Quantum Break is a game that a lot of PC gamers were looking forward to. Developed by the team behind Max Payne and Alan Wake, Quantum Break looked like a title that would showcase what DX12 is all about. And to be honest, a lot has been said about the PC version of Quantum Break. So time now to see whether we’re dealing with a rushed console port or a really demanding PC title.
For this Performance Analysis, we used an Intel i7 4930K (turbo boosted at 4.0Ghz) with 8GB RAM, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, Windows 10 64-bit and the latest WHQL version of the GeForce drivers.
A lot has already been said about the PC version of Quantum Break, with lots of PC gamers claiming it to be one rushed console port. However, Quantum Break appears to be the most demanding PC title we’ve ever tested. And to Remedy’s credit, this isn’t JUST a rushed console port.
Our GTX980Ti was unable to offer a constant 60fps experience at 1080p on Ultra settings. While testing the Ultra settings, we experienced severe stuttering and low framerates. Since this is a DX12-only title, we used PresentMon in order to measure our framerates. At 1080p and on Ultra settings, Quantum Break ran with 45fps. While Remedy claimed that an NVIDIA GTX980Ti was recommended for Ultra settings, we can confirm that a single GTX980Ti is unable to run this game at 1080p, unless of course you lock the framerate at 30fps. But let’s be realistic here; who would do such a thing on the PC?
In order to run Quantum Break smoothly, we used the following settings. And we are happy to report that with these settings, we did not experience any stutters (apart from when the game was saving). Quantum Break ran with a minimum of 50fps with these settings, and below you can find two videos in which you can witness how smoothly the game actually runs. As you can see, there aren’t any frame pacing issues or stutters.
What’s really interesting here, is that our GTX980Ti ran Quantum Break with 90fps on Low settings (we kept our resolution at 1080p). So basically, PC gamers with really old GPUs will undoubtedly encounter performance issues, and they’ll have to lower their resolutions (or lock the framerate at 30fps). Just for the fun, we tried Quantum Break on our GTX690 (which performed similarly to a GTX680 as the game does not support multi-GPUs) and we were able to maintain a constant 30fps experience on Low settings.
In other words, Quantum Break is the most demanding title we’ve ever tested (at least when it comes to its GPU requirements), and its official PC requirements mislead PC gamers. Remedy should had made it clear that the Ultra requirements were for gaming at 1080p + 30fps.
Furthermore, Quantum Break is yet another title that favours AMD’s GPUs. According to reports, the Radeon R9 Fury X is providing a better gaming experience than the NVIDIA GTX980Ti. In fact, the performance gap between them is said to be around 8-11fps. We don’t know whether NVIDIA will be able to narrow this performance gap via its drivers, however all DX12 titles are currently performing better on AMD’s hardware. And that’s something consumers should take into account when purchasing the top of the line GPUs that are currently available to the market.
Graphics wise, Quantum Break does a lot under its hood. The game is powered by Remedy’s in-house engine, the Northlight Engine. For its Global Illumination, Remedy used a mix of screen-space and pre-calculated solutions. Screen space reflections and Volumetric Lighting have been used, as well as Physically-based rendering. Quantum Break also packs incredible particle effects in Time mode, some cool physics effects (as a number of objects are destructible), amazing character models, and really polished animations. Unfortunately, though, the lip-syncing is not as good as the one found in other triple-A titles (like Ryse or Rise of the Tomb Raider for example).
The biggest downside with the PC version of Quantum Break is that Remedy has kept the temporal reconstruction technique that was used in the Xbox One version. Our guess is that Remedy kept that technique for performance purposes. After all, NVIDIA’s current top tier GPU is unable to run the game – in its current state – with 60fps on Ultra settings. Imagine what would have happened if the reconstruction tech hadn’t been used. Everyone would be complaining about the game’s performance. Still, it would be awesome if there was an option to disable it as this technique makes the visuals look like they are covered in Vazeline. And since this is a UWP and a DX12 title, we can’t use Reshade in order to sharpen the visuals. As a result of that, PC gamers will have to put up with these blurry visuals throughout the game. What a bummer.
Moreover, an aggressive LOD system is in place. Remedy has not provided any LOD slider so players will be unable to increase the LOD settings. As a result of that, you’ll notice objects changing right in front of you. Again, Remedy used this aggressive LOD system in order to improve performance. Still, a LOD slider and the ability to remove the reconstruction technique are currently the most requested options of PC gamers.
Regarding its CPU requirements, we did not notice any performance difference between a quad-core and a hexa-core CPU. The game scales well on more than four threads, however it does not require a high-end CPU in order to be enjoyed. Quantum Break stresses more the GPU than the CPU, so you can think of it as a GPU-bound title.
So, what’s the verdict on Quantum Break PC? Is it a rushed console port or a really demanding title? Well, a bit of both. While there are some indications of a rushed console port (no “Quit” button, no LOD slider and no ability to remove the reconstruction technique), there are also indications of a product that received some love. For example, the mouse controls are great, making the gunplay feel better. Moreover, there are proper on-screen keyboard indicators, and Remedy has added an option to disable copyrighted music.
In its current state, Quantum Break is the most demanding title available on the PC. We strongly believe that there was room for improvement and the game would benefit from various optimizations if Remedy had enough time. Unfortunately, it didn’t have. And that’s one of the reasons why the game requires such powerful GPUs. Is it a rushed product? Definitely. Is it as bad as Batman: Arkham Knight was? Not at all. Contrary to Batman: Arkham Knight, in Quantum Break PC gamers can lower their settings and enjoy the game (as showcased in our videos). Still, there is definitely room for improvement so here is hoping that Remedy will further optimize the PC version via patches.
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.”
Contact: Email
This game is a slide show with a highly overclocked Titan x at 1440p on ultra. The graphics aren’t that impressive, In fact they it looks crappy in some places.
Remedy should be ashamed of themselves for releasing such a horrible port. Btw what’s up with the main character’s rolled up pants? Looks stupid as hell.
I think it has more to do with Microsoft greenlighting the port last minute and not giving them enough time to work on it. It’s obvious from Alan Wake that they know what they’re doing.
Still, this was a team effort and they failed miserably.
skinhead for life, the early screens even had him with boots and braces!
Okay as long as lower settings still make the game playable, it’s fine. That means those with lower end hardware will at least be able to play the game. There’s such a huge gap in performance between low and ultra settings.
Mr Cat!
Lmao XD
Kinda hard to sell a game when only 10% of pc gamers can play it. This time they cant blame piracy.
The way I understand this analysis is that the game runs fine at lower settings and that there’s a huge discrepancy between ultra and low so I thought perhaps with lower end hardware, the game would be playable at lower settings but I guess the game just runs crap in general. Gonna wait for some more benches but it’s not looking good right now.
Yeah, definitely not the best analysis.
To be honest, I really don’t find the graphics of this game all that impressive. So, for it ask such high end hardware doesn’t really sit well with me.
I don’t know… the lighting and global illumination are the best I’ve seen so far. The GI they use is clearly very heavy. No other game comes close from what I’ve seen. I mean, just look at those screenshots.
Even so, it’s a shame they didn’t have time to do a proper PC version… especially after Alan Wake, which was great on PC. The visuals are still ruined by blurry textures, bad IQ, excessive dithering and artifacts etc
I can see those, just the floor itself impresses me on that last screenshot. I really can’t argue against the lighting and GI. But overall it doesn’t look good enough for demanding those graphic cards. The cost just doesn’t justify the visuals.
The “ran on console at 30 fps” part is key here! It just proves (considering pc has the same assets more or less) that the port was mediocre. AS IF a FuryX or a TitanX couldn’t handle that game, that’s absurd.
kinda reminds me some old early x360 games that lacked good shadows and lighting for various colors schemes such as bright colors and surfaces, glowing objects, bloom and objects that look like as if they have been tossed in oil. I am not saying it has that bad graphics, it is on par with other games outhere, i am saying that the techniques they use in terms of art feel like an old game.
Which is ironic since it was built on Unreal engine 2.5(modified) , I just don’t see how Microsoft can justify such a insane price point .
What upsets me the most is, you have Microsoft hyping their new Direct X stating how much better it will be performance wise and ends up with ridiculous system specs, it’s not because games are sooo much more shiny but due to lazy porting taking their games from xbox one and then converting them to their UWA shell, rather than actually putting in effort to make a PC branch, I mean why should it cost sooo much for a lazy port , system spec wise look at Dead Rising 3 which also required extensive hardware in order to run and that was still Direct X 11, so my point being these high specs are in order to mask a terrible porting problem they have and not just the problem of fixing that horrendous store they have (which somehow was stopped working on my current installation).
The intention of creating a Xbox Win 10 ecosystem seems worthwhile however it’s only to try and recoup costs for the lacking first party sales on xbox one, plus I think if it performs and plays better on PC than all those fanboys will cry wolf again as to why its better on PC and not their precious subscription box.
Sad thing is majority of titles all over are being plagued by bad performance and developers are okay with it lately which I don’t get why, seems to me that deadlines have become a demand and haven’t seen any significant titles this year so far become delayed yet.
subscription box 😀
Agreed, and I have to question this part of the article:
“The biggest downside with the PC version of Quantum Break is that Remedy has kept the temporal reconstruction technique that was used in the Xbox One version. Our guess is that Remedy kept that technique for performance purposes.”
Seems more likely that they just took the Xbox One game as-is and published it as a UWP app without much more tinkering, with the temporal reconstruction remaining present because it’s practically “hardcoded” in there as a result of the game being a console exclusive until the very last months of development.
Microsoft should’ve either let Remedy work on a proper PC version from the very beginning, or given them the time to do so after the console version shipped. We can deal with late ports as long as they are quality ones and appropriately priced, but an awful port like this reflects badly upon both the developer and publisher, not to mention the latter’s already not that well received new storefront.
i agree. it’s a bit sad, actually. the engine seems to have a lot of potential. the time break moment was an amazing environment
LOL…
The game doesn’t look good at all with that resolution upscale. It could be amazing-looking if it was actually rendered above 720p.
welcome to the world of microsoft
Great review! Thanks for being objective. Would’ve liked to see a little more finger pointing at Direct X 12 vs claiming a rushed console port. DX12 is still an infant will get better. Also, AMD is looking poised to have a great head start on DX12
God damnit i wanted this game to perform well so much. This is a bummer. I guess i’ll still wait for the UWP Gsync patch in may/june and let the devs optimize this a little.
I’m sorry to say this, but I was very dissapointed with this performance analysis. A bad port usually becomes a “demanding title”, it’s a false dichotomy that somehow makes Quantum Break look like a optimized, demanding title.
Next time first compare it to the garbage-console version and then say if the requeriments are fair or not.
Not to mention how suspiciously quickly it appeared compared to, let’s say, Hitman.
I’d rather not think “that”….
He said that Hitman’s test was delayed due to performance issues being widely reported.
i completely agree.this performance analysis is a complete letdown.
I tend to agree here. Although, on the one hand, he does acknowledge that more optimization could have been done with more time to develop it, while saying that, at least, the resources were kinda allocated correctly, with proper scaling in CPU cores and such and presenting nice rendering techniques. But it’s definitely not as bad as Arkham Knight (crashes, low res textures even on “normal” -as there wasn’t a “high” preset-, no rain effects, 30 FPS cap… it actually looked worse than the consoles version) nor GoW UE. Personally, I’m really disappointed with this, to be honest, but perhaps my expectations were a bit “too high” regarding all this DX12 stuff. I hope there’s going to be some performance patches down the line. That being said, what disappoints me the most is the fact that this games is only 10-hours long. I’m not going to pay $60 for such a short game, sorry.
So because this analysis is not following the rant of the net where everybody is blaming the game now it is not good? As soon as I will receive my redeem code from Microsoft I will see how it will perform on my PC but, at the moment, this is the most “fact based” analysis that I read o QB
you need to wake up
No, because it’s justifying absurd requeriments that don’t exist in the console version, this means it’s a bad port, and should be treated as such.
Where’s the magical DX12 now? If it had worked as advertised it wouldn’t have been the most demanding title ever…
DX 12 will improve the performance 90000% lol. they said this bulls**t for 2 years.
Now, thanks to wonderful DX12, poor developers can go back to their families instead of trying to optimize the game. 🙂
well i just complete the ACT 1 (intro) and was running at high 50s with R9 290(1080p Ultra). should be normal since the game looks like 720p lol.
I don’t understand what happen in this review.
That video capture software you’re using, could do with an update John 😛
A couple of interesting things, this is the only win store game that actually shows up in Nvidia Experience, for me I used their recommended settings and have smooth gameplay at 1440 on my 980. Important caveat be sure to disable gsync for this game, and make sure its running in full screen.
My settings for smooth play at 1440p on 980:
Anti-aliasing: Off
Display Mode: Fullscreen
Effects Quality: High
Global Illumination Quality: Medium
Lock 30fps: Off
Resolution: 2560x1440p
SSAO: On
Screen Space Reflections: Medium
Shadow Filtering: High
Shadow Resolution: Medium
Texture Resolution: Medium
Volumetric Lighting: Medium
I believe now if they make good on multi gpu support like they say they will, I’ll be able to play at max, time will tell though
Doesn’t appear in my Geforce Experience games list, even after refreshing it and restarting the computer several times.
my nv experience
With that kind of ports MS is basically shooting themselves in the legs.
Nonsense it is pc gamers legs they intentionally sniping.
/watch?v=EPop3hlEYz8
They were never going to make the PC version look superior, only the shadows and volumetric effects look slightly better on ultra. XB1 is basically 720p/4xmsaa/medium.
Rofl without Uncle Bill they don’t know anymore wtf is a Pc.
Ok i will overclock my GTX 970 G1 GAMING +100 mhz core +450 mhz memory then lock it to 30 fps and put evrything on ultra. Game still downloading from windows store as we speak.
It has nvidia experience support, so once installed be sure to rescan your game directory, and give it go on there reccomended settings first, I’m playing at 1440p with a 980 sitting in high 50’s so I’m guessing you can do similar w/ a 970 at 1080p. check 2 comments down for my current settings, now playing it with no issues
I have 1080p 21,5” IPS monitor and because DSR is not supported currently by Windows store unfortunately i am forced to play it on native 1080p. That a shame realy i wanted to play 1440p DSR but whati can do? Wait 1 month for DSR support to be added or start it now on native 1080p?
I think you will be fine at 1080p, the game has a film grain kind of like Mass Effect 1 or GTAIV did so it softens the edges anyway, as you can see from my settings below I actually turned off AA because the film grain makes so you aren’t really seeing jagged edges anyway and it give a boost in performance. Once you get the settings dialed in, then after 15 minutes of playing you’ll forget about graphics tweaks anyway because its a crazy game and really starts off with a bang
i play most games in 1440p DSR nowdays only the very demanding ones like just cause 3 rise of the tomb raider e.t.c i playd on nativcr 1080p. 1080P on 2016? Especialy on a powerful card like GTX 970 G1 GAMING? 1440P DSR is the way go unlesss as i said a game is too demaning for 1440p. In that case i dont have any other choice than playi ton native 1080p because i am forced too.
Still downlaoding it 14,7 of 42 gb downloaded!
Don’t get scared but is it the Asus VS229H-P? Own it as well but i use it as a second monitor its nice for gaming to for the money.
NVIDIA users shouldn’t be using ultra, the ultra volumetric effects cripple the performance so much probably because they are Async Compute based. The crashes are probably because of Async as well, same thing happens in Hitman. If this game had a DX11 option, it would run far better for NVIDIA users and you wouldn’t see the difference in image quality.
The volumetric effects don’t need accelerating using DX12 on the PC, it’s needed for the consoles, PC GPU have the raw power to do it as shown in Rise of the tomb raider, even Crysis 1 used volumetric effects.
Are tje graphics on ultra settings so good that it requires a 980 ti? Does it llok liks real or close to it?
IMO, they do… the sad part is that there’s virtually no difference between PC and Xbox One graphics. I don’t know if it’s DX12 problems, lack of optimisation (is it with “S” or “Z”), both or something else, but it’s a bit (too) disappointing so far. I’d really would have loved to see how this game performs in DX11, just for comparison’s sake.
Easily the lack of optimization and lack luster engine, perhaps in 230 years we can finally start seeing most games use superior engines like the unreal 4 engine or the cry engine or at this point even unity.
“no ‘Quit’ button” There doesn’t need to be since it’s a Windows app. You put the mouse pointer at the upper edge of the screen and press the red X when it appears. It’s as simple as that.
Damn, DX12… we either have a looooooong way down the road or it just doesn’t work.
Long way to go for DX12 yet, it’s just these devs are pushing out DX12 quick because AMD want that market share growth because all they can sell DX12 on is Async. NVIDIA GPUs like Maxwell are DX11 GPUs, end of story, all the gains in DX12 will come from the low level work in years to come, even AMD know this but they are marketing it to gain share.
Amd always tries to sell hardware by advertising software at least since bulldozer
Well, Mantle games (which still had hiccups, if my experience with Dragon Age Inquisition is anything to go by) benefitted mostly of a more focused direction (optimising for GCN) and AMD’s assistance. I really doubt MS is hands on on introducing DX12 and I’m pretty sure is up to devs to learn how to code properly. But yes, all this makes me wish everyone supported Mantle back then.
If Mantle was actually easier to use then it’s a shame it got the boot. On the other hand, that was perhaps because they only had to make it work for GCN. Now, if that’s not the case and it was easy all the time AND that “difficulty” was “ported” to Vulkan, then perhaps it’s just a matter of time for devs to use it instead. Otherwise… well, we’ll have to wait and see and stick to DX11.
Yeah, I don’t really know what more to say at this point. Perhaps DX12 just needs polishing or devs need to learn it better or whatever… the point is that DX12 is really lacking now on their promises right now. Let’s hope it gets better in time.
Well, I don’t know how “superior” of a solution Vulkan is compared to DX12 so I can’t really answer that right now.
Well, that proves versatility but still lacks a proper push. Say, PS4 using it for their games.
AMD have f*cked up it’s that simple, they were too busy trying to push their Async agenda and went full stupid by making Mantle then giving it away(probably actually their master plan because it worked to leverage Microsoft into making DX12 asynchronous). Mantle is a good idea on the face of it but making an API that only is optimised and works well for them is damn right silly and they only did it because their architecture supported asynchronous since 2011.
Why not tell everyone that GCN has been 1.1 since 2011 and the 7000 series, they only updated a few GPUs with 1.2. AMD plan is to keep GCN 1.1 inline with the consoles, so their 5 year old architecture and rehashed GPUs can benefit from DX12.
I’ll say it again. You do NOT make hardware that the API doesn’t use, DX11 isn’t asynchronous but AMD made ACE units anyway and you only go make a graphics API like Mantle to use it. AMD was supposed to have worked very closely with Microsoft and DX, well something when wrong because DX11 doesn’t use ACE tech, no one knows why and no one it seems asked.
7790 has GCN 1.1, PS4, XB1 have GCN 1.1, point is, AMD had ACE units since 2011, they made the hardware for a graphics API that didn’t support asynchronous compute, in production they had GCN 1.1. AMD made the assumption directX was going that way, they were wrong and had to make Mantle.
CRAP PORT!
If the pc version is a 10, the xbox one is a close 9 when we talk about graphics. And the sad part is the apu running on that console. And he is using a 980ti on that bench pc. Plus people is saying that 1080p pc is not real 1080p. Its up scaled 720p.
It is running at what? Maybe 40 fps at max setting on a 980ti. The apu is pushing constant 30. Same image quality. Its ultra sad. John totally dropped the ball on this article. Just do not buy this pos.
As a side note, the game is priced at 1750 pesos argentinos on the store. And that is like 130 bucks. For comparison rise of the tomb raider is priced at 60 bucks on the usa store and 570 pesos atgentinos in our store. Its a fair price. But quantum break cost the triple. Greed as f***
Nunca pensé encontrarme un argentino acá, kudos to you sir
Buenas, uno de los pocos sitios q no se asusta en postear la verdad en las reviews. Aunque esta fue muy mala. Normalmente cuando sale un juego y esta mal optimizado sale un post diciendo q el review estara en unos dias pero cuidado q el juego corre horrible en toda placa. Con quantum break eso no paso. Por eso ya ayer nos quejabamos q no habia una advertencia del mal rendimiento, ni un mísero post. Nada. Y ahora esta review, la cual no refleja la realidad a mi entender. Muy feo q pase esto.
exacto, the witcher 3 y unity estan MUY por encima de este juego en mi opinion, sin embargo resulta que Quantum Break no esta mal optimizado, es “demanding” …. huele raro.
implying the console version does not run at medium settings at 720p at 28 fps.
Also look at the bright side at least you dont live in Greece like john,
My goodness and people say Ubisoft are bad, Uplay and Ubisoft are nothing compared this this garbage Microsoft is putting out on PC gamers.
Hey there this is ms harassing you to upgrade to win10, upgrade to win10 damn it. It has dx12, and what you gonna play with it? quantum break….you gonna need 2 titans and a 16 core cpu with 32gb ram but other than that…… it runs pretty well, this is the power of dx12, totally not useless with 8000$ pc requirements.
this game doesn’t even touch my GPU , ran the game @ 4k maxed out and i see my CPU fans running fast while my GPU is very quite
Microsoft does not pay off this site this is probably the only site online that doesn’t get money from companies
Messing around with GTA V
http://i.imgur.com/3z7oFYM.png
let the joke aside this is very very very sad day for pcgamers 🙁
RIP DX 12 ….we are in 2016 still
Surprised the local Rockstar cümslurper didn’t reply to my GTA V post lol.
omg FURY X has 60 FPS perfect on this one WTAF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nope, the game is 50FPS hard capped. R9 390 is destroying the GTX 970 by 20FPS+.
wow thats just bs
But but… dx12
Joking aside its sad that games with the new api are so demanding without offering extraordinary improvements in graphics. Blurry really? I just hope game developers will not fall for “dx12 only” because they will not be able to cry “Piracy” for low sales.
I’m not usually into the whole conspiracy thing, but i do wonder if Microsoft are trying to limit PC performance so gamers will stay at 1080p around 30 so there is more comparison with the xbox one. Generally, lighting and shadow fx are easily forgotten about when actually playing the game, but frame rate and fps are the one big advantage that PC has. Maybe the plan to have a single windows platform across all formats means they intend to enforce conformity on game visuals too. Maybe not, but just a thought.
even if that’s not their goal it’s a positive thing in their eyes probably. they are also turning “PC gaming is expensive” myth into a reality by having “demanding” titles on PC.
The game is locked to 50FPS max and the frame times are horrible as well, even on AMD GPUs which perform much better. it’s clear MS don’t want the XB1 too look so bad so the PC version looks bad in turn with all these limitations.
The game is not locked at 50fps. According to Digital Foundry, this cap occurs only when you have a 60hz monitor. On our 120hz monitor, we witnessed framerates up to 90fps.
Moreover, in this video the framerate is not locked at 50fps (and you can clearly see in the menu that the game runs at 60fps which equals to 60hz. So I don’t know why Digital Foundry was unable to hit more than 50fps)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3VPy5TxFCI
Ahhh some kind of adaptive sync which limits the frame rate under your monitor refresh rate . What a mess.
i guess it’s 5/6 of the monitor refresh rate.
The DirectX 12 Revolution is reminding me of DirectX 10 all hype and no show.
with DX10 i think the fact that most hardware console hardware only DX9 capable making dev completely ignore DX10. the most funny thing is when DX11 arrive most dev only make their games in DX9 and DX11 only leaving all user with DX10 cards in the dust.
Yeah but DX10 did actually do some important stuff, like allow MSAA in deferred rendering, really a stop gap for DX11 though, more iteration where DX12 is about revolution and it is, it’s just needs time. MS are putting out crap DX12 ports which isn’t helping DX12’s image.
UNOPTIMIZED ? “demanding”
GTX980Ti? Damn, i see that you guys finally upgraded your rig.
The problem is an unrealistic amount of expectations from DX12 and of course lazy devs or in this case perhaps Remedy wasn’t lazy but were instead rushed by Microsoft. The thing is, DX12 sounds nice and all and yes it allows you to code closer to the metal BUT it requires MORE work because you are getting that much closer to the machine. My point is, greater performance with DX12 over DX11 is possible but not if so many devs are lazy, which most in fact are.
So true so many people act like DX12 is this magic secret sauce. Devs have always been lazy how we can so suddenly expect them to do more work for DX12 , When they don’t even go out of their way now. But alot of the unrealistic expectations are from microsoft and other companies hyping DX12 so much for years
Finally an honest analysis with pros and cons. Great job guys!
LOL. This is a sh**ty analysis. Digital Foundry did a better job.
AMD R9 390 destroying the GTX 970 in DX12. Finally a game that shows it in it’s true form I think. My guess it’s Async heavy, it’s seems to be the main reason why the R9 390 is destroying NVIDIA GPUs. We knew this was coming. NVIDIA GPUs would run better if this was DX11 as well.
http://i.imgur.com/U18sfvV.jpg
True.
I’m going to disagree with your assessment that QB is not as bad as AK at release.
Digital Foundry’s video showed a 50%+ gap in the performance between a gtx970 and a r9 390 (in AMD’s favor), primarily being down to the compute requirements of the volumetric lighting.
You say you couldn’t hit 60 fps – that’s because there’s a 50fps hard cap, even @ 720p/low settings on a titan-x DF couldn’t get over 50fps flat.
AA options are “on / off”. What AA is it? They don’t say. What factor? They don’t say. Just on/off.
Temporal Reconstruction, the tech used on the xbox one to upscale the native 720p render to 1080 is kept in place on the pc with no means of disabling, meaning @ 1080p we’re actually getting an upscaled 720p image, which on a pc monitor looks hideous. To achieve higher resolutions, on nvidia cards you need to enable DSR and use the following resolutions:
Native 1080p: 2880×1620
Native 1440p: 3840×2160
Native 4k: Not happening in this generation, stop dreaming.
There’s no “Quit” option in the game, you need to click the close icon in the top right corner oldschool style. If you’re using a controller and are on your TV, you’re SoL. Yeah, something as basic as a quit option isn’t even there.
There’s animation issues and scene cut issues on the pc version too, which don’t occur on the xbone version.
Nvidia users are also reporting that even with the day 1 driver, they’re suffering from frequent driver crashes in game.
the folks over on DF also had their completed savegame on the xbone overwritten with an empty file from their pc version when they installed it there. Nice.
It is priced on xbone @ €60 for retail, but in the same regions in the EU, from the windows store on pc, it’s €75 with no explanation given for the price hike.
As it’s a UWP exclusive, there’s no other options for where to get it on pc, so you’re stuck with the inflated prices in some regions. Not to mention the ludicrous slew of issues that come with UWP to begin with (forced double buffer v-sync, no g/free sync options, no sli support, no mod support, no overlays, no ini access, a storefront plagued with download issues, be it slow downloads or downloading far too much data for some odd reason – some folks are seeing dl’s in excess of 80gb for QB, no explanation given).
Still say it’s not as bad as AK? Remedy’s publisher didn’t license out this port to some tiny 3rd party dev like WB did with AK, so there’s no one to blame here but themselves for this mess.
GTX970 owner…don’t own the game of course. Shame on Nvidia for their latest crappy drivers and Microsoft for lock this game’s refresh rate.
Well done AMD for run this garbage port with a better playable frame rate. That’s how you do things.
If the next Polaris is better than Pascal even by 1FPS, I’m going to switch (after 10 years) to AMD.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK2BUeYqLVI
Ok i live in America and i tried my best to find a small monitor that was 1080P and IPS so it could look sharp and have great colors. All i could find really is the Asus.
DigitalFoundry
“What went wrong with Quantum Break on PC?
Poor performance, UWP limitations, crashing Nvidia drivers – and a 50fps limit on 60Hz monitors. This isn’t good.”
No bullsh!te spin about demanding title elsewhere
That house of cards that is DX12 is falling apart, hope VULKAN can get some real good titles, so many devs starts to developing for an API that works on every modern system nowadays. Vulkan is good for consumers, because you arent tied to a single platform.
This puts to bed the lie that DX12 is running like cr@p because devs have had to include a DX11 option/wrapper
This turd is 100% DX12
“There were claims originally, that Nvidia GPUs wouldn’t even be able to execute async compute shaders in an async fashion at all, this myth was quickly debunked. What become clear, however, is that Nvidia GPUs preferred a much lighter load than AMD cards. At small loads, Nvidia GPUs would run circles around AMD cards. At high load, well, quite the opposite, up to the point where Nvidia GPUs took such a long time to process the workload that they triggered safeguards in Windows.”
This might explain the crashes that NVIDIA users are having but it’s strange because Async isn’t enabled in the NVIDIA driver. Why aren’t devs implementing Async for light workloads then for NVIDIA GPUs? If you want a conspiracy theory here, I can easy make one. AMD are making devs use heavy Async workloads to f*ck over NVIDIA, it works the same way people are saying about NVIDIA Gameworks f*cking over AMD GPUs.
Well I’m sure that Remedy would have delivered the quality they’re known for if it wasn’t for that abomination called the Windows Store und UWP. At least there’s hope that they’ll be able to fix things in the next couple of weeks as they did with GoW: UE.
I see a lot of experts down below. So savvy I think they should have been the ones writing the article itself.
I don’t get people’s problem with this game.
I’m playing in 1080p, low, and aside from setting Textures to Medium, since I have a 7850 2 GB VRAM, the game looks and plays like the Xbox One version, because my GPU has close to (if just slightly higher) performance than an Xbox One. So it actually runs like it should.
4 years later:
Runs 1080p60 Ultra with no upscaling
100% Sharpening from driver.
5700 XT, R5 3600, 32 GB ram
Game is plenty sharp now.