The Medium

The Medium is a game from Bloober Team released on January 28th, 2021 on PC and Xbox Series S/X and on PlayStation 5 on September 3rd, 2021.

The game is built on Unreal Engine 4 and is using an "on-rails / fixed camera" perspective. The game is making extensive use of dual viewport rendering to display two game worlds in one frame which lead to unusually heavy hardware requirements.

The game is using ray tracing for reflections and has integration of Nvidia DLSS for upscaling and antialiasing option and was launched in partnership with Nvidia.

PC performance benchmarks
This game doesn't have a built-in benchmark and as a result of this all benchmarks are done by manual run throughs and can show considerably different results.

Key performance takeaways

 * The game has very steep requirements on the GPU as even the highest end of GPUs available at its launch are unable to lock at 60 in 4K, even with DLSS enabled (in case of Nvidia).
 * General launch performance seems a bit weird with all GPUs but Nvidia Ampere showing lower than expected performance in this game.
 * The game seem to consume no more than 8/10GB of VRAM without/with raytracing in 4K resolution.

Console versions comparison
The game was Xbox Series S/X console exclusive at launch but was released on PS5 in about 7 months after the initial launch.

Main console versions characteristics

 * Xbox Series X has raytracing reflections while Series S doesn't.
 * Xbox Series X has higher quality shadows than Series S.
 * Launch version of the game was suffering from uneven frame pacing. This was solved with patches.
 * PS5 version at launch was lacking all raytracing but reflections were patched in later. Ambient occlusion is still missing.