Remedy Addresses Multiple Issues With 'Quantum Break' On PC

Remedy’s Quantum Break is available now on the Xbox One and PC, but those playing the Windows 10 version encountered a series of issues within the game.  A week after Quantum Break’s launch, the developers are finally addressing the numerous problems and feedback.

Multiple Issues

At the top of the list is frame stuttering and pacing. When the game shipped, there was a “major rounding error” in the game’s refresh rate predictions. There isn’t a fix available for it yet, but the developers are working on a solution in an upcoming update.

There’s also a scenario where video memory becomes fragmented after playing the game for a long duration. Due to the fragmentation, certain assets are moved to the system memory, which cripples the game’s rendering performance. Remedy said that the issue is extremely rare, but nevertheless, it is continuing to look at the issue and figure out a method to prevent video memory problems in the future. As a side note, the development team also told users to install a specific driver version for their GPUs to play the game. For Nvidia cards, use version 362.00, and for AMD GPUs, install version 16.4.1 of the Radeon Software Crimson Edition.

The developers were also able to replicate a scenario where the game crashed on launch with the help of “SIMD instructions that require SSE4.1.” Just like the video memory issue, this crash is supposedly a rare occurrence, but the team will create a fix for the problem and monitor the game for any further crashes at launch.

At certain points in the game, some players also encountered a series of light flares or flashing lights, which disrupted gameplay. For now, the sole method to fixing the problem is to close the game and reopen it again.

Requested Features

Players also asked for more features to make the gameplay experience less frustrating. One example is the request to add an option to quit the game from the main menu. At the moment, the only way to exit the game at any point is to press Alt-F4 or to press the “X” icon at the top-right corner of the window. Remedy will add the “Quit” option in a future update.

Certain performance and visuals options aren’t available in Windows Store games, one of which is the ability to disable VSync. This means that certain Universal Windows Applications (UWA), such as Quantum Break, have a locked framerate. However, that will change soon. At Microsoft Build, Xbox head Phil Spencer mentioned that VSync options — in addition to support for GSync and FreeSync — are coming in May. Additional options are also on the way, such as the ability to turn off the game’s film grain filter, which was Remedy’s “artistic choice” for the game due to its cinematic approach to storytelling.

A Word On Multi-GPU Functionality And Rendering

If you have a multi-GPU setup for your PC, it seems that Quantum Break won’t be able to support it. According to Remedy, the extra work required to support DirectX 12 multi-GPU configurations on the game’s engine “would have been significant and out of scope.”

The developers also wanted to reiterate the rendering process for Quantum Break. Just like the Xbox One variant, the PC version renders the game through four buffers. If you’re playing it at 1080p resolution, then the images are first rendered through four 720p buffers at 4xMSAA (multisample anti-aliasing).

“[The] engine assigns input geometry samples from 4xMSAA rendering into shaded clusters in order to maximize covered geometry while keeping the performance on acceptable level by reducing expensive shaded samples. When you change the resolution, the buffers used to construct the image are always 2/3rds of the set resolution, i.e. in 2560x1440 they would be 1706x960.”

Not The Best Start

The issues with Quantum Break on PC is somewhat troubling, and obviously, the team at Remedy is working hard to fix the issues. For Microsoft, which saw the game as one of its marquee titles, these issues don’t bode well for its plan to attract PC gamers to the Windows Store.

Follow Rexly Peñaflorida II @Heirdeux. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.