First Xbox next-gen exclusive, The Medium, brings the GeForce RTX 3080 to its knees: can't manage a locked 1080p/60 FPS, even with ray-tracing disabled

Bloober Team recently launched The Medium, the first next-gen exclusive title to arrive on PC and Xbox Series S/X. While the game received very positive reviews, thanks to great atmosphere and a gripping story, performance appears to be the greatest horror. As it stands today, The Medium can't manage a fully locked 1080p/60 FPS, even on the flagship Ampere GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. 

The folks over at DSOGaming recently reported about dire performance figures. With RTX effects disabled and DLSS disabled, portions of the game ran as low as 52 FPS. With ray-tracing set to ultra and DLSS disabled, performance dropped to a miserable 15-20 FPS, in a benchmark run by YouTuber Cycu1. It's important to note, however, that with ray-tracing disabled and quality DLSS turned on, the game ran at a healthy 70-80 FPS at 4K. 

This leads us to the conclusion that, while The Medium does appear to have optimization issues in certain sections, current-gen ray-tracing hardware - whether that's Ampere's RT cores or the console equivalent - is simply not capable enough. In the here and now, turning DLSS on while disabling ray-tracing could be the way to go. We might have to wait until Navi 31 and Lovelace (or beyond) to get truly playable RT. 

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