The Medium

The Medium, a fixed-camera horror title built around layered reality shifts, presents a distinctive load profile that rewards a balanced system. The combination of the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 produces a dataset that clearly illustrates the game's engine scaling behavior across resolutions and presets. This analysis breaks down the measured performance to determine where the bottleneck lies and how to configure the game for the optimal experience.

Resolution Scaling

The performance delta between 1080p and 4K reveals a system that is heavily GPU-bound at higher resolutions, with the CPU becoming a more significant factor only at lower settings. At High settings, moving from 1920x1080 (95.8 FPS) to 2560x1440 (78.6 FPS) results in a 17.2 FPS drop, and then a further 12.6 FPS drop to 3840x2160 (66 FPS). This scaling is relatively linear, indicating that the GPU’s rendering load is the primary constraint. However, the most dramatic shift occurs when comparing Low presets. At Low, the 1920x1080 result is 143.3 FPS, which falls to 133.2 FPS at 2560x1440 and then to 124.6 FPS at 4K. The much smaller absolute drop from 1080p to 4K at Low (18.7 FPS) compared to the High preset (29.8 FPS) suggests that at Low, the CPU's frame generation limit is being approached, capping the potential frame rate even when the GPU has less work.

The Ultra preset shows the steepest decline, dropping from 77 FPS at 1080p to 60.8 FPS at 1440p, and finally to 52.1 FPS at 4K. This behavior confirms that the Ultra preset introduces effects that are exponentially more demanding on the GPU's compute and memory subsystems. The data suggests that for a 60 FPS target, High settings at 4K are viable (66 FPS), while Ultra at 4K falls short (52.1 FPS). The scaling pattern indicates that the RTX 4090 is the limiting component at 4K, but at 1080p with Low settings, the Ryzen 7 5700X’s single-thread performance becomes the ceiling, preventing the GPU from reaching its full potential.

Settings Recommendations

Analyzing the measured rows, the Medium preset offers the most balanced experience across all resolutions. At 1920x1080, Medium delivers 117.8 FPS, which is 22 FPS higher than High and only 25.5 FPS lower than Low. At 2560x1440, Medium achieves 110.9 FPS, a smooth and high-refresh-rate experience. Even at 4K, Medium sustains 84.7 FPS, which is well above the 60 FPS threshold and nearly 20 FPS faster than High. This suggests that the Medium preset provides a significant visual upgrade over Low while avoiding the heavy performance penalty associated with High and Ultra.

The High preset, while playable, begins to show strain at higher resolutions. The 78.6 FPS at 1440p and 66 FPS at 4K are adequate, but the step up from Medium to High costs 32.3 FPS at 1080p, 32.3 FPS at 1440p, and 18.7 FPS at 4K. This performance hit is substantial for what is likely a marginal visual improvement in a game with a fixed-camera perspective. The Ultra preset is the most demanding, and its 52.1 FPS at 4K makes it unsuitable for a locked 60 FPS experience at that resolution. For players prioritizing frame rate consistency, Medium is the clear recommendation. For those at 1080p, High is still a viable option with 95.8 FPS, but the data indicates that Medium provides a more stable foundation for the game's dual-world rendering.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, with its AD102 chip on a 5 nm process, is the dominant component in this pairing. Its 24 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus provides a bandwidth of 1.01 TB/s, which is crucial for a game like The Medium that frequently renders two distinct scenes simultaneously. The 82.58 TFLOPS of FP32 compute power and 1,290.2 GTexel/s texture rate are directly reflected in the GPU-bound scores at 4K. The card's boost clock of 2520 MHz and base clock of 2235 MHz allow it to sustain high throughput, as evidenced by its 91st percentile ranking among all GPUs.

The benchmark data shows that the RTX 4090 is not the bottleneck until the resolution reaches 4K with High or Ultra settings. At 1080p and 1440p with Medium or Low settings, the frame rates are likely limited by the CPU's ability to feed the GPU. The GPU's 128 RT cores and 512 tensor cores are present but are not necessarily the primary factor in this title's rasterization-heavy load. The 24 GB VRAM capacity is more than sufficient for this game, as even at 4K Ultra, there is no indication of memory pressure, and the performance drop is due to compute limits rather than memory constraints. The GPU's role is to provide the raw throughput, and it does so until the resolution and preset demands outpace the CPU's frame generation.

How This Combo Ranks

In the benchmark database, this specific configuration of the Ryzen 7 5700X and RTX 4090 is ranked 79th out of 1689 tested combos for The Medium. This places it in the top 4.7% of all systems tested, indicating an exceptionally high-performing pairing. The ranking is a composite of the CPU's ability to process game logic and the GPU's ability to render frames. Given that the RTX 4090 is an end-of-life product with a 91st percentile GPU score, and the Ryzen 7 5700X holds an 83rd percentile CPU score, the combined rank reflects a system that is at the higher end of the performance spectrum.

The rank of 79 suggests that while this combo is superb, there are 78 other combinations that achieve higher average FPS in this specific game. This is likely due to CPUs with higher single-thread performance or more cores that can better feed the RTX 4090, especially at lower resolutions where the CPU bottleneck is more pronounced. The data indicates that the RTX 4090 is capable of much more than the 5700X can deliver at 1080p, so the combo's rank is somewhat held back by the CPU. At 4K, the rank would likely be higher because the GPU is the limiting factor, but the overall rank of 79 places this system firmly in the enthusiast tier.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700X, built on the Zen 3 architecture, provides the processing foundation for this combo. With 8 cores and 16 threads, it has a base clock of 3.40 GHz and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz. The 32 MB of shared L3 cache is a key asset for gaming, and its performance in synthetic benchmarks is solid, with a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 22620 and a single-core score of 3193. The CPU's 65 W TDP allows for consistent boost behavior, but its role in The Medium is primarily to manage the game's logic and the rendering of two simultaneous camera views.

The benchmark results show that the CPU becomes the limiting factor at 1080p with Low and Medium settings. At Low 1080p, the 143.3 FPS is likely near the CPU's practical frame cap for this game engine. The fact that 4K Low only drops to 124.6 FPS (an 18.7 FPS difference) while 1080p High is 95.8 FPS and 4K High is 66 FPS (a 29.8 FPS difference) clearly demonstrates that the CPU is holding back the GPU at lower resolutions. The 5700X's single-thread performance, while strong, cannot fully utilize the RTX 4090's potential at high frame rates. The CPU's performance is adequate for 60 FPS gaming at 4K, but for 144Hz or 240Hz displays at 1080p, it will be the bottleneck. The data suggests that this CPU is a capable partner for the RTX 4090 at 4K, but it prevents the GPU from showing its full strength in lower-resolution scenarios.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the frame rates are as follows: Low preset averages 143.3 FPS, Medium averages 117.8 FPS, High averages 95.8 FPS, and Ultra averages 77 FPS. The step from Low to Medium costs 25.5 FPS, while the step from Medium to High costs 22 FPS, and High to Ultra costs 18.8 FPS. This shows a consistent, predictable decline as visual fidelity increases.

Moving to 2560x1440, the averages are 133.2 FPS on Low, 110.9 FPS on Medium, 78.6 FPS on High, and 60.8 FPS on Ultra. The performance drop from 1080p is most pronounced on High (17.2 FPS) and Ultra (16.2 FPS), while Low and Medium see more modest reductions of 10.1 FPS and 6.9 FPS, respectively. This indicates that the lower presets are less resolution-sensitive.

At 3840x2160, the averages are 124.6 FPS on Low, 84.7 FPS on Medium, 66 FPS on High, and 52.1 FPS on Ultra. The 4K resolution is the most demanding, with the Ultra preset failing to reach 60 FPS. The Medium preset remains the most efficient, offering a 32.5 FPS advantage over High and a 40.1 FPS advantage over Ultra. The data shows that at 4K, the gap between Low and Medium is 39.9 FPS, which is the largest single-preset jump in the entire dataset, highlighting the engine's non-linear scaling with certain effects. The only sub-60 FPS result is 4K Ultra, confirming that this setting is reserved for systems that can tolerate lower frame rates.