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Digital Foundry: The Medium PC Tech Review: Yes - It Really is Super Demanding on PC Hardware

OldDirtyGamer

OldDirtyGamer

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Apr 14, 2019
2,469
Maybe its because of the part of the game i am at ( as gpu usage varies soo very much in this game ) but i feel the dual reality parts are running significantly better, while the single reality part with RT on is running worse. Also seems to have a couple new video settings. And they explain what DLSS is now.
 
RoboPlato

RoboPlato

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,805
I know why this game is so heavy (plus it being a Bloober game to begin with) but that has to be the wildest framerate range I have seen in a single video.
 
LuigiV

LuigiV

One Winged Slayer
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Oct 27, 2017
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Gestault said:
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.
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Presumably the cause of the issue is incorrect delta-time calculations. Why exactly the delta-time calculations are incorrect is hard to say in this particular instance but the Unity Engine team made an excellent blog post about how they fixed the same issue in their engine. It definitely did not seem like a simple fix but in the medium's case I doubt it's an engine level issue (we typically don't see this in UE4) so it might be easier to fix.

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2020/10/0...020-2-for-smoother-gameplay-what-did-it-take/
 

Firefly

Member
Jul 10, 2018
8,619
aevanhoe said:
That just tells me that people can't appreciate great lighting, atmosphere and design unless there's a bunch of flashy colors on the screen.
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It's such a strange criticism. Medium's other reality has gorgeous art design and use of colors. Has there been a horror game that is always colorful?
 
aevanhoe

aevanhoe

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Aug 28, 2018
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Medium is not an action title, not a shooter, not a platformer. Sure, performance could be better, but this is not the title to please the framerate fan club. You can still enjoy it. I get the feeling parts of this forum don't play games, they count frames.

It's a story-driven game made by a small studio. It may not be for you, and performance certainly could be better, bit if I could immerse myself in it with my GTX 1060, I'm sure your 2080 Supers and 3080 Titaniums will be fine.
 
sweetmini

sweetmini

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Jun 12, 2019
3,921
OldDirtyGamer said:
Maybe its because of the part of the game i am at ( as gpu usage varies soo very much in this game ) but i feel the dual reality parts are running significantly better, while the single reality part with RT on is running worse. Also seems to have a couple new video settings. And they explain what DLSS is now.
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There's not much RT in dual reality things... framerates are not vastly different on and off, but gpu load is (and vram, of course) this was taken prepatch, i grabbed that while discussing the game on era hardware side of things
med205jgp.jpg
 

Deleted member 27751

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Tofer said:
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
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Nooooo, please don't tell me this is true. Is this just in cutscenes or gameplay as well? I'm playing Control at the moment and that works flawlessly bar the main menu screen on my 34" curved monitor, and Medium was next on my list :( I was super excited to see how my RX6800XT goes but also just the actual game itself sounds mind blowingly amazing.

Re: the performance. I expected this, considering the game is literally rendering two copies of the game world at once which has never been done before. That mechanic concept alone was always going to push hardware to its limits despite the current powerhouse CPUs/GPUs we have, because any form of asset duplication/mirroring would require a huge data pipeline.
 
JahIthBer

JahIthBer

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Jan 27, 2018
10,376
I feel like people don't get that rendering 2 different locations at once is super demanding, there is a reason console games started to cut out split screen & if they had split screen, the framerate/resolution was typically lowered by half.
I think Medium is pretty well optimised, not everything is Arkham Knight.
 
Atolm

Atolm

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Oct 25, 2017
5,826
Gestault said:
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.
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I don't know about you screen but almost all, if not all variable refresh rate screens (HDMI 2.1, FreeSync, GSync) have a threshold, for example FreeSync on my monitor doesn't work below 40hz.

The same probably happens with most screens with this game, I would assume.
 
gozu

gozu

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Oct 27, 2017
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This is very, very weird. Isn't dynamic resolution easy? Why on god's name would they leave it off on PC?

I can't think of a single acceptable answer. Maybe their lead coder quit?
 

Deleted member 12833

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Eorl said:
Nooooo, please don't tell me this is true. Is this just in cutscenes or gameplay as well? I'm playing Control at the moment and that works flawlessly bar the main menu screen on my 34" curved monitor, and Medium was next on my list :( I was super excited to see how my RX6800XT goes but also just the actual game itself sounds mind blowingly amazing.
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No ultrawide support in cutscenes and gameplay. There is a mod but It didn't seem perfect and I didn't bother to download it.
 
plagiarize

plagiarize

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Oct 25, 2017
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digitalrelic said:
I feel like this video, in a nutshell, sums up exactly why ray tracing, in it's current application state, makes no fucking sense and is not even remotely worth the performance hit.
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Bloober had two choices. Their game is designed around two viewports, and they clearly weren't going to get those running at a stable 60 fps on basically anything. So they had to lock those to 30. They could, I suppose have gone the FIFA route of presenting a bunch of stuff in 60 fps and a bunch of other stuff in 30 fps. The other choice, was to target 30 fps for the entire game, and to push the graphics as hard as they could at 30 fps in the scenes without two viewports.

The 'Ultra RT' option on PC, is as Alex pointed out, a ridiculous step up in effects, both adding far more of them AND forcing them on at all times. But the regular mode, and on Series X, they were basically using the crazy amount of overhead they had at 30 fps to make those scenes look as good as they were able to.

Which makes plenty of sense to me.

agiantsheep said:
Yeah, I think The Coalition has their own implementation though. I'm gonna load up a UE4 project and see.

Edit: I just get "DynRes: Unsupported" sadly
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Good to know. Thanks for digging into this a bit.
 
Pyramid Head

Pyramid Head

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Oct 27, 2017
1,838
Decided to boot the gamepass version back uo to see if the game breaking conference room bug had been fixed. Now the game doesn't boot at all, just hangs on a black screen after the Bloober logo. I then get a UI pop up asking me to chose between a system save or cloud, but only after killing the game through the task manager.

Time to uninstall this turd.
 
shinbojan

shinbojan

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Oct 27, 2017
1,101
dmix90 said:
Understandable of course, but man... you're in a perfect position to raise some awareness about this. Maybe next time.
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I hope that DF will start paying more attention to HDR in the future. Without HDR issue being mentioned, analysis looks incomplete, which is not something I'm used to when it comes to DF videos.
But this happens often. I remember Alex praising A Plague Tale: Innocence (pc never got HDR, developers were even mocking the people who asked for the support), Ori did not have it day 1, Mafia remake still does not have it...as for The Medium, I've stopped playing the game until the issue is resolved and I hate when this happens.
Alex obviously cares about pc very much, so I hope he will help raise awareness about the similar issues.
 

brain_stew

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Oct 30, 2017
4,727
Dictator said:
It can be forced in titles on PC with unreal engine unlocker - I am genuinely surprised it is not supported in the documentation.
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Does that work in combination with DLSS or do you have to drop DLSS to enable it?

Lack of dynamic resolution support in PC releases can be very frustrating. Dropping resolution is always preferable to dropping frames, so I struggle to imagine a scenario where you would ever want to disable it.

The Medium quite clearly shows up the alternative when it is not available. Everyone just ends up having to optimise settings around the most demanding scenes which degrades visual quality for the majority of scenes unnecessarily.

In my case this meant settling for a native rendering resolution of 720p (!!) on a 3070 although thankfully DLSS came to the rescue there and it still looked really good. That doesn't exactly help AMD users though, rendering at 720p on a 6800 isn't exactly a great solution.
 
dmix90

dmix90

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Oct 25, 2017
1,885
shinbojan said:
I hope that DF will start paying more attention to HDR in the future. Without HDR issue being mentioned, analysis looks incomplete, which is not something I'm used to when it comes to DF videos.
But this happens often. I remember Alex praising A Plague Tale: Innocence (pc never got HDR, developers were even mocking the people who asked for the support), Ori did not have it day 1, Mafia remake still does not have it...as for The Medium, I've stopped playing the game until the issue is resolved and I hate when this happens.
Alex obviously cares about pc very much, so I hope he will help raise awareness about the similar issues.
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Yep

When properly mastered/implemented and on compatible display HDR is very often far bigger visual impact than let's say jumping from Medium/High settings to Ultra in most games... and such an important aspect is getting ignored rather often in PC community which is a huge shame. Analysis of a games visual presentation should definitely include HDR related information in this day and age... even if compatible monitors adoption on PC is probably not great.
 
EvilBoris

EvilBoris

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Oct 29, 2017
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dmix90 said:
Yep

When properly mastered/implemented and on compatible display HDR is very often far bigger visual impact than let's say jumping from Medium/High settings to Ultra in most games... and such an important aspect is getting ignored rather often in PC community which is a huge shame. Analysis of a games visual presentation should definitely include HDR related information in this day and age... even if compatible monitors adoption on PC is probably not great.
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It's not right in SDR, so it's not unique to HDR.

One of the difficulties with talking about HDR is that it's not just a technical thing, there is an art component which is arguably more important.

But the reality of it is, there are not enough experts outside of the mathematics of getting it working. Which is why we keep seeing such inconsistencies in titles, games that are so extremely contrasty users scream "crushed blacks" and games that have got it wrong and users scream "raised blacks".

You then have a spectrum of games that do it successfully , that either look generically punchy or aim for a look which many players still perceive as "wrong".

Since I started doing the HDR analysis and even did some work for DF on RDR2 there is an increasing appetite for it and for a while developers even started reaching out to me for consulting work; but this has really died back again. coincidentally we've had a big uptick of atrocious setups in game over the last 6 months.
Perhaps a byproduct of Covid and working from home.
 
dmix90

dmix90

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Oct 25, 2017
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EvilBoris said:
It's not right in SDR, so it's not unique to HDR.

One of the difficulties with talking about HDR is that it's not just a technical thing, there is an art component which is arguably more important.

But the reality of it is, there are not enough experts outside of the mathematics of getting it working. Which is why we keep seeing such inconsistencies in titles, games that are so extremely contrasty users scream "crushed blacks" and games that have got it wrong and users scream "raised blacks".

You then have a spectrum of games that do it successfully , that either look generically punchy or aim for a look which many players still perceive as "wrong".

Since I started doing the HDR analysis and even did some work for DF on RDR2 there is an increasing appetite for it and for a while developers even started reaching out to me for consulting work; but this has really died back again. coincidentally we've had a big uptick of atrocious setups in game over the last 6 months.
Perhaps a byproduct of Covid and working from home.
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I was thinking the same thing the other day... if developer does not have access to studio HDR mastering display due to WFH( if their office/workplace have such display in the first place... ) then that's pretty much impossible to do anything HDR related( even if home displays support HDR they might... "support" HDR and issues wont even be visible )

It is a good excuse and might explain a lot, but still.... pushing out a product out of the door without properly testing crucial rendering features is baffling.
 
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EvilBoris

EvilBoris

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dmix90 said:
It is a good excuse and might explain a lot, but still.... pushing out a product out of the door without properly testing crucial rendering features is baffling.
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Even so, HOW do they test them? There are a lot of things in the AV chain to consider and I can't imagine all developers have an in house specialist or their home setups are often calibrated in any shape or form, let alone to account for the specifics of HDR and gaming.



I only know of a few studios that even have multiple monitors and whilst Vincent often goes to calibrate production studio equipment for movie/tv studios, I don't think he's ever done a games studio.
Ultimately I don't think it's given the same resource as movies/Tv, where there are multiple job roles to handle these things.
 
DanielG123

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Jul 14, 2020
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So far, the latest update has seriously improved performance across the board. Where I was ranging anywhere from 45 frames, to as low as the single digits before, now on ultra settings, RT on, and DLSS set to performance, I'm consistently hovering between 58-60 frames. I haven't gone through another split world segment yet, but so far, it's been much better. The game looks and feels smooth as hell now.
 
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chandoog

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Oct 27, 2017
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Dictator

Do you guys have any plans to revisit the game post patch ?

Reportedly, the Series X patch has fixed, or at least improved, the frame pacing issues. I have only tested the first apartment area post-patch but have noticed an even/smoother 30 FPS with little to no judder.
 
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