Quantum Break PC Performance Review

Quantum Break PC Performance Review

Conclusion

Quantum Break is very much a quantum conundrum as most of the issues that are present in the game are due to the Universal Windows platform and it alone, which is something that Remedy, the developers of the game, themselves cannot fix.  

Control wise the game can only really be played optimally will with a controller, with the mouse controls for me being inverted on the horizontal axis the mouse controls also coming with the V-Sync mouse lag that most PC gamers love to hate. The game plays well on a controller, as you would expect from a Xbox One title, but it is a shame that the mouse and keyboard controls did not work out so well. 

While there has been a lot of talk on the internet about the “terrible” PC performance of Quantum Break I can say that these reports have been exaggerated though I will agree that at the games maximum setting the game does indeed not perform that well. On lower end GPUs like the GTX 960 and the R9 380 I would recommend that you either play at 1080p low or 900p medium in orde to get playable framerates, but on our GTX 980Ti and R9 Fury X it was fairly easy to get playable framerates in the game at up to a resolution of 4K. 

To get the best balance of performance to visual quality in the game I would recommend that you play the game at medium preset with AA turned off and use that as a starting point. Then I would advise you to choose a suitable resolution depending on your setup. 

Sadly on my system I was unable to get the game to run at a solid 60FPS, regardless of the GPU that I used. With such similar results at the lowest game setting at 1080p, 1440p and 4K I can only say that there is some kind of system bottleneck in place that is not GPU related, which is a very strange prospect given that I was playing Quantum Break from an SSD on a system with an overclocked i7 6700K CPU and 16GB of 3200MHz DDR4 memory. 

Quantum Break is a game that is playable on PC, but it is sadly a PC game that can never be played at a constant 60FPS on PC, at least with current hardware and as a game that was designed to run at 720p on consoles is a game that may be too demanding for those that run lower end PC hardware unless you turn down the resolution to match.  

When choosing what graphical setting to run this game at you will see one thing, that anything over medium is not offering any major improvements in visual fidelity, meaning that for most of us the extra visual quality is simply not worth the extra performance hit. 

Many of the performance problems in this game would go away if this game was not a UWP app, as the elimination of V-Sync would mean that framerates could be higher in most cases and allow those with FreeSync of G-Sync to be able to handle the dips below 60 without having to go all the way down to 30. 

Microsoft has promised to fix UWP to allow V-Sync to be turned off, to support G-Sync and V-Sync and to enable SLI/Crossfire, but at this time it is something that severely limits games that are shackled to it and the Windows 10 storefront. 

From what I have played i can say that I have had fun with this game so far, but the performance of this game will still be a major turn off, even if they can get past the Windows 10 Store requirements and the Universal Windows Platform restrictions. 

 

You can join the discussion on Quantum Break’s PC performance on the OC3D Forums. 

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