Medal clips lag because your computer is struggling to record, compress, and save video at the same time you're playing

Medal is a background recording tool that captures your gameplay automatically. When you clip a moment, Medal has to take the raw video your graphics card just produced, compress it into a smaller file, and write it to your hard drive — all while your game is still running and demanding processing power. If your computer doesn't have enough spare capacity, both the game and the recording slow down.

The lag you feel is usually one of three things: your frame rate dropping during the clip save, a delay between when you press the hotkey and when the clip actually saves, or stuttering while Medal is processing in the background. Each has a different cause, and each has a different fix.

Key Takeaways

  • Medal clips lag most often because your hard drive is too slow to write video files while you're playing, especially on older mechanical drives.
  • Lowering your clip quality, resolution, or frame rate in Medal's settings reduces the amount of data Medal has to write per second.
  • Moving Medal's save folder to a faster drive (SSD instead of HDD, or a different SSD) often fixes lag when ready because the bottleneck is write speed, not your graphics card.
  • Closing other programs that use your hard drive — browsers with many tabs, cloud sync tools, antivirus scans — frees up the I/O bandwidth Medal needs.
  • If your frame rate itself is dropping, Medal is competing with your game for GPU resources, and you may need to lower in-game graphics settings instead.

Your hard drive speed is usually the bottleneck

Medal records at whatever frame rate and resolution your game is running. A 1440p game at 120 frames per second produces roughly 1.5 gigabytes of video data per minute before compression. Your hard drive has to write that data fast enough to keep up, or Medal queues it in memory and your system runs out of RAM.

Mechanical hard drives (the older spinning kind, usually labeled HDD) write at 100 to 200 megabytes per second. Solid-state drives (SSDs) write at 400 to 3,500 megabytes per second depending on the type. If Medal is saving to a mechanical drive while you're also running Windows, your browser, and Discord, the drive is already busy. Adding video write requests on top causes everything to slow down.

Check where Medal is saving clips: open Medal, go to Settings, then Storage. Note the drive letter. Open File Explorer, right-click that drive, select Properties, and look at the drive type. If it says "Local Disk" and the used space is fragmented across the bar, it's likely mechanical. If you see "SSD" or the bar is solid, it's solid-state.

Move Medal's save folder to a faster drive

If you have an SSD, move Medal's save folder there. Open Medal Settings, go to Storage, and click the folder icon next to the current path. Create a new folder on your SSD (for example, C:\Users\YourName\Videos\MedalClips if C: is your SSD) and select it. Medal will save new clips there when ready.

If you only have one drive and it's mechanical, the next best option is to lower Medal's quality settings so there's less data to write per second. Go to Settings, then Recording Quality. Lower the resolution from 1440p to 1080p, or lower the frame rate from 120 to 60. This cuts the data rate roughly in half and gives your drive time to catch up.

If you have two SSDs, use the one that isn't your Windows drive. Windows itself is constantly reading and writing to your system drive, and Medal competing for the same drive's attention still causes lag. A second SSD, even a slower one, will be faster than sharing your main drive.

Close programs that compete for hard drive access

Your hard drive can only do one thing at a time, even though it feels when ready. If OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, or another cloud sync tool is uploading files in the background, your drive is split between that and Medal. If Windows Defender is running a scan, or Chrome has 40 tabs open and is writing cache files, Medal has to wait.

Before you play, open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), click the Processes tab, and look at the Disk column. Sort by Disk to see what's using your hard drive. Close anything you don't need: browsers, cloud sync tools, or background Windows processes. Antivirus scans can wait until after you're done playing.

If you use Discord, OBS, or Twitch streaming software at the same time as Medal, those are also writing to disk. Streaming and clipping at the same time on a mechanical drive will cause lag in both. If you stream, move Medal's clips to an SSD or lower the quality.

Lower Medal's recording quality if you can't move the save folder

Medal's default settings record at your game's native resolution and frame rate. If your game runs at 1440p 120fps, Medal records at 1440p 120fps. You can lower either without changing how your game looks.

Open Medal, go to Settings, then Recording Quality. You'll see options for Resolution and Frame Rate. Try lowering Resolution to 1080p (most clips look fine at this size when watched on a phone or shared online). If that doesn't help, lower Frame Rate to 60fps. Both changes reduce the amount of data Medal writes per second.

You can also enable H.265 encoding if Medal offers it in your settings. H.265 compresses video more efficiently than H.264, which means smaller files and less hard drive strain. The trade-off is that some older devices or websites may not play H.265 files, but for personal clips it usually doesn't matter.

Check if your GPU is the bottleneck instead

If your frame rate is dropping during clips but your hard drive isn't full and isn't slow, Medal is competing with your game for graphics card resources. This happens less often than hard drive lag, but it does happen on older GPUs or when you're already running near your card's limit.

Open your game and Medal, then open a monitoring tool like MSI Afterburner or the built-in Windows Performance Monitor. Watch your GPU usage while you play normally. Then clip something and watch again. If GPU usage jumps to 95–100% when you clip, your graphics card is maxed out.

Lower your in-game graphics settings instead of Medal settings: reduce shadow quality, turn off ray tracing, lower the texture resolution, or cap your frame rate 10 fps below what your GPU can handle. This gives Medal room to record without stealing resources from the game itself.

Disable Medal's background recording if you only want manual clips

Medal runs in the background constantly, buffering the last few minutes of gameplay so you can clip retroactively. This uses CPU, GPU, and hard drive space even when you're not clipping. If you only want to clip moments you know are coming, you can turn off background recording and use manual recording instead.

Open Medal, go to Settings, then Recording. Toggle off Background Recording. Now Medal will only record when you press your clip hotkey. This saves hard drive writes and RAM usage, though you lose the ability to clip something that happened 30 seconds ago.

If you keep background recording on but still have lag, lower the buffer time. In the same Recording settings, look for Buffer Length or Clip Length and set it to 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes. Shorter buffer means less data in memory at any time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Medal lag more on certain games?

Yes. Games that already use a lot of GPU or CPU resources leave less headroom for Medal. Competitive shooters at high frame rates, open-world games with high settings, and games that use most of your VRAM will lag more. Lowering in-game settings or Medal's quality usually helps.

Will upgrading my GPU fix Medal lag?

Only if your GPU is already at 95–100% usage while clipping. If your hard drive is the bottleneck, a new GPU won't help. Check your GPU usage first. If it's under 80%, the problem is your hard drive or CPU, not your graphics card.

Can I save Medal clips to a USB drive?

Technically yes, but USB drives are usually slower than internal SSDs and will make lag worse. External SSDs connected via USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt are fast enough, but even then, an internal SSD is better. USB drives are fine for storing old clips you want to keep, not for active recording.

Why does Medal lag even when I'm not clipping?

Background recording is always running and always writing to your hard drive. If you notice lag even during normal gameplay, turn off background recording or lower the buffer length. You'll lose the ability to clip retroactively, but gameplay will be smoother.

Does Medal use more CPU or GPU?

Mostly GPU for the video encoding, but also some CPU for managing the buffer and writing to disk. If your CPU is already at 100% from your game, Medal's CPU load can push it higher and cause stuttering. Lowering Medal's frame rate or resolution reduces both CPU and GPU load.