The Medium

The Medium is one of the heaviest Unreal Engine 4 ports of its era, and the pairing of an Intel Core i3-12100F with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 lands in a specific, well-defined spot for this horror title: strong enough for 1080p play, marginal at 1440p, and out of its depth at 4K. The database holds measured frame rates for this exact combination across twelve resolution-and-preset points, and the recorded data tells a consistent story. The RTX 2060 sits in the 58th percentile of all GPUs, the i3-12100F in the 68th percentile of all CPUs, and this game punishes the graphics card far more than the processor.

How This Combo Ranks

Across the full set of hardware combinations tested in The Medium, this pairing ranks 2977 out of 3724 combos. That places it in the bottom fifth of the database for this specific game, which is a reflection of how demanding The Medium is rather than a broad indictment of the hardware. The RTX 2060 is a Turing card with 1920 shading units, 30 RT cores, 240 tensor cores, and 6 GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus delivering 336.0 GB/s of bandwidth. The Medium's dual-reality rendering, where two full scenes are drawn simultaneously in key sections, eats into that frame buffer quickly.

Context matters here. Against its nearest GPU rivals in the database, the RTX 2060's average benchmark score of 15290 is statistically tied with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 (15283, a 0 percent delta), fractionally ahead of the AMD Radeon 680M (15270, 0.1 percent), the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 OEM (15199, 0.6 percent), and the AMD Radeon RX 7600 (15171, 0.8 percent). In other words, everything within half a percent of this card's class will produce effectively identical The Medium behavior.

The CPU side is not the limiter. The i3-12100F scores 1932 in Geekbench single-core and 7252 multi-core, with a 3DMark single-thread score of 893, and it posts essentially identical 3DMark results at 8 threads (4026) and max threads (4023), which confirms the 4-core, 8-thread Alder Lake design saturates fully at its thread count. Its rivals, the Intel Core 3 N355 (0 percent delta), Intel Core i5-9500 (0.3 percent), Intel Core 5 120UL (-0.7 percent), and Intel Core i7-1250U (1.1 percent delta), all cluster within about one percent of its average score of 13494. Horror games built on Unreal Engine 4 rarely need more than this, and the measured frame rates indicate the GPU is the deciding factor at every preset.

FAQ

Q: Can the i3-12100F + RTX 2060 run The Medium at 1080p?

A: Yes. At 1920x1080 on the Low preset, the measured average is 83.5 FPS, comfortably above the 60 FPS playability threshold. Medium is the closest runner-up at 51.4 FPS average, which falls short of 60.

Q: What about 1440p?

A: Barely. At 2560x1440, only the Low preset clears the bar, at 72.2 FPS average. Medium drops to 43 FPS average and High falls to 34.1 FPS average, so dropping detail is mandatory at this resolution.

Q: Is 4K playable at all?

A: No. At 3840x2160 the best result is 54.7 FPS average on Low, below the 60 FPS threshold. Medium averages 33 FPS, High 23 FPS, and Ultra 19 FPS. No preset is considered playable at 4K per the recorded verdicts.

Q: How much does the preset choice matter at 1080p?

A: Significantly. Going from Low (83.5 FPS) to Ultra (28.9 FPS) at 1080p cuts average frame rate by roughly two thirds. Medium (51.4 FPS) and High (39 FPS) sit between them, and neither reaches 60.

Q: Does ray tracing hardware help in this game?

A: The data does not isolate ray tracing performance, but the RTX 2060 carries 30 RT cores and supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), so hardware ray tracing is available. The measured results cover standard presets only.

Q: Is the CPU a bottleneck in The Medium?

A: The evidence suggests no. The game's frame rates scale with resolution and preset in a pattern consistent with GPU limitation, and the i3-12100F's strong single-thread results (893 in 3DMark single-thread, 1674 in Cinebench R23 single-core) cover Unreal Engine 4's threading profile.

Best Settings per Resolution

Using the 60 FPS average threshold, the best playable preset at each resolution is:

• 1920x1080, Low: 83.5 FPS average. The only 1080p preset at or above 60.
• 2560x1440, Low: 72.2 FPS average. The only 1440p preset at or above 60.
• 3840x2160: no playable preset. The best recorded result is Low at 54.7 FPS average, which misses the threshold.

The pattern is stark: at no resolution does Medium clear 60 FPS. The step from Low to Medium costs roughly 25 to 40 percent of the average frame rate depending on resolution, which reflects The Medium's heavy use of volumetric effects and simultaneous scene rendering.

Similar Performance Alternatives

If this exact pairing is unavailable, the database's rival data points to near-identical substitutes. On the graphics side, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 OEM (0.6 percent behind the RTX 2060 in average score) and the AMD Radeon RX 7600 (0.8 percent behind) will land within a frame or two of these results in The Medium. The AMD Radeon 680M, an integrated solution scoring 0.1 percent below the RTX 2060's average, also clusters with this card in the database's aggregate metrics, though the 6 GB of dedicated GDDR6 and 336.0 GB/s bandwidth on the 2060 remain real advantages in a title with dual-world scenes. The GTX 580, at a 0 percent delta, is the closest statistical match in the ranking set.

On the processor side, substitutes are interchangeable for this game. The Intel Core i5-9500 sits 0.3 percent behind the i3-12100F's average score, the Intel Core i7-1250U is 1.1 percent behind, and the Intel Core 5 120UL is actually 0.7 percent ahead. Any of these will reproduce the CPU side of these results within margin of error. The i3-12100F itself brings four Alder Lake cores on Intel's 10 nm process, a 3.30 GHz base and 4.30 GHz boost clock, a 58 W TDP, 12 MB of shared L3 cache, and support for both DDR4 and DDR5 on Socket 1700, so a system built around any rival CPU will not change The Medium's frame rate ceiling: the GPU decides.

Measured FPS Breakdown

All figures below are measured averages for the i3-12100F + RTX 2060 combination in The Medium.

1920x1080:

• Low: 83.5 FPS
• Medium: 51.4 FPS
• High: 39 FPS
• Ultra: 28.9 FPS

2560x1440:

• Low: 72.2 FPS
• Medium: 43 FPS
• High: 34.1 FPS
• Ultra: 23.5 FPS

3840x2160:

• Low: 54.7 FPS
• Medium: 33 FPS
• High: 23 FPS
• Ultra: 19 FPS

Two observations stand out. First, Low scales unusually well with resolution: 83.5 at 1080p, 72.2 at 1440p, and 54.7 at 4K. That shallow slope suggests the Low preset shifts the bottleneck partly toward the CPU and fixed engine costs, and the i3-12100F handles its share without folding. Second, the upper presets collapse hard: Ultra is between roughly two and three times slower than Low at every resolution, and the gap between Medium and Ultra (43 versus 23.5 FPS at 1440p) shows that the highest texture, shadow, and lighting settings are simply beyond a 6 GB Turing card in this engine.

For players who want a visual upgrade without falling off a cliff, Medium at 1080p at 51.4 FPS average is the closest near-miss, though it sits below the playability bar. High and Ultra are not realistic targets anywhere in this stack.

The Verdict

Yes, this PC can run The Medium, with clear limits. At 1920x1080 on Low, the measured average of 83.5 FPS delivers a comfortable experience with headroom, and 2560x1440 on Low also clears the bar at 72.2 FPS average. That is the full extent of playable territory: 1080p and 1440p, Low preset. No Medium or higher setting reaches 60 FPS at any resolution, and 4K is off the table entirely, with even Low managing only 54.7 FPS average.

For a horror game paced around exploration, tension, and fixed camera moments rather than twitch reflexes, Low-preset frame rates in the low seventies to low eighties are workable. The Medium's atmosphere survives reduced settings better than most genres. The practical recommendation for owners of this hardware: play at 1080p or 1440p with the Low preset, accept that the game's heavier visual modes require more GPU than the RTX 2060 provides, and treat any near-identical substitute card from the rival cluster as delivering the same experience. The CPU is not the constraint, and the recorded data is unambiguous about that.