The Medium has been pitched as a game with cutting-edge visuals since its (re)announcement in mid-2020. It was being positioned as an Xbox Series X/S launch title at the time, though it'd be released on PC as well. Now that The Medium is available on both platforms, players can see for themselves just how The Medium performs. And while The Medium definitely strives to deliver on its visual promises, at least on PC it sounds like poor optimization has limited the horror game's potential.

DSOGaming is reporting that The Medium struggles to deliver consistent performance even on high-end PC hardware. The outlet says that the review code it was provided by The Medium developer Bloober Team struggles to maintain 60FPS even on a PC with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card and other similarly impressive components. Worse, that's at a resolution of just 1080p, with standard High settings.

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Compounding the issues is the fact that The Medium also offers players the opportunity to turn on ray tracing. Ray tracing is a graphics feature that, depending on its implementation, can vastly improve lighting and shadows. DSOGaming's testing of The Medium on PC had ray tracing turned off. In other words, using ray tracing on PC even with an expensive RTX 3080 graphics card would make the game's performance even worse.

One example that DSOGaming shows is an example of The Medium running at 1440p, High settings, and DLSS turned on. Without ray tracing enabled, the game is shown at 50 and 53FPS. With ray tracing enabled, the game is shown at 43 and 46FPS. That's with the frame-improving DLSS technology that newer Nvidia graphics cards support turned on. A scene at 1080p is also shown running at around 52FPS, though DSOGaming does acknowledge that this is without DLSS enabled.

The report attributes the lack of optimization to Bloober Team's general efforts with PC version of the game first, but second to its graphics choices for the Xbox Series X/S version of The Medium. The Medium on Xbox Series X/S is apparently capped at 30FPS. If Bloober Team had Xbox performance as its priority, then it makes a lot of sense why the PC version wouldn't improve dramatically on that.

Luckily, PC performance is one thing that Bloober Team should be able to improve with continued development post-launch. Those playing The Medium on PC should definitely make their voices heard and ensure that Bloober Team doesn't work to give players more frames.

The Medium is available now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.

MORE: The Medium Review

Source: DSOGaming