‘Quantum Break’ On Windows 10 Suffers From Framerate Limits And Issues, Crashing, And More, Per Report

If you picked up Quantum Break this past week, you’ve either been pleasantly surprised that Microsoft’s most recent title is a great experience, or you’re likely experiencing great issues in playing the game. It seems Quantum Break on Windows 10 is hit-or-miss: some people are reporting decent, though not perfect performance, others are getting downright abysmal results. It’s a shame, because at its core, Quantum Break is a phenomenal game with an engaging story and cast of characters. However, it remains to be said: Quantum Break on PC is just not in a state currently where you should risk it on Windows 10 today.

The tech gurus over at Digital Foundry put together a laundry list of issues, which seemed to confirm many of the reports going on earlier in the week since launch on Tuesday. The Windows 10 version of Quantum Break suffers greatly in terms of framerate and frame-pacing, customization and even visually compared to its Xbox One counterpart. In fact, the Xbox One version seemingly is much more fluid than its Windows 10 counterpart – which makes no sense when one can run at a much higher framerate than the former. However, the Xbox One version is clearly the version to get right now, and its a shame to anyone who wanted to play Remedy’s time-bending action game on PC.

Remedy finally addressed this on Twitter, stating that they are aware of the issues and that the Finnish developer is tracking both versions of Quantum Break.

We are monitoring both Windows10 and Xbox One Quantum Break and figuring out what issues are real and if any are widespread or not.

— Remedy Entertainment ?? GDC (@remedygames) April 8, 2016

Collecting data and researching is slow, but we are on it.

— Remedy Entertainment ?? GDC (@remedygames) April 8, 2016

The issues being reported are the type that is eerily reminiscent of Warner Bros. Batman: Arkham Knight last year: frame rate locks and limits being artificially being placed on the game, poor optimization and wide-spread reports of visual issues. Digital Foundry points out that the temporal reconstruction technique that The Inquisitr previously reported is still in play on the PC, meaning that the image is still natively rendered at a lower resolution (720p) than the final output resolution. This means that, while you may be able to play the game at 1440p on Windows 10, the native resolution of the game is actually lower, because there is no way to turn off the technique, unlike Rainbow Six: Siege, where you could.

Quantum Break also seems to struggle on Nvidia cards, and suffers on Nvidia hardware compared to its AMD counterparts — with an average margin of 20 frames-per-second. Nvidia also seems to have an issue where the driver will inexplicably crash, which is shocking, considering Nvidia released a day one driver for Quantum Break.

However, if you are lucky enough to get great performance, or you simply knock back settings in Quantum Break to give you more overhead, even with the framerate cap off, there still seems to be a cap in place. A 60hz monitor cannot achieve 60fps, as Quantum Break seems capped at 50fps on those displays, or as Digital Foundry reckons, 5/6ths of your displays refresh. This means if you’re using a GSync 144hz monitor (with GSync disabled, because Windows Universal App), you may see higher than 60fps gameplay, but you would never achieve 144z — assuming you could. Even with some of the best hardware money can by, Remedy’s new game struggles to maintain a smooth, consistent 50fps with its uneven frame pacing.

Unfortunately, until these problems are actually fixed, there are no ways for PC gamers to alleviate the issues on their own — something that would be done with unofficial patches or forcing options through their respective GPU’s control panel. However, because of the archaic, console-like restrictions placed on the Windows Universal Platform, Quantum Break will simply be broken for many users until a fix can be made available.

Playing Quantum Break on Windows 10? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

[Image via Microsoft]