Posted Fri Apr 8, 2016 at 02:33 PM PDT by Justin Clark
And you can thank UWP for that.
'Quantum Break' is, fundamentally, a fine game on Xbox One, but it's a game with some egregious technical hiccups on that system, primarily as it concerns lighting, shadow texture quality, and an annoying motion blur in particularly intense areas. Many assumed this is basically Remedy/Microsoft gimping the PC version for consoles. Joke's on everybody, apparently: Digital Foundry's put the PC port through its paces, and, well, it's a mess.
Probably the biggest WTF of them all is the fact that the game, even on its highest settings, can't be cranked up to 60fps without taking a massive hit in performance. To nutshell DF's findings, if you have a monitor that does 60Hz, you'll get 50 frames per second, and that's at a good moment. If your monitor can do 120Hz, you'll get something closer to the 60fps promised land, but the price is jittery gameplay. One might be compelled to try capping the gameplay at 30fps as well, but DF notes that mode is borked too, where frame rate is never as consistent as its Xbox counterpart, and often results in a herkyjerky experience.
That's the tip of the iceberg for a whole slew of technical issues--from the draw distance being hilariously mishandled, to NVIDIA driver-related crashing--but according to them, you can pretty much sum the whole thing up with "Universal Windows Platform is bad and you should feel bad." See, even though these are all issues that should've been ironed out from the word go, inventive PC players could probably sort this mess out in a few days if they were allowed to play around with the game's internals a bit. But, thanks to the magic of UWP, they can't. Both versions of 'Quantum Break' are technologically handled like console games. And that's a terrible state of affairs for a game that is now, officially, a biohazard zone until Remedy/Microsoft decide to issue a patch. Until then, you're stuck with a playable, but still kinda fugly, Xbox One port.
You can see the problems for yourself in the video below. Then, maybe, get real sad and depressed. Source: Digital Foundry
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