The Medium

The Medium’s fixed-camera horror demands consistent frame pacing, and the pairing of the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 delivers a split personality depending on resolution. At 1920x1080, the combo is clearly CPU-bound at lower presets, but as pixel count climbs, the RTX 3070 becomes the dominant constraint. The data shows a dramatic drop from the Low preset at 1080p to the Ultra preset at 4K, highlighting the GPU’s 8 GB frame buffer and memory bandwidth as the critical factors for this title.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS trajectory from 1080p to 4K reveals how quickly the RTX 3070’s resources are exhausted by The Medium’s layered rendering. At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo produces 124.5 FPS, a figure that suggests the CPU has headroom to spare. Moving to 2560x1440 on the same preset yields 106.3 FPS, a modest 14.6% reduction. However, the jump to 3840x2160 at Low brings the average down to 78.4 FPS, a 37% loss from the 1080p figure, indicating that even at the lowest quality, 4K resolution taxes the GPU heavily.

The scaling becomes more punishing at higher quality presets. At High settings, the frame rate falls from 55.1 FPS at 1080p to 48.5 FPS at 1440p, then to 36.3 FPS at 4K. The Ultra preset is the most demanding, starting at 44.6 FPS at 1080p and collapsing to 37 FPS at 1440p, then 29.5 FPS at 4K. The pattern is clear: resolution scaling is not linear, with the 4K step inflicting the largest penalty across all settings. This behavior points to the GPU’s 256-bit memory bus and 448.0 GB/s bandwidth being saturated by the game’s high-resolution textures and dual-world rendering technique.

Notably, the gap between Medium and High at 1080p is only 23.8 FPS (78.9 vs 55.1), while the gap between Low and Medium is 45.6 FPS (124.5 vs 78.9). This suggests that the game’s Medium preset introduces a significant jump in shader complexity, but High adds less overhead relative to that step. At 4K, the Medium preset (48.9 FPS) is closer to High (36.3 FPS) than to Low (78.4 FPS), implying that the visual features enabled at Medium disproportionately impact the GPU’s fill rate and pixel throughput.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the benchmark database, this specific combination of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and RTX 3070 ranks 768th out of 1689 tested combos for The Medium. That places it in the 45th percentile of all system pairings, a middling result for a CPU that sits in the 87th percentile among all processors and a GPU in the 72nd percentile among all graphics cards. The discrepancy between component-level percentiles and the combo’s in-game rank suggests that The Medium’s engine does not fully utilize the CPU’s strengths, particularly its large L3 cache and high single-thread performance.

The CPU’s nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks are the Intel Core i7-12700F (0.1% slower), AMD Ryzen 9 5980HX (0.3% slower), AMD Ryzen 7 8700G (0.6% slower), and AMD Ryzen 7 7745HX (0.6% slower). These deltas are negligible in real-world gaming, meaning the CPU is unlikely to be the differentiator in this combo’s ranking. The GPU, meanwhile, sits close to the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT (0.9% faster) and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti (1.0% faster) in aggregate benchmarks, though those older cards lack the RTX 3070’s dedicated ray tracing cores and Tensor cores, which The Medium can leverage for its fixed-camera effects.

The 768th rank out of 1689 combos indicates that many pairings with lower-tier CPUs but higher-tier GPUs outperform this setup. This is consistent with the resolution scaling data, which shows the RTX 3070 as the limiting factor at 4K. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D’s 8 cores and 16 threads, with a boost clock of 5.00 GHz, are more than adequate for the game’s CPU demands, but the GPU’s 8 GB GDDR6 memory appears to be the bottleneck for higher resolutions and presets.

GPU Role

The RTX 3070’s specifications directly explain its performance ceiling in The Medium. The GPU has 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, providing 448.0 GB/s of bandwidth. The base clock is 1500 MHz with a boost of 1725 MHz, and its 5888 shading units deliver a peak FP32 throughput of 20.31 TFLOPS. The 46 ray tracing cores and 184 Tensor cores are present, but the game’s measured results suggest that raw rasterization performance, not ray tracing, is the primary driver of frame rates at these settings.

At 4K Ultra, the combo achieves 29.5 FPS, which is below the 30 FPS threshold that most players consider playable. The Low preset at 4K hits 78.4 FPS, showing that the GPU can handle the resolution if the visual load is reduced. The 8 GB memory capacity is likely the key constraint at higher presets, as The Medium’s dual-reality mechanic requires loading two sets of textures simultaneously. The 448.0 GB/s bandwidth is sufficient for 1080p and 1440p, but the 4K resolution demands more data movement, which the memory subsystem cannot fully provide.

The GPU’s pixel rate of 165.6 GPixel/s and texture rate of 317.4 GTexel/s are modest by modern standards, and the data shows that these limits are hit first. The measured FPS at 1440p Ultra (37 FPS) is only slightly higher than 4K Low (78.4 FPS), but the 1440p Ultra figure is barely above 4K Low’s half, indicating that the game’s Ultra preset adds substantial per-pixel work. The RTX 3070’s 96 ROPs are also a potential bottleneck for the game’s post-processing effects, though the frame buffer size remains the most plausible explanation for the steep drop from Medium to High at 4K.

Settings Recommendations

Based on the measured FPS rows, the optimal balance between visual quality and playability is the Medium preset at 1920x1080, which delivers 78.9 FPS. This is comfortably above the 60 FPS target and offers a significant improvement over the High preset’s 55.1 FPS at the same resolution. The jump from Medium to High at 1080p costs 23.8 FPS, which is a 30% reduction, suggesting that High’s added effects are not worth the performance hit unless the user prioritizes visual fidelity over smoothness.

For 1440p, the Medium preset yields 64.6 FPS, which is still playable but leaves little headroom for demanding scenes. The Low preset at 1440p (106.3 FPS) is the only option that guarantees a high refresh rate experience, but it sacrifices much of the game’s atmospheric lighting. At 4K, the Low preset (78.4 FPS) is the only playable option, as Medium (48.9 FPS) and High (36.3 FPS) fall below the 50 FPS threshold, and Ultra (29.5 FPS) is effectively a slideshow.

The data indicates that the RTX 3070 is best paired with the Medium preset, which appears to be the sweet spot for this GPU’s architecture. The game’s Ultra preset provides diminishing returns at all resolutions, with the 1080p Ultra figure (44.6 FPS) being lower than the 1440p Medium figure (64.6 FPS), suggesting that Ultra’s additional features are disproportionately expensive. For a stable 60 FPS experience, the 1080p Medium preset is the recommended target, while users with 1440p displays should accept the Medium preset’s 64.6 FPS as the practical ceiling.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured data provides a complete picture of the combo’s performance across all settings and resolutions. At 3840x2160, the average FPS ranges from 78.4 on Low to 29.5 on Ultra, with Medium at 48.9 and High at 36.3. The 4K results show a 48.9 FPS difference between Low and Ultra, which is the largest spread of any resolution. At 2560x1440, the figures are 106.3 (Low), 64.6 (Medium), 48.5 (High), and 37 (Ultra), with the gap between Low and Ultra at 69.3 FPS. The 1920x1080 results are the most variable, ranging from 124.5 (Low) down to 44.6 (Ultra), with Medium at 78.9 and High at 55.1.

Comparing the resolutions, the 1080p Low preset (124.5 FPS) is the highest recorded figure, while the 4K Ultra preset (29.5 FPS) is the lowest. The data shows that moving from 1080p to 1440p at the same preset costs roughly 15-20% performance, while moving from 1440p to 4K costs an additional 25-35%. The High preset is the most consistent across resolutions, with only 18.8 FPS separating the 1080p and 4K results. The Low preset also scales predictably, with a 46.1 FPS difference between 1080p and 4K.

The Medium preset shows the most interesting scaling behavior, as the 1080p result (78.9 FPS) is nearly identical to the 4K Low result (78.4 FPS). This suggests that the Medium preset at 1080p and Low at 4K impose a similar load on the GPU. The Ultra preset is consistently the worst performer, with no resolution achieving even 45 FPS. Overall, the measured FPS breakdown confirms that the RTX 3070 is a 1080p-focused card for this game, with acceptable 1440p performance only at lower presets, and 4K playability only at the Low setting.