Remedy Entertainment is usually known for making quality titles, even on PC.
Remedy Entertainment is usually known for making quality titles, even on PC. Imagine the shock and surprise when it turns out that Quantum Break is a broken mess on PC and that it's almost in worst shape than the infamous Batman: Arkham Knight on PC.
Gamespotpicked up the news from a technical breakdown that Digital Foundryconducted, where they compared Quantum Break on PC with AMD and Nvidia cards, as well as rolled out a comparison to the Xbox One version. It turns out the Xbox One version is better optimized and runs more fluently than the PC counterpart. But why?
Well, part of it is poorly optimized drivers from Nvidia. The Digital Foundry crew ran into several driver crashes running on the Nvidia hardware. Worst yet is that the company had recently updated the drivers for Quantum Break . That didn't matter, though, because between AMD and Nvidia cards there's nearly a 50% performance gap.
Nvidia's GTX 970 could barely hit 30fps on the Ultra settings, whereas the AMD R9-390 was able to rock out at a partially consistent 50fps. There was, on average, a 20fps frame-rate difference between Quantum Break on Nvidia cards and AMD cards. That's one of the biggest gaps in benchmarking I've ever witnessed between two similarly powered cards. It's bizarre.
Worse yet is the double buffered v-synch – now I always turn off v-synch because it usually butchers the frame-rate with the kind of judder that could make your eyes bleed, especially with poorly optimized games. But in this case, according to Digital Foundry, they weren't able to disable it due to it being a mandatory feature running Windows 10 programs from the UWP.
But that's not even the worst of it; the frame-rate is capped at what they state is 5/6th of your monitor's refresh rate. What this means is that anyone with a 60hz monitor will never be able to play the game above 50fps. This ludicrously asinine display of technical incompetence was put on display with a $1,000 Titan X card that couldn't run Quantum Break on medium settings at 720p above 50fps. Check out the video below to see the comparisons
This is like a through and through sign to stay away from Quantum Break on PC. When you can't even get a $1,000 GPU to run the game more consistently than its Xbox One counterpart at the same resolution and graphics settings, you know darn well that the game is not worth the price of entry on PC.
Even more than that is the fact that if you play the game offline it reads it that you're playing a pirated version of Quantum Break . Yes folks, if you play offline you are shamed with the eye-patch accessory that (inconsistently) appears on the main character throughout the game to remind you that you're playing a pirated version. The only problem is there is no pirated version of Quantum Break available... yet. Essentially it's a shaming tactic for not being always-on. Rue greatly the day for which that becomes the norm.
Anyway, Quantum Break doesn't sound as if it's beyond repair, but clearly you do not want to put $60 down on a game with incessant frame-rate drops and jittery FPS performance. If Remedy can fix the problems then maybe it might be worth it, but for now this is another Batman: Arkham Knight scenario.
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