The Medium

The Medium pairs a fixed-camera horror aesthetic with a demanding rendering load, and the data for the Intel Core i3-12100F with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER reveals a system that is consistently GPU-bound at higher settings, but whose frame rate curve flattens as resolution drops, signaling a growing CPU influence at lower graphical loads. The measured FPS progression from 4K to 1080p shows that the RTX 4080 SUPER has ample headroom, yet the quad-core processor begins to cap performance in the least demanding scenarios.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling across resolutions tells a clear story about where the bottleneck lies in this configuration. At 3840x2160 with Ultra settings, the combo delivers 45.4 FPS, which rises to 54.9 FPS at High, 77.9 FPS at Medium, and jumps to 124.6 FPS at Low. Moving to 2560x1440, the Ultra setting climbs to 58 FPS, High reaches 74.5 FPS, Medium hits 98.4 FPS, and Low produces 137.1 FPS. At 1920x1080, the pattern shifts: Ultra yields 66.1 FPS, High 82.8 FPS, Medium 121.4 FPS, and Low peaks at 146 FPS.

The delta between 4K Ultra and 1080p Ultra is a modest 20.7 FPS, from 45.4 to 66.1, which indicates that even at the highest settings, the GPU is not being fully saturated at lower resolutions. The more telling figure is the Low preset: from 4K Low at 124.6 FPS to 1440p Low at 137.1 FPS and 1080p Low at 146 FPS, the gains are only 12.5 and 21.4 FPS respectively. This narrowing gap suggests that the Intel Core i3-12100F, with its 4 cores and 8 threads, begins to limit the RTX 4080 SUPER once the pixel count drops and the GPU load decreases. The data shows that the scaling from 1440p to 1080p is particularly compressed, with the Low preset gaining just 8.9 FPS, a sign that the CPU is the limiting component in these lighter scenarios.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER brings a substantial amount of graphical firepower to this pairing. Its 16 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 256-bit bus provides a bandwidth of 736.3 GB/s, which is more than sufficient for the textures and assets in The Medium. The GPU’s boost clock of 2550 MHz and base clock of 2295 MHz, combined with 10240 shading units and 80 RT cores, place it in the 88th percentile of all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 53610. In the database, it sits 0.2% ahead of the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT and 2.9% ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, showing that it is a top-tier part for this title.

The VRAM capacity is never a concern here. At 4K Ultra, the game demands heavy memory usage, but 16 GB ensures there are no capacity-related hitches. The GPU’s role is clearly dominant in the higher resolution and higher quality settings. The 54.9 FPS at 4K High and 45.4 FPS at 4K Ultra are within the range of playable, but they show that the RTX 4080 SUPER is being pushed hard by the game’s rendering effects. The GPU’s pixel rate of 285.6 GPixel/s and texture rate of 816.0 GTexel/s handle the fixed-camera scenes with heavy post-processing, yet the frame rates at 4K Ultra suggest that The Medium’s visual demands outpace even this high-end silicon. The data indicates that the GPU is the primary driver of performance at 4K, whereas at 1080p, its capabilities are underutilized due to the CPU constraint.

How This Combo Ranks

In the overall database of tested hardware combinations for The Medium, this specific pairing of the Intel Core i3-12100F and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER achieves a combo rank of 127 out of 1689 tested combinations. This places it in the top 7.5% of all systems tested, which is a strong showing given the processor’s modest specifications. The rank reflects the GPU’s sheer performance, but it also highlights the CPU’s potential to hold the system back from achieving even higher placement.

The CPU’s average benchmark score of 13516 places it in the 72nd percentile of all CPUs, with its nearest rival being the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3975WX, which scores 13534 and is only 0.1% faster. The Intel Core i7-7700K trails by 1.8%, and the Intel Core i3-10105 is 0.6% behind. This shows that the i3-12100F is a capable processor for general workloads, but in a game like The Medium, which can leverage multiple threads, its 4-core/8-thread configuration is a limiting factor. The combo’s rank of 127 suggests that many other pairings with stronger CPUs achieve higher frame rates, even if they have weaker GPUs. The data implies that the RTX 4080 SUPER is doing the heavy lifting, and a more powerful CPU would likely push this combo much higher up the rankings.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a complete picture of performance across all settings and resolutions. At 3840x2160, the system delivers 45.4 FPS on Ultra, 54.9 FPS on High, 77.9 FPS on Medium, and 124.6 FPS on Low. These figures show that the game is very demanding at 4K, with Ultra settings nearly halving the frame rate compared to Low. The jump from Medium to High is a significant 23 FPS drop, indicating that High preset introduces costly visual effects.

At 2560x1440, the results are 58 FPS on Ultra, 74.5 FPS on High, 98.4 FPS on Medium, and 137.1 FPS on Low. The relative performance is similar to 4K, but with about 13 to 15 FPS more headroom at each setting. At 1920x1080, the system achieves 66.1 FPS on Ultra, 82.8 FPS on High, 121.4 FPS on Medium, and 146 FPS on Low. The most notable observation is that the frame rate ceiling appears to be around 146 FPS, which is the highest recorded value across all tests. This ceiling is reached at 1080p Low, and it is only 8.9 FPS higher than the 1440p Low result, reinforcing the idea that the processor is preventing the GPU from pushing beyond this threshold. The spread between Ultra and Low at 1080p is 79.9 FPS, which is the smallest spread across all resolutions, highlighting the CPU limitation.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i3-12100F is a 4-core, 8-thread processor from the Alder Lake architecture, with a base clock of 3.30 GHz and a boost clock of 4.30 GHz. It features 12 MB of shared L3 cache and supports DDR4 and DDR5 memory. In synthetic benchmarks, it scores 11912 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 1681 in single-core, with a Geekbench multi-core score of 7413 and single-core of 2224. These numbers indicate a strong single-thread performer, but the multi-core scores are limited by the low core count relative to modern high-end CPUs.

In The Medium, the CPU’s role becomes more apparent as resolution decreases. The benchmark results show that at 4K Ultra, the game is almost entirely GPU-bound, with the RTX 4080 SUPER working at its limits. However, at 1080p Low, the frame rate plateaus at 146 FPS, which is likely the maximum that the i3-12100F can feed to the GPU. The data suggests that the game’s fixed-camera angles and streaming logic may rely on a few primary threads, which the 4-core processor can handle adequately, but the lack of additional cores prevents it from sustaining higher frame rates in less demanding scenes. The CPU’s boost clock of 4.30 GHz helps in single-threaded tasks, but its 4-core limit is a bottleneck when trying to achieve frame rates beyond 150 FPS. The system’s overall performance is a balance, where the GPU excels in heavy graphical loads, but the CPU caps the maximum output in lighter scenarios.