Quantum Break PC performance thread

Well, they fixed the stuttering (which still occurs from time to time) but since you have a 120/144Hz monitor the game can go past 60 fps. In any case you are still getting vsync and not gsync.
 
Freesync, huh... Nice...

I wonder what they did to make it work in Windowed mode?

I have a GSync screen, and if I enable GSync only in fullscreen, some UWP games and apps such as Movies and TV, Netflix and Edge can toggle the screen to GSync mode when in fullscreen.

It's not usual exclusive fullscreen, but it seems to tel DWM that only the app is shown, so refresh rate can change. And everytime I get a notification, move the mouse to the top to show the app bar or to the bottom to show the taskbar, GSync is disabled.

Of course, if I set GSync to work in Windowed mode it's always working, even in UWP games, and that caused some trouble in Gears of War at first (long loadings) but the game was patched to force 30 FPS in loadings.

Note that all of this was before the Windows update "enabling GSync", I think nothing will change in this case, as it already works.
 
I have a GSync screen, and if I enable GSync only in fullscreen, some UWP games and apps such as Movies and TV, Netflix and Edge can toggle the screen to GSync mode when in fullscreen.

It's not usual exclusive fullscreen, but it seems to tel DWM that only the app is shown, so refresh rate can change. And everytime I get a notification, move the mouse to the top to show the app bar or to the bottom to show the taskbar, GSync is disabled.

Of course, if I set GSync to work in Windowed mode it's always working, even in UWP games, and that caused some trouble in Gears of War at first (long loadings) but the game was patched to force 30 FPS in loadings.

Note that all of this was before the Windows update "enabling GSync", I think nothing will change in this case, as it already works.
Freesync only works in Fullscreen though... It doesn't have an option for Windowed mode and hasn't been working thus far for UWP.
 
My guess is they simply add a fullscreen mode to the games via patch.

They said they added the functionality with a Windows update that the games need to be patched to use... If they added fullscreen mode, I'm fairly certain they would have just come out and said that instead of saying they added Freesync support for UWPs.
 
My guess is they simply add a fullscreen mode to the games via patch.
Not according to this:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/di...and-more-now-enabled-for-uwp/?linkId=24319396
Does DirectX 12 and UWP support full screen exclusive mode?
Full screen exclusive mode was created back in the original release of DirectDraw to provide games with enhanced performance when using the entire screen. The downside of full screen exclusive mode is that it makes the experience for gamers who wish to do other things on their system, such as alt-tab to another application or run the Windows GameDVR, more clunky with excessive flicker and transition time.

We thought it would be cool if gamers could have the versatility of gaming in a window with the performance of full screen exclusive.

So, with Windows 10, DirectX 12 games which take up the entire screen perform just as well as the old full screen exclusive mode without any of the full screen exclusive mode disadvantages. This is true for both Win32 and UWP games which use DirectX 12. All of these games can seamlessly alt-tab, run GameDVR, and exhibit normal functionality of a window without any perf degradation vs full screen exclusive.
 
That'd be my #1 request for the next patch as well, if there ever will be one. Otherwise I'll probably have to watch these episodes on YouTube somehow.

Its not up to us, but we do obviously realize very well that downloading like on the Xbox One would be a great option.
 
So I want to try to post my impressions.

I played through the game twice, first on normal and on hard and have completed it 100%. I played through on a 970 overclocked, i5-4690K overclocked to 4.6GHz, 16GB RAM, and SSD. I played through at 1080p30 no reconstruction all settings on high, it consistently looked amazing. So, that's the good part. Playing the game in a liner fashion (ie: start to finish using only 'continue' in the menu) with those settings works fine but keep in mind usage of all resources was very high. I'm skeptical of the game running well on lower systems mostly because CPU and RAM usage were very high regardless of settings.

However the game still has rough edges and reproducible crashes. Most notably the phone/earpiece bug and the video streaming.

The first bug is that the characters earpieces become disconnected from their bodies and float around jiggling in the air, this can also happen with phones as well. This is very annoying and happens throughout the entire game.

Secondly as I've mentioned before streaming video is broken/inefficient. I assume that if you have the bandwidth for the full 4K video streaming is fine, however if you don't the game often gets stuck trying to load a higher stream then your connection can handle causing stuttering/constant buffering. This was very frustrating, it's clear that on my regular ADSL2 connection the video was constantly buffering back and forth between 1080p and 4K. It was effectively broken and totally un-watchable. However, I was able to workaround this by running a Netflix stream in the background. Doing so forced the quality down but largely stopped the buffering (it would buffer around 4 times an episode rather than every 2 seconds). A much better solution would be to allow people to download the videos in advance or simply set a maximum quality for the streaming video.

I can reproduce crashes in 2 ways. At first I wondered why digital foundry had so many crashes on a 970 while I had none but now it's easy to understand.

Firstly, set any setting to ultra. This causes a driver crash instantly for some reason. I didn't get these crashes because I didn't set anything over high at first. Secondly, the game will crash when loading levels through the timeline. I discovered this when trying to test if I could get 60fps. Performance noticeably drops in the second level loaded through the timeline and then crashes on the third. This is strange as playing the game through normally doesn't result in crashes but manually loading levels through the timeline is broken and will cause crashes very quickly. This made it impossible for me to accurately test the performance of different settings and so I just gave up. I imagine this is what digital foundry experienced as well.

Overall the game is still fundamentally broken in many ways but works if you have very powerful hardware and are willing to accept limitations. I don't recommend trying on weaker hardware than a recent i5, 16GB of RAM and a SSD. It's possible you could get away with a lower graphics card using reconstruction and lower settings though. I was unable to really test this because of the crashing when loading levels through the timeline.

I hope the remaining issues are patched out. Microsoft really should be making this a priority, it's supposed to be a flagship product and is sold at a premium price on the market. If you accept limitations and throw powerful hardware at it it does work though.

I appreciate the work Remedy has done so far. I am trying to read between the lines and assume they have had their hands tied but I could of course be wrong. I would love to see the quality of this port match the excellent Alan Wake port. To me the difference between that port being available DRM free and it's stellar performance and this UWP locked port seems to me to be down to the publisher and it's frustrating. Of course this is my reading of the situation, I'd love any feedback on the reality that I'm not aware of.

Lastly I took some screenshots to show off how incredible it can look despite its problems. I'll embed a few or you can view the gallery as well. These are 1080p, high settings, reconstitution and film grain off. (Gallery contains spoilers) https://flic.kr/s/aHskzPP5Yx

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That's great news. I hope they can give us a change log relatively soon. Some more performance improvements would be appreciated, but I'm sure the team already knows that.
 
Hopefully they are aware of the streaming issues too.

Oh, right. I hope so. There should be some technical options for the episodes. Let users download them, like on the Xbox, different quality settings (bitrate and/or resolution), buffer size and maybe more. Forcing 4K videos on everyone, regardless of the connectivity and screen resolution is not the best solution and I don't think the team want to keep it this way.
 
That's great news. I hope they can give us a change log relatively soon. Some more performance improvements would be appreciated, but I'm sure the team already knows that.

We will put up patch notes once the update is out. Things are always in a state of flux so if we put them up early, the content might still change.
 
We will put up patch notes once the update is out. Things are always in a state of flux so if we put them up early, the content might still change.

Thank you! I know that it doesn't make sense to post the notes, when they're not set in stone yet. Just hoping for some improvements regarding Nvidia cards.

I'm looking forward to the new patch and I'm glad that you guys are still actively working on improving it, after the initial release. I'll gladly wait with the second playthrough (on hard) until the new patch is out.
 
Who should be petitioned to allow downloading the live action show to disk, or at least have 1080p version available, or at the very least improve its buffering and streaming, so that it does not hitch, pause and stutter?
 
Thank you! I know that it doesn't make sense to post the notes, when they're not set in stone yet. Just hoping for some improvements regarding Nvidia cards.

I'm looking forward to the new patch and I'm glad that you guys are still actively working on improving it, after the initial release. I'll gladly wait with the second playthrough (on hard) until the new patch is out.

There will be no improvement apparently, at least for the 970, but that could be the same for the others nVidia GPUs.
https://twitter.com/RiotRMD/status/732437072917766144
 
Completed the game by playing it on my PC and switching to the Xbone to watch the episodes. Not the smoothest experience, but I ended up loving the game anyway.
 
Interesting results.
Looks like Pascal likes GCN optimized games a lot more.

Well, I wouldn't say "a lot" but there definitely are some non-linear gains in some games which are known to favor GCN over Maxwell - QB is one example, FC Primal is another which sticks out a bit.
 
I play it on medium, 1080p, no upscaling, no AA, textures on high with a 290X.

It's perfectly playable. My Fps ranges between the 70s and 60s.

Good to know. Maybe it will be completely playable on Polaris and more patches are released to improve performance.

I want 1440p/60fps. NO UPSCALING.
 
Good to know. Maybe it will be completely playable on Polaris and more patches are released to improve performance.

I want 1440p/60fps. NO UPSCALING.

To be fair, this game uses a lot of taxing effects. Hell, the global illumination alone must be a huge resource hog.

I'm pretty sure the fps fluctuations and slight stuttering I experience are because my i5 2500k @ 4.5 is slammed at 100% utilization while that game is running. Resource manager shows the workload at 116%, actually. I am curious how this works for people with i7s or even FX 8xxx CPUs. Are you guys getting CPU bottlenecked as well, or do I just not have enough threads for the way this game was coded?
 
I play it on medium, 1080p, no upscaling, no AA, textures on high with a 290X.

It's perfectly playable. My Fps ranges between the 70s and 60s.

I meant with ultra settings @ 2k of course, just like the tests they did, which give quite disappointing results in my opinion. Not even the fastest card on the market is able to achieve 60 fps. Unfortunately they did not specify if they were using upscaling or not.
 
Ok, so based on these Hardwarecanucks benchmarks results those ones at pclab.pl were with upscaling enabled.

And damn, a GTX 1080 cannot even reach 40fps average @1440p.
 
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