The Medium

The Medium presents a significant challenge for the Intel Core i5-10400F and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER combination. This pairing represents a mainstream 1080p-oriented setup from a few generations ago, and the benchmark data confirms that it is positioned near the bottom tier for this specific title. With a combo rank of 3179 out of 3724 tested configurations, this system will require careful settings management to deliver a playable experience, particularly at higher resolutions.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution for this combo in The Medium?

A: The only resolution where this combo achieves a consistently smooth frame rate is 1920x1080. At this resolution, the Low preset delivers 70 FPS average, while the Medium preset provides 44 FPS average, which is the highest quality setting that remains playable.

Q: How does the GTX 1660 SUPER compare to its closest rivals?

A: The GPU's average benchmark score of 12986 places it just 0.4% ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Mobile and AMD Radeon RX 580. It is 0.7% behind the NVIDIA Tesla M2090 and 0.9% ahead of the AMD Radeon 740M, indicating it sits in a tightly contested performance band.

Q: Is the CPU a bottleneck for this game?

A: The data suggests the GPU is the primary limiting factor. The i5-10400F's 6 cores and 12 threads provide solid multi-threaded performance (Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 10283), but the GTX 1660 SUPER's 6 GB of VRAM and 336.0 GB/s bandwidth struggle to maintain high frame rates at 1440p and 4K, regardless of the CPU's capabilities.

Q: What is the difference in performance between Low and Ultra settings at 1080p?

A: The jump from Low to Ultra settings at 1920x1080 results in a dramatic performance drop. The average frame rate falls from 70 FPS on Low to 25 FPS on Ultra, representing a 64% reduction in performance, which firmly positions Ultra as unplayable for this hardware.

Q: Does the GPU support the necessary APIs for this game?

A: Yes, the GTX 1660 SUPER supports DirectX 12 (12_1), OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.4. This ensures full API compatibility with The Medium, which can leverage these modern graphics interfaces.

Q: How does the 4K Medium preset compare to the 1080p Medium preset?

A: At 3840x2160 with Medium settings, the combo achieves an average of 29 FPS with a minimum of 25 FPS. This is a 34% reduction compared to the 44 FPS average at 1920x1080 with the same settings, showing that 4K resolution is too demanding for this hardware.

How This Combo Ranks

The benchmark results place this Intel Core i5-10400F and GTX 1660 SUPER combination at rank 3179 out of 3724 tested combos for The Medium. This places the system in the bottom 15% of all tested configurations, indicating that it is significantly outclassed by the majority of hardware pairings used for this title. The low ranking is primarily attributable to the GPU's struggles with the game's demanding visual effects and high-resolution textures.

The GPU's percentile ranking of 53% against all GPUs suggests it is an average performer overall, but The Medium's specific requirements push it to its limits. When compared to its nearest rivals, the GTX 1660 SUPER is virtually tied with the RTX 3050 Ti Mobile and RX 580, yet none of these cards are positioned to handle this game at high settings with smooth frame rates. The CPU's percentile ranking of 68% against all CPUs is notably higher, reinforcing the notion that the graphics card is the constraining factor in this pairing.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER is the definitive bottleneck in this configuration. The GPU's 6 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus provides a bandwidth of 336.0 GB/s, which proves insufficient for The Medium's high-resolution texture requirements. The card's base clock of 1530 MHz and boost clock of 1785 MHz are standard for the Turing architecture, but the 1408 shading units and 48 ROPs are simply not enough to maintain high frame rates in this horror title.

The GPU's benchmark scores illustrate its mid-range positioning. The PassMark G3D score of 12699 and the Geekbench Vulkan score of 57102 show reasonable DirectX and Vulkan performance, but the 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 1278 reveals that modern DX12 workloads are particularly demanding for this card. The 5.027 TFLOPS of FP32 performance is the theoretical ceiling for compute tasks, yet the game's real-world demands exceed this capability at higher settings.

The 6 GB VRAM capacity is a critical limitation. At 4K resolution, the game's assets exceed this capacity, causing the card to rely on slower memory paging, which is reflected in the dramatic frame rate drops when moving from 1440p to 4K. The GPU's 125 W TDP and dual-slot design are modest, but the performance per watt is not sufficient to overcome the game's heavy shader and lighting effects.

Settings Recommendations

For this hardware combination, the optimal experience is achieved at 1920x1080 with the Medium preset. This configuration delivers an average frame rate of 44 FPS with a minimum of 37 FPS and a maximum of 51 FPS, providing a stable and playable experience for a horror game where consistent pacing is important. The Low preset offers a much higher 70 FPS average, but the visual compromise is significant, making Medium the best balance of visual quality and performance.

At 2560x1440, the Low preset is the only viable option, yielding 59 FPS average. The Medium preset at this resolution drops to 37 FPS, which is borderline for smooth gameplay, and the High and Ultra presets are unplayable at 27 and 21 FPS respectively. For 4K resolution, no preset is recommended, as even the Low preset only achieves 47 FPS average, while the Medium preset falls to 29 FPS and the High preset to 21 FPS.

The measured data indicates that the Ultra preset is not usable at any resolution. The highest average frame rate recorded for Ultra settings is 25 FPS at 1080p, which is below the threshold for a responsive gaming experience. Users should avoid Ultra entirely and instead focus on tuning the Medium preset or lowering shadow and texture quality from High to gain additional performance headroom.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the performance envelope is clearly defined across the four presets. The Low preset delivers an average of 70 FPS, providing the smoothest experience. The Medium preset averages 44 FPS with a minimum of 37 FPS and a maximum of 51 FPS, offering the best quality-to-performance ratio. The High preset drops to 32 FPS average, and the Ultra preset falls to 25 FPS average, both of which are below the ideal playability threshold.

At 2560x1440, the frame rates decrease predictably. The Low preset maintains an average of 59 FPS, which is still playable. The Medium preset averages 37 FPS with a minimum of 32 FPS and a maximum of 43 FPS, showing noticeable stutter potential. The High preset averages 27 FPS, and the Ultra preset averages 21 FPS, rendering both settings unsuitable for actual gameplay.

At 3840x2160, the system is severely overburdened. The Low preset averages 47 FPS, which is the only 4K setting that approaches playability. The Medium preset averages 29 FPS with a minimum of 25 FPS and a maximum of 33 FPS, indicating frequent drops below acceptable levels. The High preset averages 21 FPS, and the Ultra preset averages 17 FPS, making these settings purely for benchmarking rather than gaming.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-10400F provides a solid foundation for this gaming system. With 6 cores and 12 threads based on the Comet Lake architecture, the CPU offers robust multi-threaded performance. The Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 10283 and the Geekbench multi-core score of 6257 demonstrate that the processor can handle the game's background processes and physics calculations without issue. The single-thread performance, as indicated by the Cinebench R23 single-core score of 1451, is sufficient for the game's primary game logic thread.

The CPU's 2.90 GHz base clock and 4.30 GHz boost clock provide adequate frequency for gaming workloads. The 12 MB of shared L3 cache and dual-channel DDR4 memory support with 42.7 GB/s bandwidth ensure that data can be fed to the GPU without creating a bottleneck. The PassMark multi-thread score of 12115 and the 3DMark 16-thread score of 4748 confirm that the CPU is not the limiting factor in this configuration.

The CPU's percentile ranking of 68% against all CPUs is significantly higher than the GPU's 53%, further confirming that the processor is overqualified relative to the graphics card for The Medium. The CPU's nearest rivals, including the Intel Xeon 6756E and AMD Ryzen 3 7320C, all perform within 0.6% of the i5-10400F, showing that it sits in a well-established performance tier that is more than capable of supporting the GTX 1660 SUPER.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals the GPU-centric nature of the performance bottleneck. At Low settings, the average frame rate drops from 70 FPS at 1920x1080 to 59 FPS at 2560x1440, a 16% reduction. The further drop to 47 FPS at 3840x2160 represents a 33% reduction from the 1440p result and a 33% reduction from the 1080p result, showing that the GPU's pixel throughput is the primary constraint.

The Medium settings scaling is more pronounced. The 44 FPS average at 1080p falls to 37 FPS at 1440p, an 16% drop, and then to 29 FPS at 4K, a 22% drop from 1440p and a 34% drop from 1080p. This steeper decline at higher resolutions indicates that the GPU's memory bandwidth and fill rate are being saturated, particularly as the game's texture detail and shadow resolution increase with the resolution.

The High settings show the most severe scaling. From 32 FPS at 1080p to 27 FPS at 1440p (a 16% drop) and then to 21 FPS at 4K (a 22% drop from 1440p), the frame rates become increasingly unplayable. The Ultra settings follow a similar pattern, dropping from 25 FPS at 1080p to 21 FPS at 1440p and finally to 17 FPS at 4K. The consistent pattern of approximately 16-20% performance losses with each resolution step confirms that the GPU is the limiting component, as a CPU-bound scenario would show much smaller differences between 1440p and 4K.