Quantum Break is one of the most technologically and visually impressive games to date, but is also plagued with many crazy technical issues that are making the game unplayable by default. In this guide I am going to look into all of the most game breaking issues and provide fixes, with some basic performance metrics focused at high-end PCs and running the game close to maximum settings.

Here is a list of issues I am going to cover:

• Native/custom resolution not detected by the game
  
• Bad frame pacing on fullscreen
  
• Random 30 FPS locks during gameplay with V-sync enabled
  
• Blurry Apperance
  
• Poor Texture Filtering
  
• Ambient Occlusion Bug
  
• High GPU requirements

One of the most basic issues is that the game may not detect native resolution. Quite a few users reported this issue, and it happened to me as well. I am using 3840x1600 ultrawide, and game was showing all possible resolutions in the menu including other ultrawide ones, except for my native, and except for DSR resolutions.

Fortunately the fix for this issue is very simple. We need to access config file and enter desired resolution manually. Config file is located at:

AppData\Local\QuantumBreak\renderer.ini

Open renderer.ini in Notepad and edit "m_iResolutionX" to your horizontal resolution and "m_iResolutionY" to your vertical one. For me it looks like this:



As long as your aspect ratio is supported by the game everything should work properly.

Note that the reported resolution in game menu is going to change to 1280x800 after that, but it is incorrect, obviously. You can still freely adjust all other settings, just don't touch the resolution setting because if you change it then you will have to go through the same process again.

Frame pacing in fullscreen mode is horrendous, especially with V-sync enabled. Camera movement is extremely jittery and inconsistent, regardless of framerate, meaning that no matter how high your framerate may be, game will still feel stuttery and unsmooth.

Thankfully this issue is not inherent to the game and can be fixed.

If you are using NVIDIA graphics card, open NVIDIA Control Panel, go to Manage 3D Settings, click Program Settings, click Add and choose QuantumBreak.exe file.
If you opened the game recently, it should be on the list automatically. If not, file is located at Steam\steamapps\common\QuantumBreak\dx11

Then you need to look for Maximum Pre-rendered Frames setting and set it to 1. Then hit Apply and keep the panel open because you will need it later.

Here is a picture for a reference (I am using a picture from the web because my Control Panel is not in English and there is no option to change language)



After applying this setting frame pacing should be correct and camera movement should feel smooth again. This kind of frame pacing issues are very uncommon and I haven't dealt with anything like this in years. Fortunately a simple setting from Control Panel saves the day.

If you are using AMD graphics card you need find a corresponding setting by yourself, because I don't have any experience with AMD tools.

With newer NVIDIA drivers, this option was renamed to Low Latency Mode. Setting it to On (not Ultra) is equal to setting Maximum Pre-rendered Frames to 1.

Continuing a streak of totally game breaking issues, here are the dreaded 30 FPS locks. Game is using a bad implementation of double-buffered V-sync (at least it appears to) which is locking your framerate to half the refresh rate whenever it "thinks" you cannot maintain framerate at your max refresh rate. This is some of the worst and most annoying features that ever made their way to games, causing an unbelievable inconsistency to gameplay, and even though quite rare, there are some examples like Assassin's Creed Black Flag and unfortunately Quantum Break.

In Quantum Break this "feature" is especially malicious and all the mitigations that we are going to use may not work at all times, though they are very effective.

The immediate mitigation is to enable Adaptive V-sync. This way, whenever your drop below your max refresh rate V-sync is automatically disabled, theoretically leaving no way for this 30 FPS to occur.

If you are not using G-sync, you can directly use Adaptive V-sync in NVIDIA Control Panel. On the same page where you have set Maximum Pre-rendered Frames, find Vertical Sync setting and set it to Adaptive, like here:



If you are using G-sync then you don't have that option available, because by design G-sync is already meant to disable V-sync every time you drop below your max resfresh rate and take over the frame delivery. Unfortunately Quantum Break is so stubborn with enforcing these 30 FPS locks that it doesn't work.

To enable Adaptive V-sync with G-sync enabled, you will need to use NVIDIA Inspector software. Once you download it, open nvidiaProfileInspector and search for Quantum Break. Find Vertical Sync Tear Control setting and set it to Adaptive, like here:



AMD should have corresponding option in it's control panel as well.

This however doesn't remove the issue fully. 30 FPS locks can still occur, somehow, though much more rarely. But there is still one more thing we can do.

I've found that using Blurbuster's Low Lag V-sync[www.blurbusters.com] method helped to remove remaining 30 FPS locking.

According to the guide, you need to find your exact refresh rate here[www.testufo.com] and then lock your FPS around 0.010 Hz below that number. It's main function is different than what we are trying to achieve here, but it manages to help somehow, probably since it interferes with how V-sync works.

So find your exact refresh rate as explained above, and then lock 0.010Hz below that with Riva Tuner Statistic Server. New versions of RTSS already support locking to fractions of Hz by default, so you don't need to into config files like Blurbuster's guide recommends (the specific version I am using currently is 7.2.1 Beta 4)

Open Riva Tuner Statistics Server, Add QuantumBreak.exe from aforementioned Steam\steamapps\common\QuantumBreak\dx11 directory, and then lock your framerate 0.010 Hz below your exact refreshrate.

For example, my refreshrate is 60.075 Hz, so I am locking to 60.065, like that:



For me the combination of Adaptive V-sync and Low Lag V-sync removed the issue entirely on the settings I was playing with (fluctuating between 48 to 60 FPS), but as soon as I completely maxed out the game, causing framerate to drop to as low as 42 FPS in some cases, these locks could still occur, so ideally you should configure the game in way that you don't drop below max refresh rate by more than 20%.

Some additional notes:

• cutscenes are locked to 30 FPS and it takes few seconds for this 30 FPS lock to go away after transitioning from cutscene back to gameplay
  
• if you get this 30 FPS lock and followed the steps above, entering and exiting menus (hit ESC twice quickly) should make the game go back to 60 FPS (don't ask why, ask developer :P)
  
• the locks are to half the refresh rate, so they don't have to be 30 FPS, if your resfresh rate is 100 Hz then locks will be to 50 FPS, probably...

You can also use NVIDIA's Fast Sync, which seems to be working much better compared to when it was first released and isn't as juddery as it was. It attempts to make the game as smooth and tearless as with V-sync On but without actually using any kind of synchronization, so it doesn't add as much latency, and most importantly for games with such malicious double buffered V-syncs like Quantum Break, it is not detected as V-sync by the game, so it cannot lock to half your refreshrate anymore and acts like V-sync off, so there is nothing to interfere without your framerate delivery.

The first thing I've noticed after loading into the game was that the game looks extremely blurry despite rendering at proper native resolution without Upscaling option enabled.

Fortunately fix to blurriness is about as easy as for any other game, and that is using Reshade, specifically LumaSharpen setting. I am using it for almost every game to compensate for blur that temporal anti-aliasing techniques usually introduce. Additionally I've used Deband option to reduce color banding (also using that for every game) and Tonemap to adjust gamma with much more precision than in-game slider provides.

The amount of blurriness in Quantum Break is especially high, so it will require more sharpening than usually. Here are some before/after comparisons:





If you already used Reshade then you know what to do, and if you didn't then look for some guide, as covering everything here would take too much time and space and be off-topic. Generally Reshade is much better than it used to be, and now it has in-game overlay/UI instead of some clunky text files, so you shouldn't have any issues using it.

There were also many reports about poor texture filtering, and this is also very easy to fix. Like before, enter Quantum Break page in NVIDIA Control Panel, and do the following:

Set Anisotropic Filtering option to 16x
Set Texture Filtering - Quality option to High Quality



*some other Texture Filtering related settings may change automatically along with these changes

As always, hit Apply and exit.

I am using these settings for almost every game, because it is basically always better than in-game Anisotropic Filtering. It has some performance cost, but improves image quality noticeably.

AMD has similar options in their control panel as well.

There is also a very strange behavior related to Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. It does not load right away after you load into the game or change it's settings. Instead, it takes over a minute for Ambient Occlusion to "kick in", causing a big stutter while doing so.

Here is a before/after comparison illustrating the issue:



This affects visuals drastically in many scenes, so if you are about to judge the look of the game or make screenshots, make sure that Ambient Occlusion is actually active.

This also has performance impact, because Ambient Occlusion is simply not there until it kicks in, so the performance that you get right after loading into the game is not the actual performance of the game, because Ambient Occlusion is not active until around a minute later. So if you are about to benchmark the game, wait until it kicks in.

You can easily see when this happens, Ambient Occlusion will suddenly appear at some point along with a single big stutter.

This will happen only after loading into the game for the first time since launching, after that you can freely load all saves and different sequences without worrying about this issue, but the issue will come back with every game restart.

Quantum Break is still one of the most if not the most demanding game on the market, but it defends itself decently when compared to other games. It is not like it is outrageously unoptimized, because GPU requirements are justified in visuals, it only has a whole host of unnecessary game breaking technical issues this guide addresses, and they are what makes the game so bad by default, not the GPU requirements.

Still, GPU requirements are high regardless of whether they are justified or not, and some tweaking will be required even on most high-end systems.

I've made some basic benchmarks, downgrading each option by one step each after each to find where to search for performance gains. Here is a graph:



I've already mentioned that this guide is focused on running the game close to maximum settings, so I didn't go past downgrading each setting by only one level, simply because it is not acceptable to downgrade settings heavily on high-end configuration whose whole purpose is to run games without compromises.

Also, considering all the issues and very high requirements, Quantum Break is probably the last game in the world you should try playing on low-end system, or one inadequate for your resolution. This is probably the hardest game to run that you can find.

As you can see, big gains can be found only in Screen Space Reflections and Anti-aliasing. And considering how important Anti-aliasing is for picture quality and how much shimmering and aliasing is visible on distant object and character's hair if you turn it off, Screen Space Reflections is the only place where you can get big gains at relatively low cost to visuals.

If you turn down Screen Space Reflections from the maximum setting of High by one notch to Medium, you get a huge 16% performance increase. And while you probably won't be able to notice the difference on different water and glass surfaces, the difference is pretty clear on the ground inside the interiors. Medium setting appears more grainy, especially on the edges of reflected object. However, High setting also looks a bit grainy and compromises on reflection resolution were made even for the highest setting, so it is overall not a huge decrease to quality, considering huge performance gain.

This is what I did personally. Reducing Screen Space Reflections by one level brought my minimum FPS from miserable 41 FPS to much more promising 48, staying in mid 50s for majority of time and almost 100% stable 60 FPS inside the interiors, making the game playable enough thanks to Adaptive Sync. Considering a massive 3840x1600 resolution and single GPU of less than optimal performance, this is a pretty good result in the most demanding game on the market.

Other settings that provided some noticeable performance gains are Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and Volumetric Lighting. However, this comes from turning Ambient Occlusion off completely, which you should never do because it improves image quality drastically at a very low relative performance cost. Volumetric Lighting is a setting where you can look for additional performance gains, but gain is only 7% so you would need to decrease the setting by another level to get double digit percentage gain, which is painful especially in a game that is all about lighting and physics effects.

If you are finding yourself unable to run this game reasonably, there is an Upscaling option available in the menu. It makes the game far less demanding, but renders the game at much lower resolution than your native, so it decreases overall image quality drastically. However, this is going to vary significantly depending on your screen size and viewing distance. Sitting close to massive 38" ultrawide, I can notice every slightest detail, so perception of resolution is going to be drastically different from for example sitting 3 meters away from the TV, from where all that you can see is that there is some game displayed on the screen. Even still, Upscaling option is a very aggressive upscaling that affects picture quality significantly, so it should be the last resort.

As stated at the beginning, Quantum Break is plagued by a lot of crazy technical issues, but fortunately the fixes are pretty simple and game can be brought to playable state.

Game is very impressive on many fronts, and it should get much more credit than it did. It should be mentioned amongst the signature games of this decade, but amount of technical issues and difficult times to launch in (remember than Pascal GPUs were not released yet, so it had to run on two GPU generations below compared to today) prevented it and the damage that was made to this game's image is beyond repair. Though I hope that my guide will make it easier, as it takes the game a long way from unplayable to "doable".

Even at a massive 3840x1600 resolution I only needed to reduce one setting to make the game run acceptably, which is not too much for the most demanding game on the market, though this is mostly thanks to Adaptive Sync/G-sync that reduces the visibility of performance fluctuations drastically. Still, if you are running lower 3440x1440 resolution or 2560x1440 16:9 display, maximum settings should be perfectly doable at this point. And if you are using 4K then you probably know your way around the performance issues that you are constantly facing at this resolution.

Nonetheless, game is extremely demanding, so if you are really struggling to run it reasonably, it would be wise to wait until the next hardware upgrade. After all, there are thousands of games to play and there is no reason why you would have to play this particular game exactly right now.

Additonal notes:

• there are some other issues like random crashing or 30 FPS cutscenes, but I have no fixes for these issues simply because there aren't any, so I didn't mention them before
  
• I didn't test CPU performance, but my 4.4GHz 6900K was working pretty hard in this game, so if you have some old low core count CPU then your performance issues may not necessarily come from the GPU
  
• check the The photographers guide to Quantum Break by Psychedelic Adventurer for photo mode, there are many amazing screenshots you can make in this beautiful game
  
• here[drive.google.com] are some uncompressed screenshots from Quantum Break
  
• and here is a performance and 21:9 support test from my small youtube channel