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DF: The Medium Tech Review: A closer look at Xbox's First Next-Gen Game

AnotherOne

Member



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• While exploring the world in full-screen, resolution tops out at native 4K on Series X and 1080p on Series S: during these segments, DRS scaling averages out to roughly 1440p on X and 900p on Series S. However, when exploring in split-screen mode, the minimum resolution drops further. On Series X, the lowest case is around 900p while the Series S equivalent is 648p. Remember, the game is literally rendering two independent scenes at the same time, explaining the drops in pixel count.

• In terms of the ray tracing support, The Medium features RT reflections - but only in certain locations and only on Xbox Series X and PC - with Series S dropping back to more conventional screen-space reflections. They do the job, but simply cannot reproduce detail that isn't present in the current camera view, so detail can to vanish in some scenarios. There are other differences between Xboxes as well: shadows, for instance, are rendered at a lower resolution on Series S. All shadows in The Medium are traditional rasterised shadows.
 
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skit_data

Member
DRS bottoms out at 900p on Series X and 648p on Series S. Jesus, thats expensive.

Edit: Aside from the animations and the resolution im left quite impressed by the visuals and the quick switches back and fort during certain scenes. No wonder this is taxing.
 
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scydrex

Member
DRS bottoms out at 900p on Series X and 648p on Series S. Jesus, thats expensive.

Edit: Aside from the animations and the resolution im left quite impressed by the visuals and the quick switches back and fort during certain scenes. No wonder this is taxing.

What? Jesus...
 
900p oh shit 😭
So people now act dumb again and completely ignore what DF says in video?

In one single scene its native 4k with RT on SX and 1080p on S but in dual rendered scene with RT (which are crazy taxing on hardware), game lowers resolution to 900p on X and 648p on S.


Dual rendereding at 4k or above 1080p resolution will be really hard for a 500$ consoles or PC.
 
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Portugeezer

Member
The dual rendering sections are clearly very taxing.

Anyway, good work from DF once again. Reminder to keep expectations in check, especially when it comes to indie devs.

So people now act dumb again and completely ignore what DF says in video?

In one single scene its native 4k with RT on SX and 1080p on S but in dual rendered scene with RT (which are crazy taxing on hardware), game lowers resolution to 900p on X and 648p on S.


Dual rendereding at 4k or above 1080p resolution will be really hard for a 500$ consoles or PC.
No. It's dynamic, he said 1440p average for single screen. Native 4k is max (only for single screen), 900p is lowest.
 
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So people now act dumb again and completely ignore what DF says in video?

In one single scene its native 4k with RT on SX and 1080p on S but in dual rendered scene with RT (which are crazy taxing on hardware), game lowers resolution to 900p on X and 648p on S.


Dual rendereding at 4k or above 1080p resolution will be really hard for a 500$ consoles or PC.

Wouldn't be taxing of they used SSR for example and resolution would be higher.
 

Md Ray

Member
Not a resolution snob; but that game just doesn't look very good. Nifty tech I guess, but even in full screen it doesn't feel next-gen to me.
The only next-gen thing about it is the instant streaming of assets and dual viewport rendering. That's about it.
 

muteZX

Banned
Walking simulator at 30 fps with average gfx, but none of that is a XSX fault /see also poorly coded texture streaming managment/ and dual viewport/dual assets .. ehh .. see wonderful portal technology on archaic PS2 /32 megs RAM without HDD/.
 

nowhat

Member
30 person team on a small budget trying to push out full scale AAA wanna be horror game... Something gotta give...and this something is optimisation. There is none.
I mean. CDPR has what, how many hundreds of employees? Yet they thought optimisation was something that can be ignored. I guess it's always the first thing to go.

(In case of CDPR and Cyberpunk, also so many promised features/mechanics - I guess when it comes to AAA development, everything must go!)
 

scydrex

Member
Why is this game rendered twice? Does the RT works or is the finest RT implementation so far? Haven't watched the video yet. Will watch it tonight.
 

UnNamed

Banned
In one single scene its native 4k with RT on SX and 1080p on S but in dual rendered scene with RT (which are crazy taxing on hardware), game lowers resolution to 900p on X and 648p on S
I'm not sure what John says is the real reason why the game runs at a low resolution: basically he's saying in a normal game with split screen you need to calculate different geometry (and different shaders in modern games,) but assets are the same, so I imagine having geometry (and shaders) already loaded is good thing. Since The Medium use some different assets, different shaders and a different illumination on both screens, probably it's the reason why it's more taxing.
At the same time, the scene is almost the same, and not packed with tons of polygons, it looks old gen to me, also the splitscreen is used mostly in small areas. Probably there is also a problem on how Unreal Engine render the two screens.
Not a ugly game, but not an achievement either. I would not spend money on next gen for this.
 
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Md Ray

Member
When is the game using "instant streaming of assets" though?

I'm confused on that since the game doesn't even require an SSD on PC.
There's this sequence here (timestamped) that I think was impressive:


The terrain and its textures and other assets instantly disappearing and reappearing while switching between the real world and the spirit world right before your eyes all while you're running through the world.
 
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GHG

Gold Member
without a doubt, I didn't expect 900p BUT at the same time its rendering 2 completely separate worlds at the same time

The excuse doesn't make much sense considering the number of pixels being output as the final result is the same.

That essentially means each world is being rendered at half of 900p individually if I'm reading this correctly. Something is off with how they are going about rendering the two scenes side by side, I would have thought the main stress would have been on the CPU. Sounds like nothing is being scaled appropriately in the dual world scenes.

Do the assets/geometry/ray tracing need to stay at their highest settings in both scenes when the player can only see everything at half resolution?

I'm interested to see if it performs any different on PC but I suspect not considering the hardware requirements chart stated 30fps. The issue is likely with the game, not the hardware.
 
I'll probably try it on Gamepass but 900p is gross image quality.

I've not paid too much attention to the game but hopefully the split screen stuff is not just a gimmick.
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
There's this sequence here (timestamped) that I think was impressive:


The terrain and its textures and other assets instantly disappearing and reappearing while switching between the real world and the spirit world right before your eyes all while you're running through the world.

But how do you know that's only possible on SSD? Is that sequence removed from PC?

The game is clearly holding both sets of assets in memory to do that. It takes several seconds to fill the XSX RAM. Even if it was just 2.5 GB of textures / models being switched out that would take an entire second.

The lack of detail in this game is explained by that and other scenes.. it's not instantly streaming anything IMO, it's just holding the "other world's" assets in memory the whole time.

The same could be said for Ratchet even. What's impressive about Ratchet is that it renders a fairly beautiful / high detail / lots going on world and then you go through a portal and in a couple seconds switches to another. If Sony halved the detail, they could hold both worlds in memory at once, and do the same thing on a much slower drive.
 
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