With all settings maxed at 1080p, neither card is particularly better or worse than before. In the opening campus walk, the R9 390 still achieves a 50 per cent performance lead over its Nvidia competitor.
What little we could test on driver 365.10 showed again that the GTX 970 falls far behind the R9 390 - just as it did in the launch code. Weeks on from release, it's hard to believe that this title still doesn't work properly on the market's best-selling graphics card.
It's hugely disappointing and between Nvidia's drivers and the game's optimisation work, something is still amiss. Playing for any longer than five to ten minutes causes a driver recovery, booting us straight to the desktop, and leaving behind a 50-60MB crash dump file in the AppData directory. The game's crashes still persist, and likewise with the very latest driver 365.10. Sadly, even following the advice given by Remedy by installing the earlier Nvidia 362.0 driver, we quickly found ourselves bumping into a familiar issue. Of course there's an elephant in the room: GTX 970 performance. A tight 60fps grants us vastly smoother, more responsive controls in combat, and for PC owners it marks a genuine step over the console experience. On the R9 390, this amalgam of presets gets us to a near-perfect 60fps - precisely what we hoped to see at launch, and the smoothest we've ever seen the game play. This grants us visual quality a grade above the Xbox One version, which runs at the equivalent of medium presets across the board. With everything maxed out, dropping both volumetric lights and shadows to high, and also effects quality to medium gets us where we need to be. Settings adjustments are required to get the done done.
An R9 390 falls short at 1080p with all settings maxed out, handing in around 45fps in the opening university chapter. With the game fully patched, a full 60fps is now entirely possible - given the right hardware at hand. To make matters trickier still, using the in-game 30fps cap to sidestep this problem was also a no-go, bringing its own frame-pacing issues that caused intrusive stutter.
For those running on a conventional 60Hz monitor, this meant it resided at 50fps even with the most powerful hardware running at the lowest settings. Before this new update, the title stuttered no matter which graphics card or setting you used, as a result of hitting a performance ceiling - roughly five sixths of your monitor refresh. Let's address the frame-rate concerns first, our main issue with the launch version of the game.
The good news is that with Remedy's latest patch things are looking brighter, and while there are still some major issues, it is indeed possible to play the game at a straight 1080p60. Ranging from stuttering frame-rates owing to a 50fps cap on 60Hz displays, a 30fps mode with severe frame-pacing issues, and also driver crashes on Nvidia cards - it all left a bad taste in the mouths of those who'd spent so much on the game at launch.
If only we could somehow bend time in real life so we could start enjoying Quantum Break instead of having to deal with all of these performance issues.Quantum Break was left in a bit of state at the PC version's launch, but this week we have update 1.7 - a whopping 27GB patch - to potentially address its issues. Unfortunately, Remedy doesn’t give a time frame as to when we can expect Quantum Break to include all of these fixes and features. PC users should also expect to be given more options and control over Quantum Break as Remedy plans on delivering a number of tweaks, including an option to quit the game from its main menu, image quality options, and more. The studio is currently working on a number of solutions to many of the issues PC players have experienced with the game, and is expected to resolve them in a title update that will launch in the near future. Remedy acknowledges the PC version of Quantum Break has some serious issues, including a stuttering frame rate and frame pacing, performance issues with Windows 10, crashing at launch, and more. Remedy Games has acknowledged the PC version of Quantum Break is riddled with some serious performance issues since its launch on April 5 and is currently “working diligently with Microsoft Studios” to fix them.