The Medium

The Medium, a fixed-camera horror title built on Unreal Engine 4, presents a demanding workload that scales sharply with visual fidelity. For this configuration—an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti—the benchmark data reveals a clear performance hierarchy across its four available presets. The most balanced experience is achieved at Medium settings, which delivers a substantial jump in frame rate over High without the steep cost to image quality seen at Ultra. At 1080p, Medium produces an average of 115.1 FPS, a 36.5% improvement over High’s 84.3 FPS, while still providing a visually coherent experience for a game that relies on atmospheric lighting and shadow work. The step to Ultra, by contrast, yields only marginal visual gains in most scenes but exacts a heavy performance toll, dropping the average to 65.6 FPS at 1080p—a 43% reduction from Medium. Given that The Medium is a narrative-driven game where consistent pacing matters more than absolute peak detail, Medium offers the best compromise between fluidity and visual integrity.

Settings Recommendations

The data strongly favors Medium as the default choice for this hardware combination. At 1440p, a resolution many users will target with this GPU, Medium produces an average of 97.9 FPS, which is comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay and leaves headroom for occasional dips during the game’s more intense dual-reality sequences. High settings at 1440p yield 68.2 FPS, which is playable but closer to the edge of variance, while Ultra drops to 53.7 FPS, introducing noticeable stutter in a genre where timing and immersion are critical. For users with high-refresh-rate 1080p displays, Medium’s 115.1 FPS average is the sweet spot, as Low’s 141.4 FPS offers diminishing returns in visual quality for a genre that prioritizes mood over raw motion clarity. At 4K, the choice becomes more strategic: Medium delivers a passable 76 FPS, while High falls to 53.1 FPS and Ultra sinks to 43.2 FPS. For 4K owners, Medium is the only preset that maintains a playable frame rate without requiring a compromise to resolution scaling, making it the clear recommendation across all tested resolutions.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the database of tested combinations for The Medium, this pairing of a Ryzen 7 5700X and RTX 5070 Ti ranks 193rd out of 1689 combos, placing it in the top 11.4% of all tested systems. This is a strong showing, indicating that the combination is well-balanced for this specific title. The ranking reflects the CPU’s position in the broader market: the Ryzen 7 5700X sits in the 83rd percentile of all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 26214. Its nearest rivals in synthetic tests include the Intel Core i9-11900KF, which scores 26196 (a 0.1% difference), and the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X, which scores 26272 (a -0.2% difference). This clustering suggests that the 5700X is not a bottleneck in this pairing; its eight Zen 3 cores provide ample throughput for The Medium’s threading model. On the GPU side, the RTX 5070 Ti ranks in the 87th percentile of all GPUs, with an average score of 52086. Its closest competitor is the RTX 4080, which scores 52085 (a 0% delta), indicating that this GPU is delivering performance at the upper echelon of the database. The combination’s rank is therefore proof of the GPU’s dominance, as the CPU, while competent, is not the primary driver of the frame rates observed.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is the decisive component in this pairing, and its specifications explain the measured results. The GPU features 16 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 256-bit bus, providing 896.0 GB/s of bandwidth. This is critical for The Medium, which is known for loading large texture sets and maintaining two simultaneous camera views during its signature dual-reality gameplay. The 16 GB frame buffer ensures that even at 4K Ultra, the game does not spill into system memory, though the performance drop at Ultra (43.2 FPS at 4K) is more attributable to the GPU’s compute limits than memory capacity. The card’s 8960 shading units and 70 RT cores are tasked with the game’s complex lighting and reflections, and the boost clock of 2452 MHz helps sustain high throughput. The data shows a clear pattern: as resolution increases, the GPU becomes the sole limiting factor. At 1080p Low, the 141.4 FPS average is likely near the CPU’s ceiling for this title, but at 4K Ultra, the GPU’s raw rasterization power is overwhelmed. The RTX 5070 Ti’s 43.94 TFLOPS of FP32 performance is substantial, yet The Medium’s engine appears to scale aggressively with pixel count, punishing the highest preset at 4K. The GPU’s 87th percentile ranking among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 52086, confirms that it is a top-tier part, but the measured FPS shows that even top-tier hardware must concede to Ultra settings at high resolutions.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The benchmark data provides a complete matrix of performance across three resolutions and four settings. At 1080p, the progression is linear: Low yields 141.4 FPS, Medium drops to 115.1 FPS, High falls to 84.3 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 65.6 FPS. The gap between Low and Medium is 26.3 FPS, while the gap between Medium and High is a larger 30.8 FPS, suggesting that the High preset introduces significant visual effects that tax the GPU. The drop from High to Ultra is 18.7 FPS, indicating that Ultra’s additional features are expensive but less impactful than the jump from Medium to High. At 1440p, the same pattern holds but with lower absolute numbers: Low averages 133.7 FPS, Medium 97.9 FPS, High 68.2 FPS, and Ultra 53.7 FPS. The 1440p results show a more pronounced penalty for High settings, with a 30.7% reduction from Medium, compared to the 26.8% reduction seen at 1080p. This suggests that High settings at 1440p are pushing the GPU’s fill rate limits. At 4K, the data becomes more extreme: Low averages 121.7 FPS, Medium 76 FPS, High 53.1 FPS, and Ultra 43.2 FPS. The 4K Medium result is notable—it is only 11.2% lower than the 1440p Medium result, indicating that the GPU has sufficient bandwidth to handle the resolution jump at lower settings. However, the 4K High result (53.1 FPS) is 22.1% lower than its 1440p counterpart (68.2 FPS), showing that the combination of 4K resolution and High settings saturates the GPU’s compute units. The Ultra preset at 4K is the only configuration that falls below 45 FPS, making it impractical for consistent gameplay.

Resolution Scaling

The transition from 1080p to 4K reveals the limiting component with clarity. At Low settings, the FPS drops from 141.4 at 1080p to 121.7 at 4K, a reduction of only 13.9%. This minor penalty indicates that at Low settings, the game is heavily CPU-bound; the Ryzen 7 5700X’s single-thread performance, which scores 3193 in Cinebench R23, is sufficient to feed the GPU even at 4K when the visual load is light. The 5700X’s 3.40 GHz base and 4.60 GHz boost clocks provide enough single-core throughput to avoid becoming a bottleneck at this preset. At Medium settings, the drop is more pronounced: 115.1 FPS at 1080p falls to 76 FPS at 4K, a 34% reduction. This indicates that the GPU is starting to take over as the primary limiter, as the added texture and shader work at Medium scales with pixel count. At High settings, the trend accelerates: 84.3 FPS at 1080p drops to 53.1 FPS at 4K, a 37% reduction. The RTX 5070 Ti’s 235.4 GPixel/s pixel rate is being challenged by the 3840x2160 resolution, which requires 8.3 million pixels per frame to be shaded. Finally, at Ultra settings, the 1080p score of 65.6 FPS falls to 43.2 FPS at 4K, a 34.1% reduction. The consistency of the percentage drops between Medium, High, and Ultra (34%, 37%, 34%) suggests that the GPU’s compute and memory bandwidth are being scaled proportionally with resolution, whereas the Low setting’s smaller drop (13.9%) reveals a CPU-bound ceiling. The data indicates that the RTX 5070 Ti, with its 896.0 GB/s of memory bandwidth, has ample headroom for 4K at lower presets, but the game’s high-end effects at High and Ultra require more shading power than the card can deliver at that pixel density. The limiting component shifts decisively from the CPU at Low settings to the GPU at Medium and above, making the 5700X a capable partner that never prevents the GPU from reaching its potential in this title.