Скачать или смотреть The Medium PC - i5 4690K & GTX 1070 - FPS Test and Settings | DX11 vs DX12 | FSR OFF vs ON

Greetings, everyone.

Today we’re re-testing The Medium, but it’s on my old PC, the 4690K and GTX 1070. This is supposedly a “next-gen” game, despite the fact that’s just a very demanding game because of its “dual-reality” render mechanic.

My old PC specs are:

-CPU: i5 [email protected] GHz with Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO.
-Mobo: Asus Maximus VII Ranger (Z97).
-GPU: Inno3D Twin X2 GTX 1070 (stock) and WHQL driver 472.12.
-RAM: 16 GB DDR3@1866, 9-10-9-28.
-Storage: Kingston SSDNow 300, 240 GB (O.S. and game), WD Caviar Black 500 GBx2 HDDs on RAID 0 setup (for files, videos and stuff).
-Case: Antec P182 from a million years ago (2007), and poor frontal airflow :P
-PSU: Corsair RMx 650W 80+ Gold.
-O.S: Windows 10 Pro with latest updates.
-Monitor: Acer GN246HLB 144 Hz.

Here's my previous video for this game, on the R5 3600 and RTX 3060 Ti:    • The Medium PC - Ryzen 5 3600 & RTX 3060 Ti...  

Some timestamps:

00:00 - Intro and 1080p High Settings, DX11, intro cutscene testing
03:27 - [1080p]DX11 vs DX12 High Settings side by side comparison, intro cutscene
05:14 - [1080p]DX11 vs DX12 High Settings, FSR Ultra Quality comparison, intro cutscene
07:59 - [1080p]DX11 vs DX12 High Settings, FSR Quality comparison, intro scene
10:26 - [1080p]DX12 Medium Settings, FSR OFF vs FSR Ultra Quality vs FSR Quality comparison
13:33 - [1080p]DX12 Lowest Settings, FSR OFF vs FSR Ultra Quality vs FSR Quality comparison
16:32 - [1080p]DX12 Medium Settings, some gameplay in the initial area
18:39 - [1080p]DX12 Medium Settings, first split-reality scene
19:43 - [1080p]DX12 Medium Settings, 30 FPS RTSS limit, on the way to Niwa Resort
22:16 - [1080p]DX12 Medium Settings, 30 FPS cap, another dual-reality gameplay scenario
24:59 - [1080p]DX12 Medium Settings, 30 FPS cap, cutscene with Sadness, very GPU intensive
29:40 - [1080p]Dx12 Medium Settings, 30 FPS limit, some gameplay at Niwa, after Sadness cutscene

If there’s any good news here when playing The Medium is the obvious fact that we don’t really need a top of the line CPU to run it, my 4 core 4690K does just fine, because the whole game is basically very GPU bottlenecked due to how its rendering works.

In the first minutes of gameplay we see great performance and that could make some people believe that’s how the whole game works, after all, the first split-reality scene with Jack runs pretty decently all things considered, but sadly that is not the case in many other parts of the game, later on.

With a GTX 1070, a resolution of 1080p is all we can expect to be able to run “comfortably” and not really always at stable FPS, not even 30 sometimes.

The minimum specs for Low Settings at 1080p and 30 FPS ask for a GTX 1070, and for Medium Settings, same resolution and frame-rate, a 1660 Super; the GTX 1070 falls in between those two, more close to the 1660 Super of course, than to the 1060, but still…even at Medium Settings certain dual-reality scenes, like the one with Sadness, tank performance to the low 20’s.

Once that scene is over, sure we go back to our locked 30 FPS that we used there, but we’re pretty much at the limit. Using AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution helps a little bit, but you need to go to Performance mode, which uses 50% of the native resolution, to keep those 30 FPS at all times, in certain really demanding scenes, and that does not look very great, specially not when then image is divided by two due to both realities being rendered.

If we were talking about Performance or Ultra Performance DLSS, which uses AI to enhance things quite a bit…yeah, I could give it a solid pass, but FSR with just a ton of Sharpening in there…does not look great at 540p internal resolution. It’s alright at Ultra or Quality modes, I guess, but that’s it.

All in all, surprised the 4690K runs another 2021 game just “fine”, only not that much because the GPU can’t keep with the dual-reality system sometimes. If you can get past certain scenes of the game going below 30 FPS, I think the game can be played at 30 and it does not really require high FPS since it barely has any action going on.

As usual, I hope this can be useful to any of you, and I’ll see you in the next one : )

#TheMedium #GTX1070 #4690K