Respawn found a way to offer gamers a better Titanfall gameplay experience on slower PCs, although that means buyers should have plenty of storage on their hard drives to install a massive 48GB version of the game. That’s 31GB more than the Xbox One install that comes in at 17GB, and it all has to do with audio files, Eurogamer has learned.
In order to prevent CPUs on low-end PCs from having to deal with audio decompression, Respawn decided to have all the uncompressed audio saved on the PC’s drive. Of the 48GB PC install on those machines, 35GB is uncompressed audio.
“Yeah, basically when you download the game or the disc itself, it’s a lot smaller than that,” Respawn lead engineer Richard Baker told the publication. “We have audio we either download or install from the disc, then we uncompress it. We probably could have had audio decompress off disc but we were a little worried about min spec and the fact that a two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio.”
“So… it’s almost all audio… On a higher PC it wouldn’t be an issue. On a medium or moderate PC, it wouldn’t be an issue, it’s that on a two-core [machine] with where our min spec is, we couldn’t dedicate those resources to audio,” Baker added.
The minimum PC specifications for Titanfall follow below:
- OS: Windows Vista SP2 64-bit / Windows 7 SP1 64-bit / Windows 8 64-bit
- CPU: AMD Athlon X2 2.8GHz / Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
- RAM: At least 4 GB
- HARD DRIVE: At least 50GB of free space
- VIDEO: AMD Radeon HD 4770 with 512MB RAM or better / Nvidia GeForce 8800GT with 512MB RAM or better
- DirectX: DirectX 11
- INPUT: Keyboard and mouse, Microsoft Gamepad
- ONLINE CONNECTION REQUIREMENTS: 512kbps down and 384kbps up or faster Internet connection
