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QuantumBroken

When Quantum Interruption launched for the Xbox One, gamers were treated to a visually rich title with some gorgeous special furnishings and interesting abilities. The frame rate and resolution both suffered on the Xbox I, however, which doesn't seem to quite have enough graphics horsepower to do the job. Theoretically, this ways the game should run beautifully on PCs — instead, gamers seem to have gotten some other raw deal on this Universal Windows Platform title.

Some of the game's problems are issues we've never seen in a PC championship before, every bit Eurogamer details. These include:

It tin't lucifer a monitor's stated refresh rate. The game appears to top out at roughly 5/6 of a 60Hz refresh rate, no thing which detail levels or settings you use. Eurogamer couldn't interruption 50 FPS on a 60Hz monitor, even when using a GTX Titan X or AMD GPU, fifty-fifty at 720p and lowest detail settings. I've heard of game engines beingness locked to a flat refresh charge per unit earlier, merely a game engine that'due south stuck at 5/6 of one? That'south new, and simply using a faster monitor isn't a solution. A 120 or 144Hz display will run more chop-chop, merely Eurogamer notes: "[Y]ou can't attain a level of performance that results in consequent, level frame-times. As far equally nosotros tin can tell, a judder-gratis experience is impossible at the moment without a patch from Remedy."

Frame rate caps don't piece of work: Locking the frame rate at xxx FPS doesn't actually upshot in a smooth 30 FPS experience. Instead, frame rate judder remains a pregnant issue — ane 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 Shop 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, merely like the Xbox 1. The game'southward use of streaming means that it must exist installed to an SSD (Eurogamer'southward emphasis, not ours). There are LOD problems, draw distance problems, and the game somehow manages to crash Nvidia'southward driver on a regular basis. The Radeon R9 390 is, according to Eurogamer, a total l% faster than the GTX 970.

Eurogamer discusses the issue in more than detail and provides testify of the R9 390 versus the GTX 970 in the video in a higher place. It's non unusual for a game to favor AMD or Nvidia or the reverse, simply 50% gaps between 2 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 cleaved in so many ways, it was impossible to recommend it. So, we at to the lowest degree 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 bulk 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 expert.

Now we take 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 State of war, merely the rampant driver crashing and terrible performance on Nvidia hardware advise Quantum Break either didn't go through proper testing on PCs or is still some other example of a terrible panel port. Given that some of these issues are present on both AMD and Nvidia hardware, information technology's incommunicable to disentangle what's acquired past poor game code, what'due south driven by the broken Universal Windows Platform, and what might exist caused by problems in the drivers both AMD and Nvidia have released.

"Random driver crashes make the game more challenging!" said no one, ever.

"Random driver crashes make the game more challenging!" said no one, ever.

In an interview terminal week, Xbox head Phil Spencer claimed that the bug people are having with the Windows ten Shop are only growing pains and that the company's principle focus had been on getting software upward and running.

"My biggest concern when Tomb Raider launched was that I was going to see a review of the Win32 version side by side to the UWP version and the UWP version would exist running at half the frame rate," Spencer said. "I knew that would be dead in the h2o. 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 accept been pretty, but both Gears of War Ultimate Edition and Quantum Break are barely functional. If these are the launch titles meant to sell united states of america on the Windows Shop, Microsoft would've done better to feature some 3rd-political party Facebook apps and imitation 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 sick-advised DX12 update for a 10 yr-sometime codebase, can be excused. Multiple games in a row tin'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'southward managed to do is illustrate why it has no business selling games at all. Quantum Suspension on the PC should have been the definitive edition of the game — instead, it'due south the worst.