and we don’t see medium tested here by this outlet it looks like at least going up to the high settings basically makes the game almost unplayable

To quote a comment I made some hours back on the Fediverse:

https://lemmy.today/comment/2708891

Also: If there are graphics presets available, if there’s one that’s called “highest” or “max” then that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.

While I can understand where you’re coming from, one thing I wonder about – I think that a lot of people want to use the max setting and expect it to work. It’s not unreasonable for a developer to choose ranges such that a max setting doesn’t run reasonably on any current hardware, as doing that may provide for scalability on future hardware. Like, it’s easy for me to make a game that can scale up to future hardware – e.g. try to keep more textures loaded in VRAM than exists on any hardware today, or have shadow resolutions that simply cannot be computed by existing hardware in a reasonable amount of time. But maybe in five years, the hardware can handle it.

If a game developer has the highest-quality across-the-board quality setting not work on any existing system, then I think that you’re going to wind up with people who buy a fancy PC, choose the “max” setting, and then complain “this game isn’t optimized, as I bought expensive hardware and it runs poorly on Ultra/Max/whatever mode”.

But if the game developer doesn’t let the settings go higher, then they’re hamstringing people who might be using the software five or ten years down the line.

I think that one might need a “maximum reasonable on existing hardware” setting or something like that.

I’ve occasionally seen “Insane” with a recommendation that effectively means something like that, “this doesn’t run on any existing hardware well, but down the line, it might”. But I suspect that there are people who are still going to choose that setting and be unhappy if it doesn’t perform well.