Quantum Break PC performance thread

dr_rus said:
What gets me the most is not even the upscale blurriness - this actually looks kinda ok considering the overall game's styling - but how the light source halos are staying visible through the main character for a second or two when the lights get behind him. This is just some temporal rendering console optimized bullshit I can't play the game with.

Example number one, notice the remaining light pole halo on his back:



SSRs seems to be rather cheaply implemented as well - anything which isn't seen on the screen is disappearing from reflection the moment it exits the screen. Sometime it's pretty jarring:



Then there's the constant flickering noise on the reflective window surfaces. I mean, this isn't supposed to happen, right? Or is there some explanation for this in the game's plot?



No wonder with that quality of PC version optimization - GCN cards will natively run the game better than anything else.
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Uh...that's how SSR works.
I mean it's right there in the name "Screen space reflection". You won't find a single game that does not do that lol. Another problem SSR has is its flickery nature that you are noticing, you need very high quality SSR to be at a point where you have only some flickering. Considering how prominent it is in the game in terms of wuantity I am not surprised that they choose to go lower res for SSR. But still they probably could have chosen to have an option to enable high res SSR in though.

Also, the blurriness is most likely due to the film grain and not upscaling considering the reconstruction technique would mean you get a native image the moment you stay in place for longer than 4 frames (which is like less than 7.5 milisecond if you are running above 30FPS). In fact I doubt any of the stills posted in here are non native because there is no way you'd end up with a non native screenshot in this game unless you take one while in motion...which I don't see any of the screenshot here doing.

Yes the game has a non native renderer because of the reconstruction technique but atleast consider what the reconstruction technique actually does instead of using it as the reason for blurry/grainy screenshots when it's most likely the grain filter...can't have the cake and eat it as well.

jony_m said:
that video is brutal...

and I don't even understand German.
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That screenshot is not a glitch, that happens whenever you move the player character closer to the screen, the part that disappears is behind the camera and hence it causes that...in other games you'd either end up with the camera pulling back or the character ends up translucent.
 
SimplexPL said:
Thanks for clarification, the minimum framerate also is an average?
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I don't think so, that would make no sense. Minimal fps is calculated from the biggest frametime spike they've had on each card probably.

nOoblet16 said:
Uh...that's how SSR works.
I mean it's right there in the name "Screen space reflection". You won't find a single game that does not do that lol. Another problem SSR has is its flickery nature that you are noticing, you need very high quality SSR to be at a point where you have only some flickering. Considering how prominent it is in the game in terms of wuantity I am not surprised that they choose to go lower res for SSR. But still they probably could have chosen to have an option to enable high res SSR in though.
Click to expand...
That's how a stupid brute force implementation of SSR works and that's also what happens when this SSR is used in a wrong way by the artists. There are ways of making the reflections stay but alas they require more performance and we're all having 1TF GPUs on PC obviously so that is absent.

nOoblet16 said:
Also, the blurriness is most likely due to the film grain and not upscaling considering the reconstruction technique would mean you get a native image the moment you stay in place for longer than 4 frames (which is like less than 7.5 milisecond if you are running above 30FPS). In fact I doubt any of the stills posted in here are non native because there is no way you'd end up with a non native screenshot in this game unless you take one while in motion...which I don't see any of the screenshot here doing.
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The blurriness is due to rendering to a 1.5x lower resolution than whatever is selected in the settings. Film grain doesn't add blur. AA may add blur as it's a TAA probably but the game is very blurry even with that being off.

nOoblet16 said:
Yes the game has a non native renderer because of the reconstruction technique but atleast consider what the reconstruction technique actually does instead of using it as the reason for blurry/grainy screenshots when it's most likely the grain filter...can't have the cake and eat it as well.
Click to expand...
I know what it does and this technique is producing all the blur you're seeing. There is no way to render to a 720p image and show it as 1080p without at least some loss of detail. The reconstruction technique is likely to fill in the missing checkerboard part by extrapolating the color information from the parts which were rendered with the help of MSAA color samples stored in these parts. It's still not a true 1080p rendering and the reconstruction itself isn't ideal. The whole thing is just a substitution of the rendering pipeline with compute reconstruction pipeline which runs better on GCN h/w because of how bad it's rendering pipeline actually is.

nOoblet16 said:
That screenshot is not a glitch, that happens whenever you move the player character closer to the screen, the part that disappears is behind the camera and hence it causes that...in other games you'd either end up with the camera pulling back or the character ends up translucent.
Click to expand...
This is a glitch though as the engine should catch these things and prevent this type of clipping in 2016.
 
nOoblet16 said:
Uh...that's how SSR works.
I mean it's right there in the name "Screen space reflection". You won't find a single game that does not do that lol.
Click to expand...
That depends. Some games detect when SSR disappears and immediately replace it with a "pre baked" cube map - for example The Division does that, reflections in that game are excellent.

I found a presentation about Quantum Break in which they talk about reflections (starting on page 36). I don't understand much, but maybe someone smarter than me will:
https://mediatech.aalto.fi/~ari/Publications/SIGGRAPH_2015_Remedy_Notes.pdf
 
curiouscharles said:
guys, stupid question i'm sure, but i seriously can't get windows 10 to let me change the default install drive for w10 store games.

i try choosing my D drive, and it just defaults back to C [tiny SSD for OS only] after i click apply...

really not sure what to do!
Click to expand...

So in the storage option you change it to your other drive, apply and then it reverts back?

My issue was that the version that the store queued up (of QB to download) does not get overwritten with the new setting. You have to manually go to the queue, delete it, and then redownload it again once you set the new storage drive.
 
Does not seem like they put much extra effort for the PC version for those performance requirements too. And so far, UWP just seems to prove that it encourages laziness.

I'd be ok with it if it had hugely significant upgrades over the XBO version, but it doesn't seem like it and it doesn't even look like they bothered to increase the LOD/Pop-in distances. Which are hilariously small.
 
Weird. I have a 16:10 monitor and I complained the other day that the first TV episode was stretched instead of letterboxed to maintain the 16:9 ratio.

Well, the second TV episode WAS letterboxed. And the stuttering I had in the first episode was totally gone too. Could they have updated something, or was the issue I had the first night just a fluke... I doubt there are many people playing this on 16:10 displays at this point so probably won't have anybody to corroborate this.
 
While the 720p reconstruction technique to create a 1080p image works well on a low-powered system like the Xbox One, it is disappointing that it is not an OPTION in the PC version because I suspect that a native rendered image with even a light post-process AA solution such as SMAA 1x or T2x would produce a far crisper image and one that more people would be happy with.
 
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/quantum_break_pc_performance_review/

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.

Sadly on my system I was unable to get the game to run at a solid 60FPS, regardless of the GPU that I used.


So it's exaggerated that the game runs terrible, yet he cannot get a stable 60 fps on any gpu.
 
I get a solid lock on 1080p60....however im noticing something very odd jerking, stuttering, and frame times are terrible, I have to turn down my lock to 30 to get rid of it all...

Same happened at 1440, 1600, no 4K monitor on hand I'm in the middle of a move. I can attain a solid 60 lock (if I don't weirder stuff happens totally unplayable) but can't get rid of all the jarring motions without locking at 30.
 
SimplexPL said:
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/quantum_break_pc_performance_review/

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.

Sadly on my system I was unable to get the game to run at a solid 60FPS, regardless of the GPU that I used.


So it's exaggerated that the game runs terrible, yet he cannot get a stable 60 fps on any gpu.
Click to expand...

There are two main issues:
1. The awful frame pacing which doesn't get reflected in these benchmarks but is confirmed by pretty much every video of the game running on PC I've seen.
2. The fact that the game is producing sub-60 fps on cards like FuryX and 980Ti while rendering in 720p with the graphics quality which is arguably way below what some other much better performing games are showing.

Considering these I certainly wouldn't say that the reports are exaggerated. The game is close to being unplayable on a vast majority of modern PC h/w and this is hardly something which can be overlooked.

I mean, seriously, how the fuck not being able to hit stable 60 on a FuryX/980Ti in 1080p on LOWEST settings isn't terrible?

06122959284l.jpg
 
dr_rus said:
There are two main issues:
1. The awful frame pacing which doesn't get reflected in these benchmarks but is confirmed by pretty much every video of the game running on PC I've seen.
2. The fact that the game is producing sub-60 fps on cards like FuryX and 980Ti while rendering in 720p with the graphics quality which is arguably way below what some other much better performing games are showing.

Considering these I certainly wouldn't say that the reports are exaggerated. The game is close to being unplayable on a vast majority of modern PC h/w and this is hardly something which can be overlooked.

I mean, seriously, how the fuck not being able to hit stable 60 on a FuryX/980Ti in 1080p on LOWEST settings isn't terrible?

06122959284l.jpg
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Yeah, the performance, given the output visuals and inteneral resolution is just atrocious. On top of the frame pacing problem and hte inability to get 60 fps on basically any config.. .reminds me of another infamous game (Batman AK).
 
So what these charts don't seem to noting is the monitor refresh rate issue we encountered. We've found that the game only supports 5/6th of the refresh rate. So a 60hz monitor is limited to 50fps.

In order to go beyond 50fps you need a higher refresh rate but, even then, you won't get a smooth frame-rate due to inconsistent frame delivery.

If you switch to a 50Hz output, for instance, it drops instead to 43fps max.

It's really insane.
 
Yum. The taste of game-forced vertical sync and no way to use alternative methods. That's always worked out wonderfully, right?
 
dark10x said:
So what these charts don't seem to noting is the monitor refresh rate issue we encountered. We've found that the game only supports 5/6th of the refresh rate. So a 60hz monitor is limited to 50fps.

In order to go beyond 50fps you need a higher refresh rate but, even then, you won't get a smooth frame-rate due to inconsistent frame delivery.

If you switch to a 50Hz output, for instance, it drops instead to 43fps max.

It's really insane.
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lol wow

They couldn't have made a worse port if they tried.



Is this the worst port since saint's row 2? (anyone remember saint's row 2? holy shit that was bad)
 
dark10x said:
So what these charts don't seem to noting is the monitor refresh rate issue we encountered. We've found that the game only supports 5/6th of the refresh rate. So a 60hz monitor is limited to 50fps.

In order to go beyond 50fps you need a higher refresh rate but, even then, you won't get a smooth frame-rate due to inconsistent frame delivery.

If you switch to a 50Hz output, for instance, it drops instead to 43fps max.

It's really insane.
Click to expand...

Holy shit.
 
Might help some people, but MSI afterburner was messing up bad on this game for me. It wasn't correctly picking up my GPU temps so the game was throttling my ass hard. Had to manually set the fan up really high and my performance massively improved.
 
dark10x said:
So what these charts don't seem to noting is the monitor refresh rate issue we encountered. We've found that the game only supports 5/6th of the refresh rate. So a 60hz monitor is limited to 50fps.

In order to go beyond 50fps you need a higher refresh rate but, even then, you won't get a smooth frame-rate due to inconsistent frame delivery.

If you switch to a 50Hz output, for instance, it drops instead to 43fps max.

It's really insane.
Click to expand...

Holy shit indeed. I can't remember a single PC game in 15 years that does that.
 
Matty8787 said:
Does buying via foreign windows store still works, cause no way in hell am I paying full whack for this PoS.
Click to expand...

I tried doing this repeatedly earlier this week - it wouldn't work. Gave me an error code whenever i tried to do the payment process.

Fixed up, it seems.
 
dr_rus said:
That's how a stupid brute force implementation of SSR works and that's also what happens when this SSR is used in a wrong way by the artists. There are ways of making the reflections stay but alas they require more performance and we're all having 1TF GPUs on PC obviously so that is absent.
Click to expand...
I'm sorry but this is just nonsense, there is no way for SSR to work for something that's way off-screen, perhaps maybe if it's slightly offscreen or partially it may work but not if it's offscreen completely.

In fact why don't you give me an example of an SSR implementation where you have reflection from offscreen object ?

The blurriness is due to rendering to a 1.5x lower resolution than whatever is selected in the settings. Film grain doesn't add blur. AA may add blur as it's a TAA probably but the game is very blurry even with that being off.
Click to expand...
The reconstruction will get you a 1080P image it's not what's causing the blur. In fact I should have made it clear when I mentioned film grain. What I meant was that I am pretty sure most people are looking at the film grain and think it's blur when it's just that film grain.

Also you can't turn off film grain in this game so there is no way for you to tell how blurry it is with it off.


I know what it does and this technique is producing all the blur you're seeing. There is no way to render to a 720p image and show it as 1080p without at least some loss of detail. The reconstruction technique is likely to fill in the missing checkerboard part by extrapolating the color information from the parts which were rendered with the help of MSAA color samples stored in these parts. It's still not a true 1080p rendering and the reconstruction itself isn't ideal. The whole thing is just a substitution of the rendering pipeline with compute reconstruction pipeline which runs better on GCN h/w because of how bad it's rendering pipeline actually is.
Click to expand...
As I said, you can't have the cake and eat it too. You can't claim it's a blurry Ness because it's 720P but then say the reconstruction technique will result in at least some loss of detail CO.oared to 1080P thereby implying it's pretty close to it. But to discuss you point, yes it is possible to have a 1080P image without it being "true 1080P" the trade off here is not that the image has loss of detail compared to true 1080P but rather that it just doesn't work in motion.

My point was that people were using the wrong examples and wrong pointers to talk about the game's technical issues.
 
dark10x said:
So what these charts don't seem to noting is the monitor refresh rate issue we encountered. We've found that the game only supports 5/6th of the refresh rate. So a 60hz monitor is limited to 50fps.

In order to go beyond 50fps you need a higher refresh rate but, even then, you won't get a smooth frame-rate due to inconsistent frame delivery.

If you switch to a 50Hz output, for instance, it drops instead to 43fps max.

It's really insane.
Click to expand...

I wonder is that's some frame pacing solution gone horribly wrong here. I wonder if that's just some leftover from XBO version which does not work as intended on framerates above 30. What a train wreck of a port. Thankfully this seems to be the last MS game I'm interested in getting for the rest of the year.
 
SimplexPL said:
That depends. Some games detect when SSR disappears and immediately replace it with a "pre baked" cube map - for example The Division does that, reflections in that game are excellent.

I found a presentation about Quantum Break in which they talk about reflections (starting on page 36). I don't understand much, but maybe someone smarter than me will:
https://mediatech.aalto.fi/~ari/Publications/SIGGRAPH_2015_Remedy_Notes.pdf
Click to expand...

Depends what?
Replacing SSR with cubemaps is a completely different thing to having SSR itself stay with the object being offscreen, which is just not possible...which was my point. It's like when I say fast ray tracing is not possible on current hardware and you say "it depends" because we can fake some of the results by rasterisation.

A lot of games replace SSR with cube maps or use a mix of both...and a lot of games don't. You have problems associated with over reliance on both instances.
 
dark10x said:
So what these charts don't seem to noting is the monitor refresh rate issue we encountered. We've found that the game only supports 5/6th of the refresh rate. So a 60hz monitor is limited to 50fps.

In order to go beyond 50fps you need a higher refresh rate but, even then, you won't get a smooth frame-rate due to inconsistent frame delivery.

If you switch to a 50Hz output, for instance, it drops instead to 43fps max.

It's really insane.
Click to expand...

Wow, that's really messed up.
 
nOoblet16 said:
I'm sorry but this is just nonsense, there is no way for SSR to work for something that's way off-screen, perhaps maybe if it's slightly offscreen or partially it may work but not if it's offscreen completely.

In fact why don't you give me an example of an SSR implementation where you have reflection from offscreen object ?
Click to expand...
You've already been given an example of how this can be fixed. Consider this as well: a frame frustum doesn't have to be equal to the frame buffer. Consider as well that you have several temporal options at keeping those rendered once they leave the frame.
So no, that's not "just nonsense", what is nonsense is pushing this kind of cheap effect implementation into the PC version of the game in 2016 just because XBO doesn't have the power to do better here.

nOoblet16 said:
The reconstruction will get you a 1080P image it's not what's causing the blur. In fact I should have made it clear when I mentioned film grain. What I meant was that I am pretty sure most people are looking at the film grain and think it's blur when it's just that film grain.

Also you can't turn off film grain in this game so there is no way for you to tell how blurry it is with it off.
Click to expand...
The reconstruction will get you a 720p image upscaled to 1080p with some information restored from MSAA and temporal accumulation samples. It still won't be a proper 1080p image and it will be blurry. If it was the same as in 1080p then there would be no win in even using this technique instead of 1080p native rendering. Logic.

nOoblet16 said:
As I said, you can't have the cake and eat it too. You can't claim it's a blurry Ness because it's 720P but then say the reconstruction technique will result in at least some loss of detail CO.oared to 1080P thereby implying it's pretty close to it. But to discuss you point, yes it is possible to have a 1080P image without it being "true 1080P" the trade off here is not that the image has loss of detail compared to true 1080P but rather that it just doesn't work in motion.

My point was that people were using the wrong examples and wrong pointers to talk about the game's technical issues.
Click to expand...

No, it's not. That's all.
 
nOoblet16 said:
I'm sorry but this is just nonsense, there is no way for SSR to work for something that's way off-screen, perhaps maybe if it's slightly offscreen or partially it may work but not if it's offscreen completely.

In fact why don't you give me an example of an SSR implementation where you have reflection from offscreen object ?
Click to expand...

You can actually extend Screen Space beyond to improve SSR/SSAO/SSGI:
1. http://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~onalbach/DeepScreenSpace/DeepScreenSpace.pdf (video of the technique)
2. http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/DeepGBuffer13/Mara2013DeepGBuffer-small.pdf
3. There is a 3rd one by McGuire et al. that talks about using two layers for SSR to help with the empty occlusion problem. I am having trouble finding it atm though.
 
nOoblet16 said:
Depends what?
Replacing SSR with cubemaps is a completely different thing to having SSR itself stay with the object being offscreen, which is just not possible...which was my point. It's like when I say fast ray tracing is not possible on current hardware and you say "it depends" because we can fake some of the results by rasterisation.

A lot of games replace SSR with cube maps or use a mix of both...and a lot of games don't. You have problems associated with over reliance on both instances.
Click to expand...

What I meant is that games behave differently when reflected object is off screen - in some games the object's reflection disappears completely, in others it is replaced by a cubemap. I am not contesting the fact, that by definition Screen Space Reflections will disappear then the reflected object leaves viewing frustum.


PC version should be bundled with SSD drive:

This is a game that must be installed on a solid state drive. We tested Quantum Break on a fast 7200rpm HGST mechanical drive as well as a Samsung 850 EVO SSD and found that performance simply wasn't acceptable on the former when transitioning between areas. Huge stutters and skips appear, leading to a very jerky experience at select points. (...) an SSD is an essential requirement you must bear in mind before purchasing.
Click to expand...
 
I'm probably done with this game until patches. Just ran into a cutscene near the tail end of act 2 that I completely missed because it was constantly stuttering down into the single digits fps, and I have a damned 980ti that's /very/ stoutly overclocked.

Game is fun, story is intriguing, but it is simply unplayable for me in this fashion. Love you to death, Remedy. Beat Max Payne probably 20 times, but please fix this fucking shit. I'm not asking for 1080p60, hell I'd happy to be able to play this at 720p30 as long as it is fucking stable, but I can't even get that as it is...

Also, while we are on the subject: does anyone know if Nvidia's drivers are safe to install yet? I'm still on 362 >.>
 
iNvid02 said:
i..i was joking but this port is all kinds of fucked up. sad to see the quality drop after alan wake
Click to expand...

It reeks of mismanagement on Microsoft's end. Remedy probably only got the greenlight for a PC port a few months ago. I really doubt Remedy would have put this out had a PC version been agreed on since day one.
 
prag16 said:
The bottom line for me: If you weren't really looking forward to the game and were on the fence to begin with, you probably shouldn't bother with this PC version.

But if you like Remedy and you WERE really looking forward to playing this game and will never own an xbone, consider swallowing your pride, and don't deprive yourself of what's still a very fun game.
Click to expand...

Look, I understand you, but this is a technical thread about performance. These type of threads usually very helpful for me to understand what settings I should use to achieve 1080p 60fps. There isn't many reports from people who actually tried run it on their PC (for various reasons like insane pricing, intolerance for MS store and UWP, or they just waiting for their preorder keys). I would like to see what your settings are.
And I would like to contribute to this tread especially for this game since Remedy was my favourite developer, but pricing for it in my store is just crazy.
QB cost 4 times more than Gears of War:UE, 3 times more than Tomb Rider (they are both in the same store) and 2 times more than, say, Fallout 4 or GTA 5 from Steam. I just can't spend that much for port like this.
And nobody knows when these issues will be resolved (if ever). Even Remedy forums (usually filled with praise and love) filled with threads about bad PC performance, and devs are completely silent, except that arrogant PC FAQ.
So I hope we will make enough noise to enforce MS to take some actions
 
SomTervo said:
It reeks of mismanagement on Microsoft's end. Remedy probably only got the greenlight for a PC port a few months ago. I really doubt Remedy would have put this out had a PC version been agreed on since day one.
Click to expand...



Phil Spencer himself admitted that as late as of august 2015 the PC version was not planned - or at least not planned to be released on the same day as console version.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1094934

"Going to those teams mid-cycle and saying: ‘Hey, by the way, I want to add a platform,’ didn’t really feel like necessarily the best way to end up with the best result for the game." - yep, he nailed it ;)
 
dr_rus said:
They are and were. Give them a try, worse thing which will happen you'll have to roll back to the previous ones.
Click to expand...

No, they absolutely were not. Had to personally roll back not only my own due to bsod issues but also drive 90 mins south to fix my brothers pc for the same reason.
 
pa22word said:
No, they absolutely were not. Had to personally roll back not only my own due to bsod issues but also drive 90 mins south to fix my brothers pc for the same reason.
Click to expand...

Was that with 364.72? If yes that's still the latest driver, if no stay away nonetheless in case you have a multi-monitor setup. They haven't released something without major issues in a good, long while.

prag16 said:
Hopefully Nvidia is prepping a driver update. A 290 beating a 980ti is nuts.
Click to expand...

While NV needs to kick their driver devs in the butt look at those minimum fps, they're abysmal without big differences no matter what card, a new driver won't fix that.
 
derExperte said:
Was that with 364.72? If yes that's still the latest driver, if no stay away nonetheless in case you have a multi-monitor setup. They haven't released something without major issues in a good, long while.
Click to expand...

I run multi-mon, and so yeah I'll probably stick to 362 for the time being.

Game is honestly performing like it has a memory leak. Wish MSI afterburner was working so I could confirm, but I do have 8GBs ram so =\?

Anyone else experiencing these types of gameplay halting issues that I mentioned?
 
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