The Medium

The pairing of an Intel Core i5-10400F with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 is an unbalanced one on paper: a six-core, twelve-thread Comet Lake CPU from Intel's 10th Gen lineup feeding one of the fastest Ada Lovelace GPUs ever built. The Medium, a 2021 psychological horror title built around dual-reality rendering, asks an unusual question of hardware, and the recorded data for this combination reveals where the demands actually fall. Across 12 measured configurations spanning three resolutions and four presets, the combo clears the 60 FPS threshold in most scenarios, but 4K Ultra proves out of reach.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the database, this CPU and GPU pairing ranks 778th out of 3724 tested combinations in The Medium. That places it comfortably in the top quarter of tested systems for this game, which is consistent with the raw capability gap between the two components. The RTX 4080 sits in the 86th percentile versus all GPUs in the database, while the i5-10400F lands in the 68th percentile versus all CPUs. The ranking therefore reflects a strong GPU carrying a mid-range processor, and the game's engine determines how much of that GPU headroom is actually usable.

It is worth asking whether a higher-ranked combo would translate into meaningfully better frame rates here. The per-resolution data suggests the answer is nuanced: at 1080p and 1440p the frame rates are close together, hinting that the CPU may be the limiting factor in some configurations, something examined in detail below.

CPU and GPU Roles

The scaling data tells an interesting story. From 1920x1080 to 3840x2160 at the Medium preset, average frame rate falls from 89 to 77 FPS, a drop of only about 13 percent despite a fourfold increase in pixels. At Low settings, the drop is from 106 to 93 FPS, roughly 12 percent. These are remarkably shallow declines for a GPU-bound scenario. A purely GPU-limited game would typically show much steeper scaling between 1080p and 4K.

What does shallow scaling imply? It suggests the Core i5-10400F is the ceiling at lower resolutions and lower presets. The game runs into the processor's limits before the RTX 4080 runs out of shading power. The GPU's 9728 shading units, 76 RT cores, and 48.74 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput are largely idle at 1080p Low, where 106 FPS is likely all the six-core CPU can feed.

At the top end, the roles reverse. At 4K Ultra, the average falls to 45 FPS, well below the 57 FPS at 4K High. That is where the dual-reality rendering and ray-traced effects lean on the Ada Lovelace hardware and the GPU finally becomes the constraint. The Medium is therefore a game that shifts from CPU-bound to GPU-bound depending on resolution and preset, and this particular pairing sits at the crossover point in an instructive way.

The CPU's own benchmark profile supports the bottleneck theory. Its Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 10283 and single-core score of 1451 are respectable but modest, and its 3DMark scaling (688 single-thread, 2560 at four threads, 3929 at eight threads, 4735 at maximum threads) shows diminishing returns beyond eight threads, which matters for a game whose simulation thread typically rides on one or two cores.

FAQ

Q: Can the i5-10400F and RTX 4080 run The Medium at 4K?

A: Yes, but not at every preset. At 3840x2160, only Low (93 FPS average) and Medium (77 FPS average) stay at or above 60 FPS. High averages 57 FPS and Ultra averages 45 FPS, both short of the threshold.

Q: What is the single best result this combo achieved in the game?

A: 1920x1080 at Low settings produced a 106 FPS average, the highest figure in the recorded data.

Q: Is the CPU or the GPU more important for The Medium with this hardware?

A: The data indicates the CPU at lower resolutions. Frame rates at 1080p and 1440p differ by only a small margin (for example, 89 versus 84 FPS at Medium), indicating a processor ceiling. At 4K Ultra the GPU becomes the limit.

Q: How consistent are the frame rates?

A: At 1080p Medium the recorded range is 75 minimum to 102 maximum around an 89 FPS average. At 1440p Medium it is 71 to 96 around 84 FPS, and at 4K Medium it is 66 to 89 around 77 FPS. Minimum frame rates stay above 60 at Medium in all three cases.

Q: How does this combo rank against other tested systems in this game?

A: It ranks 778 out of 3724 tested combinations in the database, placing it in the top quarter.

Q: Does the RTX 4080's 16 GB of GDDR6X matter here?

A: The database does not record memory usage for this game, but with 16 GB of GDDR6X on a 256-bit bus delivering 716.8 GB/s of bandwidth, capacity and bandwidth are unlikely to be the limiting factor at any tested setting.

Similar Performance Alternatives

Looking at hardware that behaves comparably, the nearest GPU rivals in the database are telling. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER scores within 0.1 percent of the RTX 4080's average benchmark score, effectively identical, and would produce indistinguishable results in The Medium. The AMD Radeon Pro W5700X sits 1.1 percent behind, the AMD Radeon RX 6750 GRE 12 GB is 2.6 percent behind, and the AMD Radeon 8060S is 2.7 percent behind. Any of these paired with a similar CPU would land in the same performance band.

On the processor side, the i5-10400F's nearest rivals are an eclectic set: the Intel Xeon 6756E (0.2 percent delta), the Intel Core 7 160UL (-0.3 percent), the AMD EPYC 7552 (0.5 percent), and the AMD Ryzen 3 7320C (-0.6 percent). These are all within a fraction of a percent of the i5-10400F's aggregate benchmark average of 14185, suggesting that swapping in any of them would leave the game's frame-rate ceiling at lower resolutions essentially unchanged, since the recorded data points to the CPU as the limiter there.

Best Settings per Resolution

Based on the recorded averages and a 60 FPS playability threshold:

• 1920x1080: Ultra is the most demanding preset that stays at or above 60 FPS, averaging 68 FPS. All four presets clear the bar, with Low reaching 106, Medium 89, and High 78.
• 2560x1440: High is the ceiling, averaging 72 FPS. Ultra falls short at 57 FPS. Low (100) and Medium (84) also qualify.
• 3840x2160: Medium is the best playable preset, averaging 77 FPS with a recorded minimum of 66. High (57) and Ultra (45) do not clear the threshold.

A pattern emerges: each step up in resolution costs roughly one preset tier of headroom.

The Verdict

Yes, this PC can run The Medium, with one clear exception. At 1920x1080, every preset from Low through Ultra is playable, and Ultra at 68 FPS average is the recommended setting. At 2560x1440, Low, Medium, and High are playable, with High at 72 FPS the best choice; Ultra at 57 FPS misses the mark. At 3840x2160, only Low and Medium clear 60 FPS, and Medium at 77 FPS with a 66 FPS minimum is the strongest option; High and Ultra do not qualify.

For a horror game paced around atmosphere rather than twitch reflexes, the Medium settings results are arguably the sweet spot: frame rates are stable, minimums stay above the threshold, and image quality remains high.

Measured FPS Breakdown

All figures below are recorded database measurements for the Core i5-10400F and RTX 4080 combination in The Medium.

1920x1080:

• Low: 106 FPS average (minimum and maximum not recorded)
• Medium: 89 FPS average, 75 minimum, 102 maximum
• High: 78 FPS average (minimum and maximum not recorded)
• Ultra: 68 FPS average (minimum and maximum not recorded)

2560x1440:

• Low: 100 FPS average (minimum and maximum not recorded)
• Medium: 84 FPS average, 71 minimum, 96 maximum
• High: 72 FPS average (minimum and maximum not recorded)
• Ultra: 57 FPS average (minimum and maximum not recorded)

3840x2160:

• Low: 93 FPS average (minimum and maximum not recorded)
• Medium: 77 FPS average, 66 minimum, 89 maximum
• High: 57 FPS average (minimum and maximum not recorded)
• Ultra: 45 FPS average (minimum and maximum not recorded)

The complete dataset paints a coherent picture: this combination handles The Medium well from 1080p through 1440p at high settings, and 4K remains viable at Medium. The shallow resolution scaling at lower presets points to the six-core processor as the frame-rate governor, while the steep falloff at 4K High and Ultra shows where the dual-reality rendering finally saturates even a GPU of this class.