Bloober Team has just released a new update for the Steam version of The Medium that completely destroys its in-game performance. Thanks to this latest update, the game is unable to take full advantage of high-end GPUs at lower resolutions. And while the game was running with 80fps in our benchmark scene, it’s now running with 50fps in the very same scene and with the same settings.
As we wrote in our previous article, we are currently in the process of benchmarking the game. For our benchmark test, we’re using the dual-reality sequence at the start of Dayroom. That sequence worked great prior to this latest update on our PC test system. However, it’s now performing horribly, with both the CPU and GPU being under-used.
To put things into perspective, the dual-reality sequence in Dayroom ran with a minimum of 70fps and an average of 83fps at 1080p/High settings (without Ray Tracing and without DLSS). However, and after the latest patch, this scene runs with a minimum of 41fps and an average of 58fps. Yeap, we’re talking about a 20-30fps hit. Instead of improving overall performance, Bloober Team has managed to make things way, way worse.
For these initial tests, we used an Intel i9 9900K with 16GB of DDR4 at 3800Mhz and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 461.40 driver. Additionally, we tested the RTX2080Ti so we could eliminate any specific GPU issues. And, as you may have guessed, that GPU had the exact same issues with the RTX3080.
Naturally, we also tried the game’s latest version on our Intel i7 4930K. And, even though none of our CPU cores was maxed out, the game performed worse than we expected. In our benchmark sequence, we were getting a minimum of 31fps and an average of 35fps.
It’s also worth noting that the game now performs awful in both DX11 and DX12. In other words, it’s a general optimization issue that affects both APIs.
Since the game now suffers from even more optimization issues, we’ve decided to postpone our PC Performance Analysis. For the time being, we suggest staying away from The Medium!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
The game is probably meant to run on Medium settings as well ?
Haven’t heard that one before.
It’s getting laughable at this point..
even with frame dips the game doesn’t have a moving camera so the frame dips to 25-35fps didn’t really bother or annoy me. The real problem is the game is mindnumbingly
boring. I played 2 hours then uninstalled it. It’s like Resident evil 1
with the 2 world gimmick and no action. Glad I had 2 days left on my free game pass trial to try it out. Feel bad for people that bought it full price.
Soooo boring….Bloober Team is able to make better games…
Eh, Bloober, that’s not how patches work.
Game devs are getting more and more incompetent these days!
This is what happens when you hire people based on their appearance and biology, instead of skills and experience!
Jeez, chill down with this stupidity. This is a Polish studio, with probably mostly polish guys working there. Secondly, it’s probably a bug going to get fixed. Third, it’s a technically demanding game since the engine needs to render twice, with different geometry, materials, lighting.
Patches should improve performance not make it worse…there’s no justification for that.
Well depends on what the patch is supposed to do, some adds additional costly fidelity so not always – However if not adding such things i totally agree, one should expect more optimizations
In my mind patches are made to improve the game, and that includes lots of things (sure, add more visual fidelity while the game runs like crap in the first place)…i seriously question if these studios even bother to test whatever they launch…this hotfix mentality is getting tiresome.
Q&A = Early adopters. The studios/publishers really want peeps to keep waiting for discounts 🙂
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fc5a25f1cd17c981fddea524c7edfe9ac67859e1f96bb4e085f52f6a2495584f.png
this is the first thing you se when start the game ……
Why does this even need to be stated? Seriously who cares? Does anybody
see this when they start the game and feel better about the murd3r
simulator they are about to play? LMFAO!!! Thank f##k the devs are
multicultural and gender diverse… I can now slide this maxi pad up my
azz guilt free LOOOL
I think this has always partly been a way of telling people who might get offended by something in the game that A) it’s a work of fiction so please don’t take it seriously and B) We have a diverse team so it’s not like we are doing whatever it is that might offend someone without having any idea that it would be offensive.
But yeah, lately it seems to be more and more a way of virtue signalling.
Ill be brutally honest here, skill > anything else for any tech company and by stating that they only end up saying we value other factors meaning skill drops in value and sadly it usually shows in products from companies employing such banners.
Look at what happened to intel when they started with that type of program… the person responsible for that program where other things are more important than skill have left for apple now however.
The anti racists should not blame the companies for equality issues but rather the school system…
Agree. I am sick of this politically correct BS in videogames. More power to you if you really care but when it comes down to it, this statement doesn’t really matter when you’re playing the game.
Yea sad, I like Hitman but I downvoted them on Steam for this. I’m not angry, frustrated or anything. I just don’t believe this has anything to do with gaming
Seriously? Jesus, what a child.
Go back to Resetera.
So many butthurt bigots, racists, xenophobes, etc. The world is more accepting than you. This is a good thing. Get over yourself, ffs.
All wrong. Stop throwing those buzzwords if you don’t know their meaning
I’m well aware of their meaning. It’s just that people who actually are bigots, racists, xenophobes, etc. tend to be offended when they’re called those things. Truth hurts. 🙂
its also the first thing you see when starting any assassins creed since the first one back in 2007
Ubisoft started the trend. Which is ridiculous!
damn that unfortunate I was really liking this game and now i have 2 hours in and wont be eligible for a refund…
Except this article is a complete lie. There has been NO patch for the Steam version yet. Period.
Mr. John Papadopoulos,
I wish you also checked out the performance after the latest updates in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla because it’s been completely destroyed!! To keep things short, Intel CPU users are basically having the same issue as you as writing in this article – components do not get used, but in AC Valhalla it’s specific to Intel CPUs.
As I notice you have two spare Intel processors, perhaps you could check this out for yourself. The AC support forum has a very hot thread about this, and best of it all, it’s been completely ignored by the people who are supposed to work for ubisoft.
It would make for a great headline and you would also make ubisoft do something as this site has influence. The people suffering from this problem have been waiting for 2 months to no avail.
So the pirated version is the recommended one
It’s available on Game Pass.
The game performance is broken currently so even if i got it for free i would still recommend the pirated version because it was not patched(the patch broke the game)
No. Why would it be? When a product, any product not just games, is not good, does that justify theft?
I think his logic is that since this game isn’t worth full (or even half) price and you can’t buy this game with an arbitrary amount of money ($1 for example) you may as well just resort to the cheapest option possible – visiting a torrent site. I don’t know if there is a demo available, but a pirated version sounds like a nice way of trying out a game, and if you’re really liking it then buying it.
Theft can’t be justified. You either don’t buy it or you pay for a month of xbox game pass, try the game and if you don’t like it for whatever reason there is still a crap ton of games to play on game pass..
Or you can pirate it, it is another option you like it or not….of course, you can support mediocre unoptomized pieces of crap like this game too…
Good one, microsoft. Go sell your DRM-for-10-bucks-a-month elsewhere.
I am just saying that there are other option instead of stealing..
Because currently the sold version is broken so why buy a broken product?
Then you don’t buy it, simple as that, theft is never an option..
Get off your high pony
Hahaha so stealing is justifiable then?
You confuse stealing with piracy when they are not even close. For stealing something you have to take away a good from someone/something-
A pirated game never was to meant a sell to begin with (people has many reasons, usually they dont want to pay or they cant)
Funny thing is that a pirated copy can turn into a sell, you get the game as a demo…you end up liking it and proceed to buy it because it deserves your money…but i bet you didnt think about that, plenty of people endup buying what they copy…usually in a sale when the price is more fair (given how broken games are nowadays, on launchday you usually get the worse experience at the highest price).
No, i disagree. A game is supposed to be sold on some marketplace (steam, epic, etc) by the original developer or a publisher. Any way of getting it without paying is piracy and theft cause you acquire for free something that you must pay to get it. If you don’t like the game, the gameplay, the performance, the price, etc then you just don’t buy it. It is not compulsory to buy games anyway. Or you can just wait for it to get updated with better performance or for the price to drop. Just like you wouldn’t steal a t-shirt you don’t like, you don’t steal a game..
How the f*ck you can make a judgement about a game without even try it? and dont tell me about reviews and youtube videos because that’s dishonest, since your morale is so high, and you know it.
Sure, you are parrotting at this point…it reads like brainwashing, is funny how you come all high and mighty on the internet of all places like is gonna change somebody’s mind on the topic…time to drop the badge Judge Dredd or accept there’s more realities out there than your own.
I am not saying that piracy is not a reality, I am just saying that it is theft, which is it. You get something for free that is not for free to begin with. That’s the definition of theft. And that “i pirate the game just to try it” is pure crap. There is the refund option..
Nothing is free in this world, not even the games Epic store “give away”…you are too naive, i just can’t.
Yeah the refund option is limited and what if dont want to use a crappy store? just NO kiddo. You think the games that you have in your library are of your own¿? you are renting them at best, game pass is even more explicit about that. You are paying for licenses, they have the value of unicorn dust.
I pirate games to then buying them if i think they deserve my money, are you calling me a liar?
Then you don’t. You play some other game. That’s what I am trying to say..
How about i do whatever i want¿? who the f*ck are you to tell others what to do with their wallet?
I am just saying don’t steal which is universally accepted by civilized societies..
LOL you cant be serious. We are bringing morality to a civilization scale now….honesty, f*ck off.
Eventually the games you paid for are gonna dissappear, change or being replace by some crappy and inferior remaster version, the copies you download on the internet are forever in your hardrive, free to use and do whatever you want: thats ownership.
I don’t give a crap to have a game forever in my harddrive. I just play it and move on..
So you are some casual being high and all might about piracy…that’s funny.
I just don’t like stealing the work of others, that’s all..
Well, get used to it…sorry princess. I dont like people supporting awfuly made games…you dont see me going around telling people to not buy crappy games dont you? learn the lesson.
And I don’t like stealing..
Get with the news, i dont care…nobody in the internet cares.
If it’s so crappy then why do you want to steal it?
Because im not stealing it…cause this game is not even worth the waste of bandwith.
I bet you bought every single music album, movie and book you had, citizen.
And also I have games in my steam library for over 10 years and they haven’t gone anywhere..
You just wait…seriously you are way too naive..this has to be some high rate trolling
Can I ask you a question? What’s your profession or your education? College, etc?
Why do you care? you are not the police…only acting like it. You are bringing the social level/class now? seriously? i dont have to ask anything about you to figure you out on the other hand.
So you are a high school drop out with no money? Starting to make more sense.
Thats a lot of projection.
OMG, do you thieves have any other justification. It’s always the same, WRONG, argument.
You are starting with a poor argument calling piracy stealing…
Piracy isn’t theft.
Well, it is..
No,even pirating this POS is not recommended lol.
If it’s so bad then why play the pirated version? You are just looking for an excuse to steal.
idiot read the article the retail game is broken by a patch the pirated version is unpatched so no performance problem there….jeez who are those dense mofos that joined this website lately?!
Idiot, there was no patch to the Steam version. This entire article is completely full of sh*t. The author even admitted that the only update they received is a “”Steamworks Shared” update, which are DX, C++, etc updates. NOT a game update. The only PC version that received an update was the GamePass version, and that update was only because they released an older build. The update was to bring it up to the Steam version. Try to not be an idiot, before calling someone else an idiot.
If what you are saying is true which i have no way to check because i dont have the game to confirm that, it means i was misleaded by an article from a gaming news website.
And where the author admitted that?
I reread to article to make sure but i dont see any update.
Anyway being misleaded by a supposed trustworthy source is not idiocy but not understanding what is written that is true idiocy.
Just a couple posts right below this. This is a direct copy/paste of what the article authors post:
John Papadopoulos Mod RodroG • 3 days ago •
“The update was in the form of “Steamworks Shared” and not of an executable file.”
Something is going on with polish studios…they all became incompetent recently.
Hopefully the trend will stop by the time Dying Light 2 comes out
Crossing fingers it doesnt gets more delays, is been a while since we seen some new footage (and what we saw was pretty cool).
I am frankly afraid that something has gone wrong for the development of Dying Light 2 …. bad feelings!
What a pity!
I sure hope so.
Cyberpunk’s launch was atrocious and poorly handled but I still think the game is a masterpiece. If you can wait another couple of months you will be able to play the game we all thought it would be without the bugs. Still Judy tho………….
I dont understand you, you say the game is a masterpiece but also recommend to wait for it to get fixed/completed.
I already finished the 3 lifepaths…the game is quite mediocre in my book, and im not considering the bugs and poor performance in the judgement.
So you finished the game 3 times and still say it’s medioce?
Yes, i need it to see all the lies CDPR said about the “different lifepaths”. I have free time. What’s wrong with replaying a mediocre game?
Sensitive people think that mediocre is a replacement for bad it seems.
ok
https://media1.giphy.com/media/l2Sq2GF6w5CXAXJKw/giphy.gif
Yes i understand, for me I still had a very positive experience with it. There are few games where you look back at moments and think wooow that was intense, or heartbreaking or just cool. I don’t know I just thought it was more interesting than a lot of games. These are only my opinions
A masterpiece in what? I can think of a dozen past games that have better story and gameplay than Cyberpunk that came out finished. What happened to the use of ‘masterpiece’ these days? It seems people have lowered their standards.
I really enjoyed the story and the world they built. It is ok to think differently
Really? Look at the Riftbreaker for instance. Cant say much for the rest of the upcoming titles but dragging all over the same cliff isn’t fair.
Im clearly talking about the mainstream games made from polish studios (Can think of The Medium and CP77 recently, both released a mess and they made things worse with patches)….im sure they are doing fine indie games with no issue.
This game is not even vaguely or remotely good enough looking or complex enough to warrant such bad performance and need for high end hardware. Yet another show boat for NEVER PREORDER.
The mediocre
On my 2060 though I saw +5fps on the same scene..
Those guys have no idea of what they are messing about… just a waste of money.
The Memeium
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c747de410b73e08748b256884a3a2630735f72057012229bfe02e8eadd5c1ee4.png
damn that sucks, i was about to play it again but it started to download the patch (14gb when the original game was only a 24.47gb download). I wanted to see what changes there were and so I read this. I tried pausing it/cancelling the update but I can’t so it is now reinstalling. I have been enjoying it so far, recommended if you like the narrative-heavy walking simulator genre (I do: I loved telltale games and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture). This is more horror Alan Wake-like. The camera is annoying but the game is beautiful.
I am playing on the xbox app (Xbox PC GamePass) but I am guessing it is the same patch as the steam version
Just. No. Stop. There was no game update for the Steam version. There was one for the PC GamePass because it did not match the Steam version upon launch. They patched the PC GamePass version to bring it up to the Steam build. Again, there has NOT been any update to the Steam version at this point. The article author even admit the only update they received was a Steamworks Shared update. Not one for the game.
To the author. Please edit the article to reflect true facts. The Steam version was NOT updated. SteamDB shows that the public branch is still 5 days old. Of course, the developers are probably working on a patch because, 4 hours ago, the beta branch was updated, but the public build of The Medium on Steam has not changed since January 25th. Regards.
The update was in the form of “Steamworks Shared” and not of an executable file. Upon launching the game, Steam started downloading it (you cannot bypass it and start the game without updating it). After finishing it, the game behaved the way we showcased. Again, prior to this update, the benchmark scene was running with 98% GPU utilization. No other game has been affected by this latest “Steamworks Shared” Update other than The Medium (in fact, other games could launch fine while Steam was downloading this update).
Thank you for your replay. Technically a “Steamworks Shared” update is not a game update, so stating in the article that “Bloober Team has just released a new update for the Steam version of The Medium” is still not accurate and misleading.
“Steamworks Shared” packages are shared and third-party DX/Visual C++ redistributables that can be necessary to run Steam games. The Steam client triggers updates for these shared components from time to time to verify/repair prior installations, update them, or within game installations.
I also received a press build of the Steam version for review, and neither the game nor the Steamworks components were updated so far.
That said, I also noticed all the performance inconsistencies and flaws you reported in your first article. However, blaming in this second article a non-existent game update as the cause of an eventual worse performance seems inaccurate and misleading, in my opinion.
Kind regards.
Point is that prior to that update, our benchmark scene was working properly. It’s a reproducible issue on multiple GPUs with both APIs, not a random bug or something we fabricated.
We’ve also informed Bloober Team about this (as well as for our previous findings) who has not denied this. And I’m pretty sure that Bloober knows better than everyone else (if an update was not the cause of this enormous performance hit, they’d let us know).
Also note that, contrary to other games in which you must use a “beta” code in order to enable the “review” build, in The Medium we did not have to do such a thing. I’m saying this because the game’s folder was also updated in the very same date (so our review build may be using the beta build? I don’t think so though as the game’s properties do not suggest such a thing). Still, the game folder was indeed updated on the same day we received the Steamworks Shared update so while the executable may be the same, some other files may have been updated.
PS: Since the game has been pirated, we can also go ahead and experiment with that version. The pirated version is based on the original Steam version. So, if the pirated version runs better in the benchmark scene (and similar to what we were getting previously), then there is no doubt that there was an update to some files of the Steam version.
So, you just admitted the game never received an update on Steam, and that it was only a Steamworks Shared update. Lmao. This entire piece of sh*t article should be removed from existence. 100% fake news. What a liar and a complete joke.
Your GPU was overclocked too….
Any sane person today wait for the first bunch of patches to get a good game and by then usually a discount is available too – So not just a superior product but also often cheaper.
The ‘AAA’ publishers/devs seems to what that as they keep releasing and selling basically beta versions.
Fake news liars. There has been no update to the Steam version.
“Bloober Team has just released a new update for the Steam version of The Medium”
um NO. there has NOT been a patch released for the Steam version even as of today so please get your facts straight.
I also messaged the author about this inaccuracy and misleading statement (see my comment below). Sadly, he argued that the Steam version of The Medium was updated because he received a “Steamworks Shared” update, and after that, the game showed a worse performance. Anyway, this argument is still highly questionable, in my opinion. Technically, based on SteamDB, and from my own experience as reviewer, I cannot support nor agree with the statement that the Steam version of the game was updated yet.
Once again you PC gamers are f**king WEIRDOOSSS!!! loooool
@JohnDio:disqus This fake news article still exists? You should be ashamed of yourself and the entire site for posting these complete lies. The Steam version has NEVER received an update. The Steam site itself proves that fact. Delete this stupid article as you clearly have ZERO idea what you’re talking about or what you’re doing. Not the first fake news article about this game from you either. Please, quit your day job. You suck at it.