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Remedy's Quantum Break was announced for Xbox One X back at Gamescom and we managed to get a few minutes of time on the game, where first impressions were positive. The resolution upgrade was palpable and performance looked relatively solid. A couple of weeks on, and we managed to get a more extended hands-on with the X port of what is undoubtedly one of the generation's most technically challenging games. In some respects, the conversion is even more impressive than we thought, but in others, we hope to see some improvement before the title update releases alongside the console on November 7th. First of all, it should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the game that Quantum Break is not running at a native 3840x2160 resolution, as impressive as the upgrade is over the standard console version. So what is it doing then? Well, Quantum Break makes use of a temporal reconstruction technique, where the game uses information from previous frames to create an end result exceeding the quality of native resolution alone. On Xbox One, that base resolution is a lowly 720p. Thanks to its reliance on multi-sampling, the end results are certainly clean, but with so few pixels at its core, the end result is rather blurry.
This same technique was included in the PC version as well, but it eventually became possible to disable it and utilise higher base resolutions. Of course, this places huge demands on PC hardware, owing to the sheer ambition behind the game's renderer. In fact, whether you're using reconstruction or not, it can cause issues for even the most powerful of PC hardware. To illustrate, a Titan Xp GPU - the fastest single-chip graphics card money can buy - running the game at close to max settings can lock to 60fps, but only at a 1440p resolution with reconstruction active.
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