The Medium

The Medium, a fixed-camera horror title built on a heavily GPU-bound rendering engine, presents a clear scaling pattern for the Intel Core i3-12100F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti combination. The data indicates that this pairing is consistently limited by the graphics card across all tested settings, with the CPU’s four physical cores providing sufficient frame pacing to keep the RTX 4070 Ti fed. The benchmark results reveal a widening gap between low and ultra presets as resolution increases, which is a classic signature of a system where the GPU’s fillrate and memory bandwidth become the primary arbiters of performance.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data shows a predictable decline as resolution climbs, but the magnitude of that decline varies sharply with the quality preset. At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo produces 145.5 FPS, which drops to 133.4 FPS at 2560x1440 (−8.3% from the 1080p baseline) and then falls to 117.9 FPS at 3840x2160 (−19.0% from 1080p). This relatively mild scaling at Low settings suggests that the GPU is not fully saturated at 1080p, leaving headroom that gets consumed as pixel count increases.

The picture changes dramatically under Ultra settings. At 1920x1080 Ultra, the average is 61.3 FPS. Moving to 2560x1440 Ultra yields 55.0 FPS (−10.3% from 1080p), and at 3840x2160 Ultra the frame rate collapses to 41.6 FPS (−32.1% from 1080p). This steeper drop at higher resolutions indicates that the Ultra preset introduces effects that scale super-linearly with resolution, likely including volumetric lighting and high-resolution shadows that hammer the RTX 4070 Ti’s 504.2 GB/s memory bandwidth and 40.09 TFLOPS of FP32 compute.

Medium and High presets sit between these extremes. At Medium, the 1080p score of 110.2 FPS drops to 90.9 FPS at 1440p (−17.5%) and 72.4 FPS at 4K (−34.3%). The High preset shows similar behavior: 76.0 FPS at 1080p, 67.6 FPS at 1440p (−11.1%), and 52.5 FPS at 4K (−30.9%). The fact that the 4K-to-1080p ratio for Medium (−34.3%) is steeper than for Ultra (−32.1%) is notable, suggesting that some Medium-specific settings are particularly resolution-sensitive, or that the 4K Ultra result is already so low that the scaling curve is compressing.

The key takeaway from resolution scaling is that the RTX 4070 Ti is the bottleneck at 4K for all presets, but at 1080p, the i3-12100F’s 4-core/8-thread configuration may start to limit frame rates in CPU-bound scenes. The 1080p Low result of 145.5 FPS is close to the practical ceiling for this CPU’s single-thread performance (Cinebench R23 single-core score of 1681), so any further GPU headroom would be wasted.

FAQ

Q: How does the combo perform at 4K Ultra, and is it playable?

A: The measured average at 3840x2160 Ultra is 41.6 FPS. This is below the 60 FPS threshold commonly considered smooth for action titles, but for a slower-paced horror game like The Medium, it remains playable, though not ideal for fast camera transitions.

Q: What is the best resolution for maintaining 60+ FPS?

A: At 2560x1440, the High preset delivers 67.6 FPS, and Medium hits 90.9 FPS. At 1920x1080, even Ultra manages 61.3 FPS, while High reaches 76.0 FPS. So 1440p High or 1080p Ultra are the highest quality options that stay above 60 FPS.

Q: Is the CPU holding back the GPU at any resolution?

A: The data suggests the GPU is the primary limiter at 4K, where even Low settings only reach 117.9 FPS. At 1080p Low (145.5 FPS), the i3-12100F’s 4 cores (8 threads) may begin to cap performance, as the GPU has ample headroom to render more frames than the CPU can feed.

Q: How does the i3-12100F compare to its nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The i3-12100F has an average benchmark score of 13516, which is 0.1% below the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3975WX (13534), 0.4% above the Intel Core i7-1250U (13462), and 0.6% above the Intel Core i3-10105 (13430). It trails the Intel Core i7-7700K (13280) by 1.8%, meaning the i3 is effectively in the same performance bracket as these older or lower-tier parts.

Q: What is the GPU’s percentile ranking among all tested graphics cards?

A: The RTX 4070 Ti sits in the 85th percentile of all GPUs, indicating it outperforms 85% of the tested database. Its nearest rival, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Mobile, scores 0.6% higher, while the Intel Arc A730M is 1.5% higher, showing the 4070 Ti is near the top of the mid-range to high-end spectrum.

Q: Does the combo’s ranking in this game reflect its overall hardware strength?

A: The combo ranks 230th out of 1689 tested combinations for The Medium, placing it in the top 13.6% of all pairings. This is strong, but not exceptional, reflecting the fact that the i3-12100F is a budget CPU while the GPU is high-end.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i3-12100F is a 4-core, 8-thread processor based on Alder Lake architecture, with a base clock of 3.30 GHz and a boost clock of 4.30 GHz. Its 12 MB of shared L3 cache and dual-channel memory support (DDR4/DDR5) provide adequate bandwidth for feeding the RTX 4070 Ti in most scenarios. The CPU’s percentile ranking of 72nd among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 13516, places it above the median but below high-core-count parts.

In The Medium, the CPU’s role is to manage the game’s fixed-camera logic, AI, and streaming, which are typically single-threaded or lightly threaded tasks. The 3DMark scores show strong scaling from 2 threads (1659) to 4 threads (2859), but marginal gains from 8 threads (4026) to max threads (4023), confirming that the chip’s performance plateaus after 4 cores. This is fine for The Medium, which likely uses 4-6 threads at most, but it means the combo cannot leverage the 8-thread headroom for higher frame rates.

The Cinebench R23 multicore score of 11912 and single-core score of 1681 demonstrate that the i3-12100F has excellent per-core performance for its class, which is critical for maintaining consistent frame times. In the measured results, the absence of any min-FPS data suggests that the CPU did not produce stutter-inducing frame drops, even at 1080p Low where the GPU is less stressed. The PassMark single-thread score of 3444 further reinforces that the CPU’s single-thread performance is sufficient to drive the RTX 4070 Ti to 145.5 FPS at 1080p Low without becoming a bottleneck.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo’s rank of 230 out of 1689 tested combinations for The Medium places it in the 86.4th percentile of all pairings. This is a strong result, but the ranking reveals an interesting asymmetry: the RTX 4070 Ti alone sits in the 85th percentile of GPUs, while the i3-12100F is only in the 72nd percentile of CPUs. The combo’s ranking is higher than both individual percentiles, which suggests that The Medium is not particularly CPU-sensitive, and the GPU’s dominance in this title boosts the overall score.

Compared to the nearest CPU rivals, the i3-12100F’s average benchmark score of 13516 is nearly identical to the Threadripper PRO 3975WX (13534, delta −0.1%) and the Core i7-1250U (13462, delta +0.4%). This means that swapping the i3 for a much more expensive workstation CPU would yield negligible gains in this game, as the bottleneck is almost entirely on the GPU side. Similarly, the GPU’s nearest rival, the RTX 5090 Mobile (45152 vs. 44900, delta −0.6%), is a mobile part that cannot be used in the same desktop socket, but the comparison shows that the 4070 Ti is performing at the expected level for its class.

The rank of 230 also implies that many of the 1689 combos above this pairing must feature more powerful GPUs (e.g., RTX 4090-class parts) or significantly faster CPUs that can push frame rates higher in CPU-bound scenes. For a 4-core CPU paired with a 5nm Ada Lovelace GPU, this placement is respectable, but it highlights that the i3-12100F is the limiting factor when aiming for the absolute highest FPS at 1080p.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo delivers a spread of 84.2 FPS between the lowest and highest settings. Low settings produce 145.5 FPS, Medium drops to 110.2 FPS (−24.3% from Low), High yields 76.0 FPS (−31.0% from Medium), and Ultra falls to 61.3 FPS (−19.3% from High). The step from Medium to High is the largest, indicating that the High preset introduces significant graphical effects (likely shadow quality and texture filtering) that cost 34.2 FPS.

At 2560x1440, the pattern is similar but compressed. Low runs at 133.4 FPS, Medium at 90.9 FPS (−31.9% from Low), High at 67.6 FPS (−25.6% from Medium), and Ultra at 55.0 FPS (−18.6% from High). The 1440p results show that the GPU is starting to feel the resolution pressure, as the Low-to-Medium gap widens from 24.3% at 1080p to 31.9% at 1440p.

At 3840x2160, the performance drops further across all settings. Low achieves 117.9 FPS, Medium falls to 72.4 FPS (−38.6% from Low), High reaches 52.5 FPS (−27.5% from Medium), and Ultra bottoms out at 41.6 FPS (−20.8% from High). The 4K Low result of 117.9 FPS is still very playable, but the 41.6 FPS at Ultra is the only sub-60 FPS result in the entire dataset, confirming that 4K Ultra is the most demanding configuration for this hardware.

The settings scaling shows that the RTX 4070 Ti’s 12 GB of GDDR6X memory and 192-bit bus (504.2 GB/s) are sufficient for 4K textures, but the 41.6 FPS Ultra result suggests that ray tracing or other advanced effects in The Medium’s Ultra preset are particularly taxing. The data also indicates that Low settings at 4K (117.9 FPS) are only 19.0% slower than Low at 1080p (145.5 FPS), which is a relatively small penalty and suggests that the GPU’s shading units (7680) scale well with resolution when the visual complexity is low.