-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Digital Foundry: The Medium PC Tech Review: Yes - It Really is Super Demanding on PC Hardware
- Thread starter chandoog
- Start date
OP
OP
Text Article:
www.eurogamer.net
In a somewhat shocking turn of events, Alex recommends capping the game at 30 FPS for the best experience.
The Medium pushes PC hard - and even 1080p60 is off the table for high-end rigs
After spending some time with The Medium on Xbox Series consoles, we were eager to try out the game on PC. It's an impr…
www.eurogamer.net
In a somewhat shocking turn of events, Alex recommends capping the game at 30 FPS for the best experience.
It's fascinating how some appearance of stutter seems to be tied to actual animation/camera paths. I enjoyed this a ton on console, but that was a 30 fps target, and still had game-level stutter visible (even w/ VRR).
The Ultra RT option is nuts, and might end up being useful as a narrow benchmark of sorts, moving forward.
The Ultra RT option is nuts, and might end up being useful as a narrow benchmark of sorts, moving forward.
Wow, the variability example given near the end of the video is fascinating. Normal gameplay bit fine at 120fps. Cutscene starts and it drops to around 80fps. Then dualscreen gameplay section starts and it drops to around 25fps. Extremely variable. No surprise that the recommendation is to definitely cap at 30fps, even if you can sometimes get in excess of 100fps.
I played it with a 1050Ti, I deserve a medal! Those dual view scenes completely murder the framerate. Thankfully the game doesn't really have action scenes so it's just about playable.
Most likely, but I wouldn't assume it's unfixable. My level of experience isn't much more than a hobbyist (my experience with animation ended w/ very basic key-frame work on a low-budget kids game a decade ago), but it's possible there's a simplification/conversion at play for the underlying path, and that could be tweaked to eliminate this sort of problem. We had a tween system where the formula to generate in-betweens got messed up in one build, so the movement it generated got wacky even though the actual key-points displayed correctly. I'm wondering if this is a more advanced version of that kind of issue.
I'm about an hour into the game (PC, gamepass) - and it's been really jarring to see how much performance tanks when playing dual-view scenes. Hopefully things will be less stuttery with the 30 FPS cap tweak, but if that doesn't really do the trick, I'm going to shelve the game until I can come back to it in a year or three with a Nivida 3xxx card.
Last edited:
Btw you get less stuttering and better performances with DX11 but the GamePass version is forced on DX12... nice UWP job as usual.
Damn, really? I'm getting some Control déjà vu. Really struggled with performance there too, which was apparently not the case with the other versions where it allowed you to switch between DX11/12.
Patch launched I think a few minutes before this vid went live? So this is not including the patch.
I spent so much time prioritising looking at performance quirks here that i did not try out HDR, or something like ultra wide.
Understandable of course, but man... you're in a perfect position to raise some awareness about this. Maybe next time.
Running it maxed out with RT, The Medium is the only game that brings my 2080 Super to its knees. If I had a Series X, I'd for sure play it there just to get stable performance, until the PC version gets better. It's an incredible game, but it's super, super demanding. I'm kind of expecting this as more next gen only games come out, as we've seen it already with the likes of Control, Flight Sim, and now The Medium.
It was running pretty smooth on my setup. Granted I only played for 10 mins before uninstalling because there is no native ultra wide support
Optimized settings? More like "I give up" settings am I right?
From what I understand the perfomance problems come from the split screen stuff, not necessarily from the ray tracing? Control looked more impressive to me from the little I've played of this.
Running this at 4k maxed wit my 3090, with DLSS disabled, had me hovering in the 30-40 range. It didn't bother me too much given the type of game it is, but yeah, it was pretty demanding. Not entirely surprising with the dual worlds and RT enabled on top of that, but still.
This could easily get used to observe advancements in RT hardware.
There are 5-6 areas with severe framerate drops without any logical explanation as well. Nothing happening, no effect, just going down stairs and a 10 meters stretch of sub 30 and even 20fps on a high end system (same as Alex, 10900k, 3090FE, 32GB DDR4 4000 , game on nvme) xD
Framepacing was horrible with vsync on, much better off.
This was a brutal game.
Too bad i didn't have the patch, but with the nature of the game and the themes, i have no will to ever go back.
"
Dear players! The Patch 1.1 is live. These are the fixes that come with it:
- Performance optimizations across the whole game
- Eliminated gameplay bugs in various locations
- Eliminated known game crashes
- Eliminated game bugs reported by the community
- Graphical bug fixes across the whole game
- Improvements in camera operation and settings
- Scene lighting fixes in various locations
- Fixes for reported crash issues when loading saves
- Improvements in interactions with in-game events and characters across the whole game
- Raytracing optimizations across the whole game
- Game sound fixes
Many thanks to everyone who gave their feedback!
store.steampowered.com
Framepacing was horrible with vsync on, much better off.
This was a brutal game.
Too bad i didn't have the patch, but with the nature of the game and the themes, i have no will to ever go back.
"
Dear players! The Patch 1.1 is live. These are the fixes that come with it:
- Performance optimizations across the whole game
- Eliminated gameplay bugs in various locations
- Eliminated known game crashes
- Eliminated game bugs reported by the community
- Graphical bug fixes across the whole game
- Improvements in camera operation and settings
- Scene lighting fixes in various locations
- Fixes for reported crash issues when loading saves
- Improvements in interactions with in-game events and characters across the whole game
- Raytracing optimizations across the whole game
- Game sound fixes
Many thanks to everyone who gave their feedback!
The Medium - Patch 1.1 is live - Steam News
Dear players! The Patch 1.1 is live. These are the fixes that come with it: - Performance optimizations across the whole game - Eliminated gameplay bugs in various locations - Eliminated known game crashes - Eliminated game bugs reported by the community - Graphical bug fixes across the whole...
Rarely does a game look bad enough that I find it distracting, but this definitely falls under that category for me. Between the bad performance, stutters, poor animations, and poorly used settings (The blurriness in the wrong areas due to the bad use of Depth-of-field finally explains it a great deal), I find the game to be largely ugly and unpleasant to play. The game looks far worse than the resolution it actually runs at and whatever excuses we want to offer due to the "split screen" scenarios aren't enough to overcome that.
There are interesting ideas at play here, and wish these issues didn't distract from that.
There are interesting ideas at play here, and wish these issues didn't distract from that.
I'm more surprised at Smokey having a single 3090 than The Medium being this demanding. This is the guy that had two Titans IIRC.
I am out of the "PC game" since a long time, but do we know why dynamic resolution is so rare on PC?
The quality of DLSS performance is amazing considering what res it's starting out with, too bad even it can't really help this game.
BTW for those of you who may have not watched the full video and seen some side by side shots of the X vs PC with DLSS and thought the DLSS shots looked far more blurry in some but sharper in others, as Alex explains later in the video the depth of field is bugged on the PC currently, it's applying DOF to near-camera objects at points where it shouldn't be. I was bewildered why the same scene at different parts of the video had the X looking far sharper than the PC DLSS version and then vice versa minutes later, that's the reason.
BTW for those of you who may have not watched the full video and seen some side by side shots of the X vs PC with DLSS and thought the DLSS shots looked far more blurry in some but sharper in others, as Alex explains later in the video the depth of field is bugged on the PC currently, it's applying DOF to near-camera objects at points where it shouldn't be. I was bewildered why the same scene at different parts of the video had the X looking far sharper than the PC DLSS version and then vice versa minutes later, that's the reason.
There are 5-6 areas with severe framerate drops without any logical explanation as well. Nothing happening, no effect, just going down stairs and a 10 meters stretch of sub 30 and even 20fps on a high end system (same as Alex, 10900k, 3090FE, 32GB DDR4 4000 , game on nvme) xD
Framepacing was horrible with vsync on, much better off.
This was a brutal game.
Too bad i didn't have the patch, but with the nature of the game and the themes, i have no will to ever go back.
"
Dear players! The Patch 1.1 is live. These are the fixes that come with it:
- Performance optimizations across the whole game
- Eliminated gameplay bugs in various locations
- Eliminated known game crashes
- Eliminated game bugs reported by the community
- Graphical bug fixes across the whole game
- Improvements in camera operation and settings
- Scene lighting fixes in various locations
- Fixes for reported crash issues when loading saves
- Improvements in interactions with in-game events and characters across the whole game
- Raytracing optimizations across the whole game
- Game sound fixes
Many thanks to everyone who gave their feedback!
The Medium - Patch 1.1 is live - Steam News
Dear players! The Patch 1.1 is live. These are the fixes that come with it: - Performance optimizations across the whole game - Eliminated gameplay bugs in various locations - Eliminated known game crashes - Eliminated game bugs reported by the community - Graphical bug fixes across the whole...
Dang, seems like a good patch. I wish I had waited to play this.
But yeah, I played 95% of the game at a locked 4k30 (RT to on, no DLSS, NVCP cap @ 30) on a 3080, but as you said there were a few scenes that absolutely destroyed performance for no reason. Hopefully this patch smooths out those areas. Honestly RT is barely worth it in this game as the effects are extremely subtle most of the time.
Bloober Team game at launch: never again.
I have a 3080pc and a series x.
How bad is pc hdr ? What is wrong with it ? Should I play on series x for this reason alone ?
Nah... this seems a bit ok for whats it doing, unoptimized maybe, and its nowhere near the AAA Arkham Knight budget.
It goes from 110 fps in one scene without RT on a 2060 at 1080p to 22fps in dual-screen. That's over a 4X drop, that's not remotely ok for what it's doing.
It's very bad. The highlights are completely clipped so many parts of the game it's so bright you can't see anything. I have a gsync ultimate monitor that can hit 1300 nits and it still clips. Not sure what is happening. I have a 3080 and a series x too. The PC version has potential to be better but apparently it's not for now.
What its doing in dual screen is far more demanding than without it. There is room for improvement still but this is still a unique scenario not seen in Arkham Knight.