THE MEDIUM TO THE TEST ON RTX 3080: HOW IT RUNS WITH RAY TRACING AND DLSS IN 4K
The Medium is the primary true next gen exclusive from Microsoft. Its landing on PC, Xbox Series X and Series S has obtained mixed reviews (as we have analyzed in our review ), for a divisive title from this point of view.
The Polish team has focused heavily on the graphics sector,
inserting potentially advanced effects within the game, which on PC provides
full compatibility with Ray Tracing, also present on Xbox, and with DLSS, the
latter usable only with NVIDIA video cards.
We tested The Medium with a GPU from the green house, an RTX
3080, discovering a title in which DLSS stands out more than Ray Tracing .
Minimum requirements and settings menu
The development team has never hidden the fact that The
Medium requires a high-end PC to play in maximum detail . The reason lies,
according to the developers, in the dual nature of the title, which often has
to render two different scenes at the same time, one for the world of the
living, the other to represent that of the dead. In these cases the performance
drops, but even when there is only one reality on the screen, the frame rate is
not very high, despite a decidedly powerful test configuration.
In this regard, in order to play The Medium in 1080p Bloober
Team recommends at least an Intel i5-6600 processor with a GTX 1650 or Radeon
R9 390X, along with 8 GB of RAM. Requirements that we consider too
optimisticseen the frame rate achieved with our RTX 3080, and that allow you to
play with the minimum settings.
Going up to the recommended configuration for this resolution
we find an Intel i5-9600 processor or a Ryzen 7 3700X, along with a GTX 1660
Super - Radeon RX 5600XT and 16 GB of RAM. For the 1440p the processors remain
the same but the GPU power increases, since an RTX 2060 Super or a Radeon RX
5700 XT are indicated, while for the 4K an RTX 2080 / RTX 3060 Ti or a Radeon
RX 6800 are recommended.
In all these cases the goal is not 60 fps, the development
team indicates these configurations as ideal for reaching 30 fps, a figure that
speaks volumes about the power needed to manage the game, based on Unreal
Engine.
On the Ray Tracing front the situation does not change, the
goal remains 30 fps , reachable from specifications through an RTX 2060 Super
or a Radeon RX 6800, however, setting the medium preset on Ray Tracing, while
to push the graphics to the maximum they are recommended an RTX 3080 or a
Radeon RX 6800 XT.
In the minimum requirements, 60 fps is never mentioned, a
choice dictated in part by the type of game, by the staid rhythms and which
does not require a high frame rate to be appreciated at its best, but also by
the fact that 60 fps are not always achievable. , even in the most powerful
configurations.
The optimization is not the best and even the settings menu
does not help much in configuring the game well, starting with a rough
translation in our language. In fact, to access the advanced graphic settings,
click on " Superior ", furthermore the wording used in the last
period for DLSS 2.0, which normally provides the " Quality ", "
Balanced " and " Performance " presets , has not been respected.
A small bug is encountered then passing from DLSS to traditional anti-aliasing:
in this case the upscaling to 200% is automatically activated , which has an
important impact on performance, forcing you to manually change the parameter.
However, we point out a small gem that we noticed by chance.
The Medium is in fact optimized for Corsair peripherals , once the game was
started the case used for the test, a Corsair iCUE 5000X RGB that we reviewed a
short time ago, changed the internal RGB lighting adapting it to what happens
on the screen, creating synchronized lighting effects.
Test setup and performance
To push The Medium to the max we used a PC made up of an AMD
Ryzen 5950X processor, along with a ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi motherboard,
a RTX 3080 Founders Edition and 16 GB of RAM at 3600 MHz. A configuration that,
at least in expectations, it should have handled the Bloober Team title in 4K
very well. The Medium in fact, despite having a discrete graphics sector,
certainly does not stand out from the crowd for quality and general complexity,
moreover the scenarios, almost completely static, should not represent a
problem for a PC of this type.
Unfortunately, the performance is below expectations, making
a general judgment is difficult because the drops in the frame rate are
frequent. Even within the same scenario, a change of room or frame is enough to
see the frame rate fluctuate from over 60 fps to less than 50, you can see it
from the first environment you encounter in the game.
The house where the protagonist grew up shows a frame rate
always above 55 fps, even exceeding 60 fps with some shots, but it is enough to
enter a particular room to see the fps drop below 50, despite the use of DLSS
on the " High " preset . We have encountered dips of this kind
throughout the first hour and a half of play, which becomes even worse when the
screen is split in two.
In general, with active Ray Tracing and DLSS at the highest
quality, the frame rate undergoes strong variations, passing from environments
that run at just over 30 fps up to others that exceed 60, a sign that
optimization on PC is not optimal . Still on the subject of Ray Tracing, its
use does not change much the graphic impact, the environmental occlusion makes
the scene more realistic, without distorting it, while the reflections, however
accurate, do not scream a miracle and could also have been implemented. without
Ray Tracing, given the extreme static nature of the game scenario.
Different speech for the DLSS 2.0, which once again has a
much higher impact than the Ray Tracing, giving a big hand to increasing the
frame rate without loss of quality in the image. If you have a mid-range RTX
card, our advice is to turn off Ray Tracing and play with DLSS active, in this
way you don't lose too much on the graphics front but you gain many more
frames.
There were also glitches: we observed, in a single
environment, shadows in positions that were not consistent with the scene, more
often instead it happened to notice phenomena of texture flickering, with the
textures that were not loaded correctly in small areas of the game environment.
Nothing too annoying but there are still signs that the PC version needs a
corrective patch.
