The Medium

The Medium is a horror title that leans heavily on fixed-camera angles and pre-rendered transitions, but its real-time rendering still puts a significant load on the hardware. The data for the Intel Core i5-10400F paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D shows a fascinating bottleneck dynamic where the GPU is often left waiting on the CPU, particularly at lower resolutions. The measured frames per second (FPS) reveal that this pairing produces a playable experience across the board, but the way performance scales with settings and resolution tells a clear story about which component is driving the bus.

Settings Recommendations

The measured rows indicate that the Medium preset offers the most balanced experience for this combination of components. At 1920x1080, the Medium preset delivers an average of 89 FPS, which is a solid 11 FPS higher than the High preset’s 78 FPS, while maintaining a minimum FPS of 75 and a maximum of 102. This is a notable jump in headroom that ensures smoother frame pacing in a game known for its atmospheric tension, where stutter can break immersion. The Ultra preset at the same resolution drops to 72 FPS average, which is only a 6 FPS gain over Medium, making the higher settings a poor trade for the visual fidelity gained, especially since the data shows the GPU has ample compute headroom.

Moving to 2560x1440, the Medium preset again proves to be the sweet spot, producing an average of 84 FPS with a minimum of 71 FPS and a maximum of 96 FPS. This is a 10 FPS advantage over the High preset’s 74 FPS, and it keeps the frame rate well above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay. The Ultra preset at this resolution yields 68 FPS, which is playable but places the system closer to the edge of the performance envelope. At 3840x2160, the Medium preset is the only sensible choice for maintaining a consistent experience, delivering 77 FPS average with a minimum of 66 FPS. High drops to 68 FPS, and Ultra falls to 54 FPS, which is below the desired smoothness threshold for a title that relies on fluid camera movement. The Low preset is not recommended, as it provides a significant FPS boost but likely sacrifices too much visual quality for a game that uses lighting and shadow to build its horror atmosphere.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D is a monstrous piece of silicon, built on the Blackwell 2.0 architecture with a 5 nm process from TSMC. It houses 92,200 million transistors on a 750 mm² die, and its specifications are equally staggering: 32 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 512-bit bus, providing a massive 1.79 TB/s of memory bandwidth. The GPU’s clocks are listed with a base of 2017 MHz and a boost of 2407 MHz, with memory running at 1750 MHz (28 Gbps effective). This hardware is clearly designed for extreme workloads, and its benchmark scores reflect that, with a Passmark G3D score of 44065 and a Geekbench Vulkan score of 376915.

However, the data shows that in The Medium, this GPU is not the limiting factor at lower resolutions. The FPS deltas between 1080p and 1440p are relatively small, indicating that the GPU is not being fully utilized. At 1080p Medium, the average is 89 FPS, and at 1440p Medium, it is 84 FPS—a mere 5 FPS drop. This suggests that the CPU is capping the frame rate, preventing the RTX 5090 D from stretching its legs. The GPU only starts to show its true potential at 4K, where the pixel throughput demands increase. At 4K Medium, the average drops to 77 FPS, which is a more significant 7 FPS decrease from 1440p, indicating the GPU is beginning to engage more seriously. The VRAM capacity is not a concern here; 32 GB is overkill for a game like this, and the data shows no memory-related stutters or issues. The GPU’s 176 ROPs and 423.6 GPixel/s pixel rate are more than sufficient for the resolution scaling seen in the results.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Intel Core i5-10400F and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D holds a combo rank of 513 out of 2911 tested combos in The Medium. This places it in the top 17.6% of all tested systems, which is a strong showing, but it is not a top-tier result. The ranking suggests that while the GPU is exceptional, the CPU is holding the combo back from reaching the upper echelons of the leaderboard. The data indicates that the FPS is often constrained by the processor, especially at 1080p and 1440p, which prevents the system from achieving the high frame rates that the GPU alone could produce.

The CPU’s nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks provide context for this bottleneck. The Intel Xeon 6756E has an average score of 14163, which is 0.2% lower than the i5-10400F’s score, and the AMD Ryzen 3 7320C scores 14277, which is 0.6% higher. These are relatively close scores, but they do not represent high-end parts. The GPU’s nearest rivals, on the other hand, are mobile and data-center parts like the AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT (1.6% higher score) and the NVIDIA Tesla P100 PCIe 16 GB (2.4% higher), which are not typical gaming desktop comparisons. This contrast highlights the mismatch in the combo: a mid-range CPU from 2020 paired with a flagship GPU from 2025. The combo rank of 513 reflects this imbalance, showing that the system is capable but not optimized for maximum performance in this specific title.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a comprehensive look at how this combo handles The Medium across three resolutions and four quality presets. At 1920x1080, the Low preset delivers the highest average at 106 FPS, followed by Medium at 89 FPS, High at 78 FPS, and Ultra at 72 FPS. The Medium preset’s minimum of 75 FPS and maximum of 102 FPS show a tight frame pacing window. At 2560x1440, the pattern repeats: Low produces 100 FPS average, Medium drops to 84 FPS, High to 74 FPS, and Ultra to 68 FPS. The Medium preset maintains a minimum of 71 FPS and a maximum of 96 FPS. At 3840x2160, the numbers compress further: Low averages 93 FPS, Medium 77 FPS, High 68 FPS, and Ultra 54 FPS. The Medium preset’s minimum is 66 FPS and maximum is 89 FPS.

The scaling between presets is relatively linear, with each step up in quality costing roughly 10-15 FPS at lower resolutions. However, the gap between Low and Ultra narrows as resolution increases. At 1080p, the difference between Low and Ultra is 34 FPS (106 vs 72); at 1440p, it is 32 FPS (100 vs 68); and at 4K, it shrinks to 39 FPS (93 vs 54). This suggests that at higher resolutions, the GPU is becoming the bottleneck, as the CPU has less overhead to spare for frame generation. The minimum FPS data for Medium presets shows no severe dips, with the lowest being 66 FPS at 4K, which is still playable.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K is surprisingly modest for a GPU of this caliber, which points directly to a CPU bottleneck. At Medium settings, the average FPS goes from 89 at 1080p to 84 at 1440p (a 5.6% drop) and then to 77 at 4K (an 8.3% drop from 1440p). The total drop from 1080p to 4K is 12 FPS, or 13.5%. Similarly, at High settings, the average drops from 78 at 1080p to 74 at 1440p (5.1%) and then to 68 at 4K (8.1% from 1440p). The Low preset shows a similar trend: 106 to 100 to 93, with a total drop of 12.3%.

This pattern indicates that the CPU is the limiting component at all resolutions. If the GPU were the bottleneck, we would expect a much steeper decline in FPS as resolution increases, typically around 30-40% from 1080p to 4K. Here, the drop is only around 13%, which suggests that the i5-10400F is capping the frame rate at around 100 FPS in lighter scenes, and the GPU is simply filling in the gaps at higher resolutions. The data shows that the RTX 5090 D is capable of much higher frame rates, but it is being restrained by the processor’s ability to feed it draw calls and physics calculations. This is a classic case of a GPU being held back by a CPU that lacks the single-threaded performance and modern instruction set optimizations to keep up with a flagship graphics card.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-10400F is a 6-core, 12-thread processor from the Comet Lake architecture, based on a 14 nm process. It has a base clock of 2.90 GHz and a boost clock of 4.30 GHz, with 12 MB of shared L3 cache. Its benchmark scores are modest by modern standards: a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 10283 and a single-core score of 1451, with a Geekbench multi-core score of 6257. The Passmark single-thread score is 2541, and the CPU’s percentile rank against all CPUs is 68, indicating it is an average performer in the current market.

In The Medium, the CPU’s limitations are evident in the FPS data. The game appears to be heavily dependent on single-thread performance for its rendering logic, and the i5-10400F’s older architecture cannot provide the high IPC (instructions per clock) needed to push the RTX 5090 D to its limits. The 3DMark scores highlight this: a single-thread score of 688 and a 2-thread score of 1350, which are low compared to modern processors. The game’s fixed-camera angles might reduce geometry complexity, but the CPU still has to manage the game’s dual-world rendering mechanic, which likely stresses the processor’s thread scheduler. The data shows that the CPU is the primary limiter, as evidenced by the minimal FPS gains when lowering resolution. The i5-10400F’s 6 cores are sufficient for the game’s threading, but the per-core performance is not high enough to unlock the full potential of the RTX 5090 D. This results in a system that is fast, but not as fast as the GPU alone could be, making it a mismatched pairing for a game that is less GPU-intensive than modern open-world titles.