The Medium

The Medium, a fixed-camera horror title built on Unreal Engine 4, presents an unusual performance profile for the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER combination. The measured data reveals a system that is overwhelmingly GPU-bound at higher settings, yet the dramatic scaling between presets suggests that the game’s rendering techniques place unique stress on the graphics hardware. This pairing, ranking 80th out of 1689 tested combinations, delivers a playable but not flawless experience at 4K, with the RTX 4080 SUPER’s substantial memory and compute resources being the primary determinant of frame rates.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate drop from 1080p to 4K is steep, indicating a clear GPU bottleneck. At High settings, the average frame rate falls from 87.6 FPS at 1920x1080 to 72.4 FPS at 2560x1440, a reduction of roughly 17%, and then to 54 FPS at 3840x2160, another 25% drop. This scaling pattern is typical for a game where pixel fill rate and memory bandwidth become critical, and it confirms that the RTX 4080 SUPER is the limiting component as resolution increases.

The Low preset shows a different, more revealing trend. At 1080p Low, the combo achieves 174.7 FPS, which drops to 161.5 FPS at 1440p and then to 126.8 FPS at 4K. The smaller relative decline from 1080p to 1440p (about 8%) compared to the High preset suggests that at Low settings, the CPU begins to exert more influence, though the 22% drop from 1440p to 4K still points to GPU limits. The gap between Low and High at the same resolution is substantial: at 4K, Low yields 126.8 FPS versus High’s 54 FPS, a 2.3x difference. This implies that the High preset activates expensive effects that disproportionately tax the GPU, rather than a balanced workload.

Ultra settings exacerbate the GPU bottleneck further. At 4K Ultra, the average drops to 44.2 FPS, which is below the 54 FPS of High and represents a 65% reduction from the 4K Low result. The scaling from 1080p Ultra (69 FPS) to 1440p Ultra (57.3 FPS) to 4K Ultra (44.2 FPS) shows a nearly linear decline with pixel count, confirming that the RTX 4080 SUPER’s raw throughput is the sole constraint at this preset. The data suggests that players targeting 4K must choose between the playable 54 FPS of High or the smoother 79.3 FPS of Medium, as the gap between Medium and High is larger than the gap between Low and Medium.

Settings Recommendations

The measured rows indicate that the Medium preset offers the most balanced experience across all resolutions. At 4K, Medium delivers 79.3 FPS, which is comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay, while High drops to 54 FPS and Ultra to 44.2 FPS. The jump from Medium to High costs 25.3 FPS at 4K (from 79.3 to 54), a 32% reduction, which is a significant penalty for what the data suggests are incremental visual gains. For a horror game where atmosphere matters, the Medium preset appears to be the sweet spot, providing enough graphical fidelity without sacrificing frame rate stability.

At 1440p, Medium produces 99.8 FPS, which is ideal for high-refresh-rate monitors, while High drops to 72.4 FPS and Ultra to 57.3 FPS. The 1080p results are less critical given the hardware’s capability, but Medium still leads with 117.5 FPS versus High’s 87.6 FPS. Low settings are only advisable for competitive play or extreme frame rate targets, as the 174.7 FPS at 1080p Low offers diminishing returns over Medium’s 117.5 FPS. The data clearly shows that Medium is the recommended preset for this combination, as it avoids the steep performance cliff between Medium and High while maintaining a frame rate that exceeds 60 FPS at 4K and approaches 100 FPS at 1440p.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER is the dominant factor in these results. With 16 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 256-bit bus, the card provides 736.3 GB/s of bandwidth, which is crucial for The Medium’s high-resolution textures and dual-world rendering mechanics. The GPU’s 10240 shading units and 80 RT cores are heavily utilized, as evidenced by the dramatic FPS drops when moving from Medium to High and Ultra. The card’s boost clock of 2550 MHz and base clock of 2295 MHz are standard for the Ada Lovelace architecture, but the data shows that the game is not clock-limited; rather, it is limited by the sheer computational load of the higher presets.

The GPU’s 52.22 TFLOPS of FP32 performance is substantial, yet the 4K Ultra result of 44.2 FPS indicates that The Medium’s Ultra preset demands even more. The card’s 320 TMUs and 112 ROPs contribute to a texture rate of 816.0 GTexel/s and a pixel rate of 285.6 GPixel/s, but these figures do not translate into linear frame rate gains due to the game’s rendering complexity. The 16 GB VRAM capacity is likely not a limiting factor at any tested resolution, as the game’s memory footprint is well within this allowance, but the bandwidth utilization becomes critical at 4K, where the 736.3 GB/s is taxed heavily. The RTX 4080 SUPER’s performance relative to its nearest rivals, such as the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT with a 0.2% delta in average benchmark score, shows that this GPU is well-positioned, but the game’s specific workload favors the NVIDIA architecture’s RT and tensor cores.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X and the RTX 4080 SUPER ranks 80th out of 1689 tested combos in The Medium, placing it in the top 5% of all configurations. This ranking is strong, but it is not the absolute top, which suggests that other pairings with higher-end GPUs or CPUs can achieve better frame rates. The combo’s position is likely driven by the GPU’s capabilities, as the CPU’s performance is secondary in this GPU-bound scenario. The Ryzen 7 7700X’s average benchmark score of 34313 places it in the 89th percentile of all CPUs, with nearest rivals including the Intel Core i5-13500 (0.4% delta) and the Intel Core i7-12800HX (0.5% delta), indicating that the CPU is not a bottleneck.

The GPU’s average benchmark score of 53610 places it in the 88th percentile, with the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT being the closest rival at a 0.2% delta. This ranking data suggests that the combo is well-matched, but the game’s performance is more sensitive to GPU settings than CPU choice. The 80th rank out of 1689 is respectable, and the measured FPS figures show that this combo can handle the game at high settings at 1440p and medium settings at 4K. However, the rank also implies that there are 79 other combinations that perform better, likely featuring more powerful GPUs like the RTX 5090 or RX 7900 XTX, which would push the 4K Ultra frame rates higher.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, with 8 cores and 16 threads, plays a supporting role in The Medium. The CPU’s base clock of 4.50 GHz and boost clock of 5.40 GHz are high, and its Zen 4 architecture on the 5 nm process provides strong single-threaded performance, as evidenced by a 3DMark single-thread score of 1090 and a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 4281. However, the game’s frame rates at lower resolutions and settings show that the CPU is not the primary constraint. At 1080p Low, the combo hits 174.7 FPS, which is high but not exceptional, suggesting that the CPU can feed the GPU adequately but may not push frame rates beyond this level.

The CPU’s 32 MB of shared L3 cache and dual-channel DDR5 memory support (83.2 GB/s bandwidth) are sufficient for the game’s data streaming needs. The 3DMark 16-thread score of 8859 and Cinebench R23 multicore score of 30325 indicate strong multithreaded capability, but The Medium does not appear to scale well with more than 8 cores, as the frame rates at 1080p Low (174.7 FPS) are only slightly higher than at 1440p Low (161.5 FPS), which is a GPU-driven difference. The CPU’s performance relative to rivals, such as the Intel Core i5-13500 with a 0.4% delta in average score, shows that the 7700X is competitive, but its role in this game is to avoid being a bottleneck. The data indicates that the CPU is sufficient for all tested settings, and the frame rate differences between presets are almost entirely attributable to the RTX 4080 SUPER’s workload.