims to bring a richer, visual experience for Titanfall PC gamers compared to its console counterpart.
In this article we’ll cover how Titanfall performs in-game using a relatively mid-range series of graphics cards. We’ll be using the newly released NVIDIA GeForce GTX750 and 750 Ti. Both cards are powered by the Maxwell architechture, arguably the most efficient GPU right now drawing well below 75W. We chose this series of graphics cards to give a baseline on how the game performs on a lower-midrange GPUs which should be very helpful for you guys out there trying to decide which is best GPU for Titanfall or if your GPU can handle Titanfall. For more info on our test setup, please see the links below:
Read our review of the GeForce GTX 750 and GeForce GTX 750 Ti
Performance Testing
We run our test using a full level playthrough, an actual full game and capture framerates via FRAPS. All in-game settings have been set to their maximum details with the exception of anti-aliasing which is set to 4xMSAA.
Results at a glance:Â For those who have no idea how to interpret these numbers, what we’re seeing here is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX750 Ti delivering excellent, highly playable frame rates with all in-game settings cranked to max and with 4xMSAA. That means we have a fairly taxing GPU load easily being handled by a mid-range GPU.
What’s great to see here is that the GTX750 and 750Ti are great overclockers and as we can see in the graph above, overclocking the Maxwell-based GTX 750 Ti yields us excellent framerates across the board from 720p all the way up to 2560×1440… I repeat, 2560×1440. With 4xMSAA.
A quick note about Titanfall, the game caps the maximum framerate to your refresh rate. Also for reference, here’s a gallery of AA comparison for Titanfall at 1080p so you can see why we opted for 4xMSAA:
For the NVIDIA GeForce GTX750 we’ve recorded gameplay footage so you can personally see how the card handles, the same settings have been applied as with the tables for the GTX 750 Ti.
Game was recorded with NVIDIA Shadowplay. Shadowplaadministratory is available for NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards users, now in version 2.0. If you have a GeForce GTX 600 series graphics card, you will have the full NVIDIA GeForce Experience available with driver updates, one-click game optimization and ShadowPlay video capture.
As seen on the image above, ShadowPlay supports multiple modes of recording. One of the main highlights here is Shadow mode wherein you can continously record up to 20 minutes of gameplay. This makes it possible to capture every gaming highlights without saturating your hard drive. Score a quadra-kill in DOTA2 or a an epic Titan+pilot combo kill in Titanfall? Shadow Mode guarantees you immortalize that gaming greatness.
Comparing to an application like FRAPS, ShadowPlay has the advantage of GPU Acceleration where all the recording is done at the GPU level, which leaves the CPU to focus on the game. With Shadow Mode enabled, storage space is conserved because you only record your pre-defined timeframe. Just hit Alt+F10 to capture up to the last 20 minutes of gameplay, only then will the data be committed to disk. Twitch.tv live-streaming support is also available so you can broadcast your game live to your Twitch channel.
NVIDIA ShadowPlay in action
Read our review of NVIDIA GeForce Experience
What’s the best graphics card for Titanfall?
Here’s the situation: you’re ready for a GPU upgrade but want to keep it on a reasonable budget. You’re on the competitive side of the fence which means your games of choice are titles like DOTA2, Battlefield 4 and Titanfall. Which do you go for?
Simple answer: NVIDIA GTX750 or 750Ti. You can get the lowest priced GX750 Ti for around Php7,000 and get playable frame rates at Titanfall. If you want to see performance results for other games, head on to our GeForce GTX 750 Ti review.
At a consistent 50FPS+ performance maxed-out, you are still just drawing around below 300W on our entire system. You can easily recoup your investment in a couple of months from your power savings compared to an older generation GPU.
You can also get the best out of your Maxwell card using NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience, its as easy as a single click:
GeForce Experience in action: