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Titanfall engine branch

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Titanfall engine branch
Promotional in-game screenshot of Titanfall, the first game to run on a heavily modified version of the Source Engine called Titanfall branch, featuring Direct3D 11 renderer, detailed models and better graphics, temporal anti-aliasing (Nvidia TXAA), and increased engine limits.
Promotional in-game screenshot of Titanfall Titanfall, the first game to run on a heavily modified version of the Source Engine called Titanfall branch, featuring Direct3D 11 renderer, detailed models and better graphics, temporal anti-aliasing (Nvidia TXAA), and increased engine limits.
Developer(s)
Release date(s)
March 11, 2014
Latest release(s)
Actively developed
Promotional in-game screenshot of Apex Legends Apex Legends. This game uses the latest iteration of Titanfall engine branch with additional features including Direct3D 12 renderer, more detailed models and better graphics, and increased engine limits once again, allowing maps to be larger.

The Titanfall branch Titanfall branch (also known as ReSource internally, or the Respawn branch) is a third-party Source branch developed by Respawn Entertainment using licensed Source Engine code from Valve. It is a heavily modified version of the Portal 2 engine branch[1] that adds many huge modifications and improvements, aswell rebuilding most of the engine, making this version of Source producing graphics and capability closer to modern engines like Unreal Engine 4 and 5 or Source 2, while keeping the game running on consoles at 60FPS with stable framerate. This engine branch is still in active development as of 2026.

Titanfall 2's lead engineer claimed that "there's not a lot of Source left" on this engine branch, due to the engine being significantly modified and rewritten to the point that it could be considered a completely new engine.[2]

It is also the only Source branch to be released on modern consoles (8th and 9th generation), until 2022 with the release of Portal Companion Collection for Nintendo Switch, running on modified Source 2013 Singleplayer branch (Portal) and Portal 2 engine branch (Portal 2).

Features

Todo: List all of the features of this modified engine.

Renderer

Native DirectX 11 (dxlevel 110) and DirectX 12 (dxlevel 120) (only in Apex Legends) renderer
First Source engine branch to support both DirectX 11 and 12 renderer.
DirectX 11 (Direct3D 11) is used by default, supported in all games (later removed in Apex Legends since March 2025). Previous versions (DirectX 9.0c / Direct3D 9 SM 3.0) was only supported on Xbox 360 version of Titanfall.
DirectX 12 (Direct3D 12) is currently only supported in Apex Legends. Enabled by default since March 2025.
Cascaded Shadow Maps (also in Alien Swarm Deferred Counter-Strike Online 2 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Strata Source Xengine)
Cast very detailed shadows from the skybox.
Deferred shading
Allow many lights to be rendered on scene with little performance impact.
New rendering system with Physically Based Rendering
A approach that seeks to render images in a way that models the lights and surfaces with optics in the real world.
Texture streaming (also in Counter-Strike: Global OffensiveStrata SourceVindictusTeam Fortress 2 branch)
Reduce system RAM and graphics card VRAM by streaming textures.
Better HDR Rendering
Improves the HDR (bloom) lighting.[Clarify]
Native HDR displays support (not to be confused with HDR Rendering)
Outputs the game image to HDR-capable display, which is capable of rendering image with higher contrast, brighter image and more intense colors. Exclusive to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S version of Apex Legends only.
Not available on PC, but it can be workaround by using Windows 11's Auto HDR feature.
TAA anti-aliasing
TAA (aswell as TXAA, TSSAA/TSAA and other variant of TAA) is a new method of anti-aliasing which was common in many modern games since 2010s, as most games transitions from forward rendering to deferred rendering, a technique which allows many lights to be rendered with little performance impact, and because MSAA (on deferred renderer, are more expensive, harder to implement and less effective compared to forward renderer). TAA is a spatial anti-aliasing technique that works by combines information from past frames and the current frame (while simultaneously jittering between both frames) to smooth the current frame. Through it's main drawbacks is that it can cause ghosting and blurriness (basically creating motion blur) to the image, especially on lower framerate (Example). Some of the TAA drawback can be workaround by applying sharpening filter on the image.
TAA was first introduced with Titanfall as "TXAA" which requires "MSAA" and a Nvidia GPU to function. Later implementation called TSSAA (or simply TAA) was introduced in Titanfall 2, replacing TXAA, and doesn't need MSAA and a NVIDIA graphics card to function. MSAA were later removed starting with Apex Legends.

Audio

Custom in-house Sound System
Audio system improvements
Speex audio codec
Titanfall uses Wwise sound system.
Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends uses updated version of Miles Sound System, which properly support 7.1 surround on modern version of Windows and better DSP effects.

Networking

New netcode and (only in Apex Legends) Cross-play support
Cross-platform multiplayer is supported starting with Apex Legends, allowing users other platforms (such as consoles), to play with PC users.

Platform

64-bit support
Full support for 64-bit, which improves performance and allow the engine to access more than 4GB of RAM. 32-bit are not supported on this branch.
Modern console support (PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S)
Titanfall, Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends support multiple modern game consoles since the 8th generation, running at 60 FPS. This is the only Source engine branch along with Source 2013 Singleplayer that have been ported to modern (8th gen and later) game consoles.

Other

Customized version of BSP and VPK, along with RPAK (Respawn Pack File)
Titanfall uses BSP version 29, Titanfall 2 uses version 37 and Apex Legends uses version 47,[3][4] with the BSP headers using rBSP (Respawn BSP) instead of VBSP as identifier.
Titanfall up to Apex Legends at launch, uses modified version of VPK file format, while Titanfall 2 also ships with RPAK file format, using it alongside heavily-modified VPK. Later updates to Apex Legends completely removed VPK files and moved remaining files to RPAK file format.

Availability and usage

Source code and official tools for this branch are not available. However, the community has made unofficial mod tools (such as Northstar, Black Market Edition, and MRVN-Radiant) for these games.

1. According to steam.inf and gameinfo.txt, the games contain a leftover SteamAppID (620) for Portal 2 Portal 2 as of March 2025 (both Titanfall 1 and 2). The AppID was likely left unchanged as both Titanfall and Titanfall 2 were originally released on Origin (now EA App), making "SteamAppID" unused. When R1Delta is installed into Titanfall, and launching Titanfall Dedicated Server, using version console command also confirms that the game uses Protocol version 2001, same as Portal 2. Also, most of the .vtf files inside the game's .vpk files are version 7.5, which were introduced in Alien Swarm engine branch.
2. Dunsmore, Kevin (June 14, 2016), E3 2016: Respawn Talks Content Variety, Reworked Engine in Titanfall 2. Retrieved on March 2, 2026. 

Q (Kevin Dunsmore - Hardcore Gamer): The original Titanfall ran on the Source Engine. Is Titanfall 2 running on the same engine or has it been moved to something like Frostbite?

A (John Shiring): On Titanfall we started with the Source engine; we replaced the renderer, we replaced the audio system, we replaced the net code. What we have now is very different from that. We have stuck with the Titanfall engine, but we did a lot of rendering improvements. We have physically based rendering, we have this really cool texture streaming system we wrote, HDR, bloom, depth of field. Hopefully you can see the results of all that hard work we put in that the game looks really different.

We also have a whole new audio system again. This time we have audio environments. Audio-wise, if you compare the two games again, it’s a huge leap. We have sound occlusion and reverb happening. There has been a whole bunch of areas where we make big changes to the engine, so there’s not a lot of Source left; we continue to rip out chunks and rewrite chunks and make it do exactly what we want to get out of this engine, and get the performance what we’re looking for.

3. MRVN-Radient source code (games.h). Retrieved on February 23, 2026. 
4. bsp_regen source code (bsp.hpp). Retrieved on February 23, 2026. 
Code: 
bool is_valid() {
        if (header_->magic == MAGIC_rBSP) {
            switch (header_->version) {
                case 29:  // Titanfall
                case 36:  // Titanfall 2 [PS4] (Tech Test)
                case 37:  // Titanfall 2
                    return (header_->_127 == 127);
                default:
                    return false;
            }
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