The Medium

The Medium, a fixed-camera horror title built on Unreal Engine 4, presents an unusual stress profile for the AMD Ryzen 5 5500 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 pairing. Benchmark data shows this combination delivers a wide spread of frame rates, with the GPU clearly dominating the performance equation at higher resolutions while the CPU's Zen 3 architecture becomes a more visible factor at 1080p. The measured results reveal a system that is overwhelmingly GPU-bound, but not uniformly so across all settings presets.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling from 1080p to 4K demonstrates a classic GPU-limited scenario, though the severity depends heavily on the quality preset. At High settings, the transition from 1920x1080 (94.1 FPS) to 2560x1440 (80.7 FPS) represents a 14.2% drop, while moving to 3840x2160 (67.1 FPS) costs another 16.9% relative to 1440p. This indicates that even at 4K High, the RTX 5090 retains substantial headroom, as the game's fixed-camera angles and controlled scene complexity do not fully saturate the GPU's 32 GB memory buffer or 104.8 TFLOPS FP32 throughput.

The scaling pattern shifts notably at Ultra settings. Here, the 1080p result (78.3 FPS) drops to 65.4 FPS at 1440p, then falls further to 49 FPS at 4K. That 4K Ultra figure is less than half of the 1080p Low result (128 FPS), showing that the Ultra preset imposes a rendering cost that grows disproportionately with pixel count. The gap between Low and Ultra at 4K is stark: 111 FPS versus 49 FPS, a 55.9% reduction. This suggests that The Medium's Ultra settings include effects like volumetric lighting and ray-traced reflections that scale super-linearly with resolution.

Interestingly, the Medium preset at 4K (93 FPS) sits much closer to the Low preset (111 FPS) than to High (67.1 FPS), implying that the Medium settings disable several of the most expensive visual features. The data indicates that at 1080p, the CPU begins to exert influence: the difference between Low (128 FPS) and Medium (105.4 FPS) is 17.6%, but the gap between Medium and High (94.1 FPS) is only 10.7%. This compression at higher settings suggests the Ryzen 5 5500's six cores and 12 threads are nearing their limit around 128 FPS, preventing the RTX 5090 from stretching further even when the GPU load is lighter.

How This Combo Ranks

The AMD Ryzen 5 5500 with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 ranks 121st out of 1,689 tested combinations in The Medium, placing it in the 92.8th percentile of all systems. This is a strong showing, but it reveals that the pairing is not perfectly balanced for this specific title. The CPU's average benchmark score of 20,875 places it just 0.1% behind the Intel Core i5-12500 and AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4655GE, and 0.1% ahead of the AMD EPYC 7J13. That tight grouping confirms the Ryzen 5 5500 is a mid-pack performer in synthetic tests, yet its 79th percentile ranking among all CPUs suggests it has enough single-thread and multi-thread capability to avoid bottlenecking most scenarios.

However, the GPU's percentile ranking tells a different story. The RTX 5090 sits in the 94th percentile of all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 84,306. Its nearest rival, the RTX 5090 D, scores 84,241 (0.1% lower), while the RTX 5050 Mobile is 0.2% behind at 84,171. The fact that this flagship desktop GPU only achieves a 121st place combo ranking in The Medium — rather than a top-50 position — indicates that the game itself is not demanding enough to fully separate the RTX 5090 from lesser cards. The measured FPS data supports this: even at 4K Ultra, the 49 FPS average is playable, meaning the combo's ranking is more constrained by the CPU and game engine than by GPU compute limits.

GPU Role

The RTX 5090's specifications are overwhelming on paper, and the benchmark results reflect that, but The Medium does not utilize the full extent of its capabilities. The GPU's 32 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 512-bit bus provides 1.79 TB/s of bandwidth, which is far beyond what this game requires for its texture streaming and fixed-camera scenes. The 176 ROPs and 680 TMUs handle pixel and texture throughput efficiently, but the game's modest polygonal complexity means the 21760 shading units are often idle.

Clock speeds are also relevant to the frame rate patterns. The base clock of 2017 MHz boosts to 2407 MHz under load, and the memory runs at 1750 MHz (28 Gbps effective). These clocks are high, but the game's frame pacing at 4K Ultra (49 FPS) suggests that the GPU is hitting power or thermal limits rather than raw compute limits, given its 575 W TDP. The pixel rate of 423.6 GPixel/s and texture rate of 1,636.8 GTexel/s are more than sufficient for the resolutions tested, yet the 4K High result of 67.1 FPS shows that the game's rendering pipeline introduces inefficiencies that even this GPU cannot overcome.

The GPU's DirectX 12 Ultimate support (12_2) aligns with the game's modern rendering features, but the benchmark scores — 14,411 in 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 and 39,650 in Passmark G3D — confirm that the card is operating well within its design envelope. The compute-heavy workloads, such as Passmark GPU Compute at 26,756, do not translate to proportional gains in The Medium because the game is not compute-bound. In essence, the GPU is over-provisioned for this title, and the measured FPS figures are more indicative of engine limitations than hardware headroom.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the lowest tested resolution, the combo produces its highest frame rates, but the scaling is uneven. The Low preset delivers 128 FPS, which drops to 105.4 FPS at Medium and 94.1 FPS at High. The Ultra preset falls to 78.3 FPS. The 38.8% gap between Low and Ultra at 1080p is substantial, but the absolute numbers suggest that the CPU is the limiting factor in the Low preset, as 128 FPS approaches the practical ceiling for this processor in the game's engine.

Stepping up to 2560x1440, the results show a more GPU-centric scaling. Low runs at 122.6 FPS, Medium at 102 FPS, and High at 80.7 FPS. The Ultra preset drops to 65.4 FPS. The difference between 1080p Low (128 FPS) and 1440p Low (122.6 FPS) is only 4.2%, indicating that the GPU can absorb the extra pixel load without significant frame loss at lower settings. However, the gap between 1440p High (80.7 FPS) and 4K High (67.1 FPS) is 16.9%, showing that the higher quality settings amplify the resolution penalty.

At 3840x2160, the full picture emerges. Low runs at 111 FPS, Medium at 93 FPS, High at 67.1 FPS, and Ultra at 49 FPS. The 4K Medium result is particularly notable because it is 37.9% higher than 4K High, despite only a one-step reduction in settings. This suggests that High enables a specific set of effects (likely including volumetric fog and higher shadow resolution) that disproportionately impacts performance on this GPU. The 4K Ultra figure of 49 FPS is the only result below 60 FPS in the entire dataset, but it remains playable for a horror title where slower pacing is acceptable. Across all resolutions, the Low preset delivers the highest FPS, but the Medium preset offers the best balance of visual quality and frame rate, particularly at 4K where it maintains 93 FPS.

FAQ

Q: Is the RTX 5090 bottlenecked by the Ryzen 5 5500 in The Medium?

A: At 1080p Low, the 128 FPS result is likely CPU-limited, as the six-core processor's 16,429 Cinebench R23 multi-core score and 2,319 single-core score are modest. However, at 1440p and 4K, the GPU becomes the dominant factor, with 4K Ultra dropping to 49 FPS, indicating the CPU has sufficient headroom at higher resolutions.

Q: What is the best settings preset for 4K gameplay?

A: The Medium preset at 3840x2160 delivers 93 FPS, which is 38.7% higher than the High preset's 67.1 FPS and 89.8% higher than Ultra's 49 FPS. This suggests Medium provides the most fluid experience at 4K without the significant frame rate penalty of higher presets.

Q: How does this combo compare to other systems in the database?

A: The pairing ranks 121st out of 1,689 tested combinations, placing it in the top 7.2% of all systems. This is a strong result, but the CPU's 79th percentile ranking versus the GPU's 94th percentile shows an imbalance that prevents a higher overall rank in this game.

Q: Does the RTX 5090's 32 GB VRAM provide any benefit in this game?

A: The 32 GB GDDR7 memory with 1.79 TB/s bandwidth is far more than The Medium requires. The measured FPS figures show no VRAM-related stutters or texture pop-in, but the game's fixed-camera scenes do not meaningfully stress the memory subsystem, so the high capacity does not translate to higher frame rates.

Q: Why does the FPS drop so much from Medium to High settings at 4K?

A: The 4K Medium preset runs at 93 FPS, while High drops to 67.1 FPS, a 27.8% reduction. This indicates that the High preset activates rendering features (likely volumetric lighting or enhanced shadows) that impose a significant compute cost on the RTX 5090, despite its 104.8 TFLOPS FP32 capability.

Q: Is this combo suitable for 1080p high-refresh-rate monitors?

A: At 1080p, the system delivers 128 FPS on Low and 94.1 FPS on High, which exceeds 60 Hz but falls short of 144 Hz on higher settings. The Ultra preset's 78.3 FPS is still smooth, but the CPU's 3.60 GHz base clock and 4.20 GHz boost clock limit the maximum achievable frame rate in this title.