The Medium

The Medium, a fixed-camera horror title built on Unreal Engine 4, exhibits a pronounced dependence on GPU throughput when paired with the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. The measured frame rates across the three tested resolutions and four quality presets reveal a system where the RTX 4090 is the primary bottleneck, while the 9950X3D’s substantial multi-threaded capacity ensures the CPU never constrains output. This combination lands at rank 9 out of 1,689 tested combos, placing it in the top 0.5% of all configurations in the database for this specific title.

Resolution Scaling

The transition from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160 produces a significant drop in average frame rate at every quality preset, confirming that pixel throughput is the limiting factor. At the High preset, the average FPS falls from 97.6 at 1080p to 82.2 at 1440p, then to 63.7 at 4K. This represents a 34.8% reduction from 1080p to 4K, a scaling curve that indicates the GPU is being pushed progressively harder as resolution increases. The pattern is even more pronounced at the Ultra preset, where the 1080p average of 76 FPS drops to 63.9 at 1440p and then to 50.6 at 4K—a 33.4% loss from the lowest to highest resolution.

The Low preset shows the most dramatic scaling, with 197.1 FPS at 1080p falling to 177.2 at 1440p and 142.8 at 4K. The 27.5% drop from 1080p to 4K at Low settings is smaller than at higher presets, suggesting that while the GPU remains the bottleneck, the reduced shader complexity at Low allows the architecture to maintain a higher utilization efficiency. Conversely, the Medium preset scales from 132.5 FPS at 1080p to 111.5 at 1440p and 84.8 at 4K, a 36% reduction that is the steepest of all presets. This indicates that Medium settings introduce a workload mix that is particularly sensitive to resolution-driven memory bandwidth demands, which the RTX 4090’s 1.01 TB/s GDDR6X interface handles with diminishing returns as pixel count rises.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data indicates that the High preset offers the most balanced experience across all resolutions. At 4K, High delivers 63.7 FPS, which is 13.1 FPS higher than Ultra’s 50.6 FPS while only sacrificing visual fidelity that many players would find negligible in a slow-paced horror title. The gap between Medium and High at 4K is 21.1 FPS (84.8 vs. 63.7), suggesting that High is a sweet spot where the GPU’s 24 GB frame buffer and 16,384 shading units are fully utilized without the performance penalty of Ultra’s additional post-processing effects.

At 1440p, the High preset’s 82.2 FPS provides a smooth experience that comfortably exceeds the 60 FPS threshold, while Ultra’s 63.9 FPS is still playable but leaves less headroom for frame-time spikes. The Low preset at 1440p achieves 177.2 FPS, but this comes at the cost of shadow quality and texture filtering that would undermine the game’s atmospheric lighting. For 1080p, the Medium preset at 132.5 FPS is the recommended choice, as it provides a high refresh rate experience while maintaining enough visual detail to preserve the intended horror aesthetic. The Ultra preset at 1080p yields 76 FPS, which is sufficient for standard displays but fails to leverage the RTX 4090’s full potential at this resolution.

GPU Role

The RTX 4090’s specifications play a direct role in the observed performance. With a base clock of 2235 MHz and boost clock of 2520 MHz, the GPU operates at high frequencies that scale well under load. The 24 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus provides 1.01 TB/s of bandwidth, which is critical for The Medium’s use of high-resolution textures and dual-world rendering sequences. The 128 RT cores and 512 tensor cores are relevant for the game’s ray-traced reflections and ambient occlusion, though the measured FPS suggests these features are not fully utilized at lower presets.

The GPU’s 82.58 TFLOPS of FP32 compute power is the primary driver of the frame rates seen at 4K Ultra, where the 50.6 FPS average indicates the rendering pipeline is heavily compute-bound. The 176 ROPs and 512 TMUs handle pixel and texture throughput efficiently, as evidenced by the relatively small gap between High and Medium at 1440p (82.2 vs. 111.5 FPS). The 450 W TDP and triple-slot cooler design suggest sustained performance without thermal throttling, which is consistent with the stable averages recorded. The PCIe 4.0 x16 interface provides sufficient bandwidth for the CPU to feed the GPU, as the 9950X3D’s 128 MB of L3 cache and 89.6 GB/s memory bandwidth prevent any data starvation.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the four presets produce a clear hierarchy. Low averages 197.1 FPS, Medium 132.5 FPS, High 97.6 FPS, and Ultra 76 FPS. The delta between Low and Medium is 64.6 FPS, while the delta between High and Ultra is 21.6 FPS, indicating that the Ultra preset adds a disproportionately heavy load relative to its visual gains. The 1080p results show that the CPU’s 16 cores and 32 threads are never the limiting factor, as even the highest frame rate of 197.1 FPS is well within the GPU’s rendering capability.

At 2560x1440, the averages are 177.2 FPS (Low), 111.5 FPS (Medium), 82.2 FPS (High), and 63.9 FPS (Ultra). The 1440p results exhibit a more linear scaling pattern than 1080p, with each preset step costing roughly 30-35 FPS. This suggests that the GPU’s pixel fill rate and memory bandwidth are being stressed more evenly, with the 384-bit bus providing adequate bandwidth for the additional pixels without hitting a hard wall. The 4K results at 3840x2160 show 142.8 FPS (Low), 84.8 FPS (Medium), 63.7 FPS (High), and 50.6 FPS (Ultra). The Low preset at 4K still manages 142.8 FPS, demonstrating the RTX 4090’s raw compute power, but the Ultra preset drops below 60 FPS, indicating that the game’s most demanding settings require either a reduction in resolution or a sacrifice in quality to maintain smooth playback.

How This Combo Ranks

With a combo rank of 9 out of 1,689 tested combinations, this pairing of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 sits at the 99.5th percentile for The Medium. The CPU itself ranks in the 96th percentile among all processors, with an average benchmark score of 71,660. Its nearest rival, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8270, scores 71,056, a delta of just 0.9%, while the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X trails by 1.8% with a score of 70,420. The Intel Xeon 6517P leads by 1.9% with 73,050, and the Intel Core i7-14700KF lags by 2.2% with 70,104. These margins are small, confirming that the 9950X3D is not the performance limiter in this configuration.

The GPU’s average benchmark score of 66,473 places it in the 91st percentile of all GPUs. Its nearest rivals are professional workstation cards—the NVIDIA Tesla T4 (66,733, delta -0.4%), NVIDIA Tesla P40 (66,127, delta 0.5%), AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56 (67,097, delta -0.9%), and NVIDIA Quadro P6000 (67,320, delta -1.3%). These deltas are all within 1.3%, indicating that the RTX 4090’s raw compute performance is comparable to these specialized cards, but its gaming-oriented architecture delivers superior real-world frame rates in The Medium. The combination’s top-10 ranking among 1,689 combos confirms that for this title, no other tested hardware pairing offers a meaningfully better experience.