Remedy has just released FBC: Firebreak on PC. Powered by the Northlight Engine, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on PC.
FBC: Firebreak is a first-person shooter game where up to three players can team up and play together. The game takes place in the world of Alan Wake and CONTROL. You and your team will fight strange and powerful enemies inside a secret government agency that’s under attack by supernatural forces.
Players will explore the strange and dangerous headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC). This place is full of weird and mysterious things. You play as one of the FBC’s brave first responders. Along with your team, you’ll face strange events that bend reality and battle creepy monsters from other worlds.
Since this is a multiplayer game that lacks an official benchmark tool, it’s pretty much impossible to test it on the exact same conditions on multiple GPUs. As such, in this article, we’ll be focusing on the game’s Path Tracing and DLSS 4 features.
FBC: Firebreak has almost the same graphics settings as Alan Wake 2. PC Gamers can adjust a wide range of settings. For instance, there are settings for Shadows, Reflections, Global Illumination and more. The game also supports NVIDIA DLSS 4 and AMD FSR 3 from the get-go. However, there is no support for Intel XeSS. There is also no support, at least for now, for AMD FSR 4.0.
Before continuing, here are some comparisons between Ray Tracing/Path Tracing Off (left) and On (right). In this game, I’m not really impressed with what Full RT brings to the table. Yes, the lighting and AO are a bit better, but we’re not talking about a “generational transformation”. Remedy has done an excellent job with the non-RT version, which manages to look amazing. The only immediate improvement that most of you will notice is with the reflections. The RT Reflections look WAY better than the SSR.
Sadly, the game does not allow you to adjust the Ray Tracing effects separately. That’s a bummer as some may want to just enable the RT reflections. Let’s hope that Remedy will add these settings via a post-launch update.
Performance-wise, Path Tracing will half your in-game performance. Without any RT or PT effects, FBC: Firebreak ran with a minimum of 91FPS and an average of 99FPS at Native 4K/Max Settings on the NVIDIA RTX 5090. Then, with Path Tracing, performance dropped to 45/50FPS at Native 4K. By enabling DLSS 4 Quality, we were able to get a constant 80FPS experience.
As you can clearly see, Full Ray Tracing (or as NVIDIA states Path Tracing) in this game is not THAT demanding. And that is being reflected in the minimal visual differences between PT On and PT Off. The good news is that you can get a constant 60FPS experience at 4K on a high-end GPU. You can either use Native 4K without Ray Tracing, or use 4K with DLSS 4 Q (without Frame Gen) and Path Tracing.
FBC: Firebreak also supports DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Gen. And this is perhaps the best implementation of MFG I’ve seen to date.
For our image quality tests, I moved the camera as quickly as I could. While playing, you won’t be panning the camera as fast as I did. This is a worst-case scenario that we’ll be using in all future games that support MFG, as it can give us an idea of the worst possible scenario (when it comes to visual artifacts).
Here are three screenshots I took randomly. In only one of them you can see very slight ghosting left to the hand (at the center of the screen). Other than that, the images look great. And again, this is in a worst-case scenario. I was moving the camera so quickly that it was impossible to play the game (everything was a blur in real-time due to the fast camera movement). So yes, MFG works like a charm in this game, and it’s one of the best implementations I’ve seen to date.
By enabling MFG X2 at 4K with DLSS Quality and Path Tracing, we were able to get to a minimum of 144FPS. Then, with MFG X3 and X4, we got to a minimum of 200FPS and 250FPS, respectively.
With 4K/DLSS Q/Path Tracing and MFG X4, there weren’t any major input latency issues. The game felt sharp and responsive. Couple this with the amazing image quality of MFG X4, and you’ll have to be an idiot not to use it if you own a high-end GPU.
I’ve also tried MFG X4 at Native 4K/Path Tracing. Since the base framerate was not as high as with DLSS Q, I did feel the lower input in this config. Still, the game was more than enjoyable. I had no trouble shooting enemies or completing objectives. In the video below, you can see some gameplay with those settings.
Finally, FBC: Firebreak does not suffer from any stutters. This is a crucial thing for a multiplayer game. Everything felt smooth. Then again, it does not feature big or enormous maps. So, I’d be shocked if the game suffered from any stutters.
All in all, FBC: Firebreak can run great on a high-end GPU, even with its Full Ray Tracing/Path Tracing effects. I wasn’t particularly impressed with its Path Tracing effects, though. To be honest, I was expecting more. Still, it’s at least good to know that the non-RT version can run with over 60FPS at Native 4K on a high-end GPU. On the other hand, the game has one of the best implementations of DLSS 4. So, make sure to use it to further boost your performance.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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