By Joel Hruska
When Quantum Break launched for the Xbox One, gamers were
treated to a visually rich title with some gorgeous special effects and
interesting abilities. The frame rate and resolution both suffered
on the Xbox One, however, which doesn’t seem to quite have enough
graphics horsepower to do the job. Theoretically, this means the game
should run beautifully on PCs — instead, gamers seem to have gotten
another raw deal on this Universal Windows Platform title.
Some of the game’s problems are issues we’ve never seen in a PC title before, as Eurogamer details. These include:
It can’t match a monitor’s stated refresh rate.
The game appears to top out at roughly 5/6 of a 60Hz refresh rate, no
matter which detail levels or settings you use. Eurogamer couldn’t break
50 FPS on a 60Hz monitor, even when using a GTX Titan X or AMD GPU,
even at 720p and lowest detail settings. I’ve heard of game engines
being locked to a flat refresh rate before, but a game engine that’s
stuck at 5/6 of one? That’s new, and simply using a faster monitor isn’t
a solution. A 120 or 144Hz display will run more quickly, but Eurogamer
notes: “[Y]ou can’t achieve a level of performance that results in
consistent, level frame-times. As far as we can tell, a judder-free
experience is impossible at the moment without a patch from Remedy.”
Frame rate caps don’t work: Locking the frame rate
at 30 FPS doesn’t actually result in a smooth 30 FPS experience.
Instead, frame rate judder remains a significant issue — one that’s
magnified by the fact that the frames are being displayed for
comparatively longer periods of time. In a standard Win32 application,
this could be fixed through the frame rate controls available through
the Nvidia Control Panel or AMD’s Radeon Software, but since this is a
Windows Store title with fullscreen borderless mode, those options don’t
exist.
The list goes on from there. Image quality is terrible
because there’s no option to actually play the game in native 1080p.
Gamers are instead being handed 720p upscale, just like the Xbox One.
The game’s use of streaming means that it must be installed to
an SSD (Eurogamer’s emphasis, not ours). There are LOD issues, draw
distance problems, and the game somehow manages to crash Nvidia’s driver
on a regular basis. The Radeon R9 390 is, according to Eurogamer, a
full 50% faster than the GTX 970.
Eurogamer discusses the issue in more detail and provides evidence of
the R9 390 versus the GTX 970 in the video above. It’s not unusual for a
game to favor AMD or Nvidia or the reverse, but 50% gaps between two
equivalently priced products are extremely unusual.Gears of Wear, Redux
When Gears of War Ultimate Edition shipped last month, we noted that the game was so fundamentally broken
in so many ways, it was impossible to recommend it. Then, we at least
had some idea where the problems were — GoW is an early Unreal Engine 3
game that was “updated” for DirectX 12 while keeping the vast majority
of the original source code intact. It performed terribly on AMD cards
at launch and less-than perfectly on Nvidia hardware, and while later
patches have reportedly improved the situation, it still isn’t very
good.
Now we have Quantum Break — a game built on a brand-new
Northlight Engine and designed explicitly for the Xbox One and Windows
10. The situation isn’t quite as bad of Gears of War, but the rampant
driver crashing and terrible performance on Nvidia hardware suggest
Quantum Break either didn’t go through proper testing on PCs or is yet
another example of a terrible console port. Given that some of these
issues are present on both AMD and Nvidia hardware, it’s impossible to
disentangle what’s caused by poor game code, what’s driven by the broken
Universal Windows Platform, and what might be caused by problems in the
drivers both AMD and Nvidia have released.
“Random driver crashes make the game more challenging!” said no one, ever.
In an interview last week, Xbox head Phil Spencer claimed
that the issues people are having with the Windows 10 Store are simply
growing pains and that the company’s principle focus had been on getting
software up and running.
“My biggest concern when Tomb Raider launched was that I was
going to see a review of the Win32 version next to the UWP version and
the UWP version would be running at half the frame rate,” Spencer said.
“I knew that would be dead in the water. We didn’t see that. People
bought it. It got downloaded and installed on their PC. It ran at frame
rate. It was a pretty game.”
Tomb Raider might have been pretty, but both Gears of War
Ultimate Edition and Quantum Break are barely functional. If these are
the launch titles meant to sell us on the Windows Store, Microsoft
would’ve done better to feature some third-party Facebook apps and fake
Instagram clients. At least those are free. Both Nvidia and AMD
customers deserve better than what Microsoft is shoveling.
Some of the Windows Store issues should be fixed by July,
while others have no timeline. One game, particularly an ill-advised
DX12 update for a ten year-old codebase, can be excused. Multiple games
in a row can’t be — and if Microsoft doesn’t start enforcing some
quality control on its platform, the Windows Store is going to be
permanently tarnished. Gamers aren’t looking to replace existing
ecosystems, which means MS needs to offer something unquestionably
better in the Windows Store to entice people to switch. So far, the only
thing it’s managed to do is illustrate why it has no business selling
games at all. Quantum Break on the PC should have been the definitive
edition of the game — instead, it’s the worst.
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