The Medium

The Medium paired with the AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Mobile lands at rank 952 out of 3724 tested combinations in this game's database — a mid-table result that reflects the game's age rather than any weakness in the hardware. The Medium launched in early 2021, and a 2025-era mobile flagship combination running it at 44 FPS average on 4K High tells you the title leans heavily on ray-traced-style lighting and dense scenes rather than raw fill rate. The data below is measured, not estimated, and covers four presets across three resolutions.

How This Combo Ranks

Out of 3724 tested combinations in The Medium, this pairing sits at rank 952. That placement puts it ahead of roughly three-quarters of the field, which is respectable but not dominant — and the reason is instructive. The Medium is a horror game built around dual-reality rendering, where the engine draws two worlds simultaneously. That design punishes GPUs with raw throughput demands at high resolutions, and the RTX 5080 Mobile, sitting in the 81st percentile versus all GPUs in the database, has the headroom to clear 4K Medium comfortably but not to brute-force 4K Ultra.

The CPU side is emphatically not the bottleneck. The Ryzen 9 8945HX sits in the 95th percentile versus all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 76212 — 0.1 percent ahead of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX, 0.6 percent ahead of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, and 0.4 percent behind the EPYC Embedded 8224P and Threadripper PRO 9945WX. Those are effectively dead-even margins against desktop workstation silicon. In The Medium, which rarely stresses more than a handful of threads, that 16-core, 32-thread Zen 4 Dragon Range chip is overkill in the best way: the single-thread Passmark score of 3907 and Cinebench R23 single-core score of 6030 guarantee the CPU never gates frame delivery.

So the rank is a GPU-side story. The RTX 5080 Mobile's average benchmark score of 38349 puts it 0.1 percent ahead of the GeForce MX570, 0.6 percent ahead of the RTX 4080 Mobile, and 0.9 percent behind the MX570 A and Radeon Pro 580X in aggregate database terms — a tight cluster where per-game results swing the ordering. In The Medium specifically, that translates into playable frame rates everywhere except 4K Ultra, which the resolution-by-resolution data below makes clear.

FAQ

Q: Can this combination run The Medium at 4K?

A: Yes, with preset selection mattering a lot. At 3840x2160, the measured averages are 35 FPS on Ultra, 44 on High, 61 on Medium, and 97 on Low. Medium is the sweet spot at 4K — it holds a 52 FPS minimum with a 70 FPS maximum, meaning dips stay above the fifty-frame line.

Q: Is the CPU fast enough for this game?

A: Far more than enough. The Ryzen 9 8945HX ranks in the 95th percentile of all CPUs, and its 5.40 GHz boost clock with 64 MB of L3 cache means the game's engine threads always have headroom. The benchmark data shows no resolution where frame rates plateau in a way that would indicate CPU saturation — frame rates scale downward consistently as pixels increase, which is the signature of GPU-bound operation.

Q: Which preset should I use at 1440p?

A: Medium. It averages 78 FPS with a minimum of 66 and a maximum of 89 — a narrow spread that delivers a smooth experience. High drops to 56 FPS average, and Ultra to 44, both of which sit below comfortable thresholds for a game with slow camera pans where stutter is noticeable.

Q: How much VRAM does The Medium need at 4K on this GPU?

A: The GPU's 16 GB of GDDR7 on a 256-bit bus with 896.0 GB/s of bandwidth is not the limiting factor at any tested setting. The frame-rate decline from 1440p to 4K tracks pixel-count growth almost exactly, indicating fill-rate and shading load rather than memory capacity is what caps performance.

Q: Does the dual-reality rendering in The Medium hurt performance here?

A: The measured data shows the game is demanding relative to its 2021 release date — 52 FPS at 1080p Ultra on 2025 flagship mobile hardware confirms the engine's dual-scene rendering carries a real cost. But the RTX 5080 Mobile's 7680 shading units and 60 RT cores handle the Medium preset at every resolution tested.

Q: What is the single biggest performance lever in this game on this hardware?

A: Resolution. Dropping from 4K to 1440p lifts frame rates by roughly a quarter to a third at matched settings, while dropping a preset tier yields smaller gains. If you need more frames, lower the resolution before you lower the settings.

GPU Role

The RTX 5080 Mobile is the component that sets this combo's ceiling in The Medium. Its 16 GB of GDDR7 memory running at an effective 28 Gbps delivers 896.0 GB/s of bandwidth across a 256-bit bus — more than enough to feed the game's texture and lighting loads at native 4K. None of the measured results suggest VRAM pressure: a memory-limited configuration typically shows frame rates collapsing disproportionately at 4K relative to 1440p, and here the decline is proportional.

The clock structure matters for a mobile part. The GPU runs a 975 MHz base and 1500 MHz boost, with 23.04 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput from 7680 shading units, 240 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. The 60 ray-tracing cores are relevant to The Medium, which uses hardware-accelerated lighting effects, and they are a plausible contributor to the steep drop between Medium and Ultra presets — 61 to 35 FPS at 4K is a 43 percent decline for one preset tier, the largest single-step penalty in the dataset.

Texture throughput of 360.0 GTexel/s and pixel fill of 144.0 GPixel/s align with the measured scaling behavior. At 1080p Low, the game runs at 147 FPS average, which is close to where the game's own frame ceiling and engine logic begin to matter more than GPU speed. The Passmark G3D score of 27711 and 3DMark Steel Nomad score of 4952 place this as a high-end mobile GPU in the 81st percentile of all GPUs, and The Medium's results are consistent with that positioning: strong at mainstream resolutions, stretched at 4K Ultra.

Measured FPS Breakdown

All figures are measured averages. Where minimum and maximum were recorded, they are listed.

1920x1080:

• Low: 147 FPS average
• Medium: 92 FPS average (78 min / 106 max)
• High: 66 FPS average
• Ultra: 52 FPS average

2560x1440:

• Low: 124 FPS average
• Medium: 78 FPS average (66 min / 89 max)
• High: 56 FPS average
• Ultra: 44 FPS average

3840x2160:

• Low: 97 FPS average
• Medium: 61 FPS average (52 min / 70 max)
• High: 44 FPS average
• Ultra: 35 FPS average

Reading across the rows, three patterns stand out. First, the Medium preset is the stability champion: it is the only setting with recorded min/max spreads at every resolution, and those spreads are tight — 28 frames at 1080p, 23 at 1440p, 18 at 4K. Consistency improves as resolution rises because the GPU load evens out, which is characteristic of a well-behaved engine on sufficient VRAM.

Second, the step from Medium to High costs more than any other preset drop. At 1080p, going Medium to High costs 26 frames; High to Ultra costs 14. At 4K the pattern repeats: 17 frames lost from Medium to High, 9 from High to Ultra. High settings in The Medium evidently enable the game's heaviest lighting and shadow features, so that tier is where the RTX 5080 Mobile's headroom gets spent.

Third, the 1080p High result of 66 FPS versus 4K Medium's 61 FPS shows you can trade pixels for detail almost one-for-one. If the visual goal is consistency, 4K Medium beats 1080p High in image sharpness at a cost of only five frames per second.

Resolution Scaling

The scaling data tells a clean GPU-bound story. Comparing Medium preset averages: 92 FPS at 1080p, 78 at 1440p, 61 at 4K. That is a 15 percent drop from 1080p to 1440p and a further 22 percent drop from 1440p to 4K. Pixel count grows by 78 percent from 1080p to 1440p and by 125 percent from 1440p to 4K, so frame rates are declining far less steeply than pixel load increases — the definition of a setup with CPU and memory headroom where the render pipeline, not scene processing, limits throughput.

The same proportionality holds at Low settings: 147, 124, 97 FPS. A CPU-bound configuration would show those numbers converging at higher resolutions; instead they keep scaling, which confirms the Ryzen 9 8945HX — with its 32 threads, 64 MB L3 cache, and 83.2 GB/s of dual-channel DDR5 bandwidth — is never the constraint in this title.

The gap narrows at the top presets, which is where the GPU's limits show. Ultra runs 52, 44, 35 FPS across the three resolutions — a 33 percent total decline from 1080p to 4K. When high-preset frame-rate declines start to compress like this, it means the heaviest shader work per pixel has reached a floor where resolution matters less than the per-frame cost of the lighting pipeline itself. Practically: at Ultra, dropping resolution buys you fewer frames than dropping the preset does, so preset selection is the better lever at the top end.

Settings Recommendations

For a 4K display, run Medium. The measured 61 FPS average with a 52 FPS minimum and 70 FPS maximum is the best balance in the entire dataset — the minimum stays above fifty, and the 18-frame spread means frame pacing stays even through the game's dual-reality transition scenes, where sudden scene complexity can spike load. High at 4K averages 44 FPS, which for a slow-paced horror game is borderline playable but will feel uneven during camera pans; Ultra at 35 FPS is not recommended for a title where atmosphere depends on smooth motion.

For 1440p, Medium is again the pick: 78 FPS average, 66 minimum, 89 maximum. This is arguably the best overall experience the combination delivers — high frame consistency, all the game's core visual detail, and enough throughput headroom that the GPU is not pinned. Players who prioritize eye detail over frame rate can consider High at 56 FPS, but the drop from 78 is steep for one preset tier, and the data suggests that tier's lighting features are the most expensive element in the game.

At 1080p, Medium's 92 FPS average with a 78 minimum is effectively the practical ceiling for this game on this hardware; High at 66 is smooth, and Low's 147 FPS is only worth chasing for high-refresh displays. One cross-resolution note: 4K Medium (61 FPS) and 1080p High (66 FPS) land within five frames of each other. On a native 4K panel, the sharper image at 4K Medium is the better trade per the measured data.

The underlying hardware justification is straightforward. The Ryzen 9 8945HX is overprovisioned for a 2021 horror title — its multi-thread Passmark score of 51405 and 95th-percentile CPU ranking mean the game never asks anything of it. The RTX 5080 Mobile, with 16 GB of GDDR7, 896.0 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and 23.04 TFLOPS of shading throughput, carries the entire workload, and The Medium's results show exactly where its ceiling sits: comfortable through 4K Medium, stretched at 4K High, and out of its comfort zone at 4K Ultra. Rank 952 of 3724 understates the hardware; the game's appetite for per-pixel lighting work is what sets the score.