The Medium

The Medium, a fixed-camera horror title built around a dual-reality mechanic, presents an unusual load profile where the GPU must render two simultaneous perspectives during key sequences. The combination of an Intel Core i5-13400F and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 produces a strictly limited experience, with measured frame rates that place this pairing near the bottom of the database. The data shows a system that is entirely GPU-bound in this title, where even the lowest settings struggle to maintain playable motion at mainstream resolutions.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals a steep performance cliff as resolution increases, confirming that the GTX 1650 is the primary constraint. At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo achieves 45.7 FPS, which is the only configuration in the entire dataset that approaches a fluid experience. Moving to 2560x1440 Low drops the average to 35.2 FPS, a 23% reduction. At 3840x2160 Low, the average falls to 31.2 FPS. This scaling pattern indicates that pixel throughput is the limiting factor, not geometry or shading complexity.

The gap between Low and High settings is stark and widens with resolution. At 1080p, High settings yield 22.5 FPS, which is roughly half of the Low preset result. At 1440p, High produces 16.3 FPS, and at 4K, High manages just 12.9 FPS. The Medium preset sits between these extremes: 25 FPS at 1080p, 25.2 FPS at 1440p, and 20.7 FPS at 4K. The fact that 1440p Medium (25.2 FPS) is nearly identical to 1080p Medium (25 FPS) suggests that the game's rendering workload at these settings does not scale linearly with resolution, likely due to the dual-world rendering overhead.

Ultra settings are effectively unplayable at every resolution. The data shows 13.9 FPS at 1080p, 10.8 FPS at 1440p, and exactly 10 FPS at 4K. This near-flat response from 1440p to 4K on Ultra indicates that the GPU is hitting a hard computational ceiling, likely related to memory bandwidth or shader throughput, rather than fill rate. The GTX 1650's 128.1 GB/s bandwidth and 2.984 TFLOPS FP32 performance are simply insufficient for the game's Ultra preset, which appears to demand more than twice the resources of Low.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-13400F is a 10-core, 16-thread processor based on Raptor Lake architecture, with a base clock of 2.50 GHz and boost clock of 4.60 GHz. Its synthetic benchmarks position it as a strong mid-range part: Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 21279 and single-core of 3004, with an average benchmark score of 25236 that places it in the 82nd percentile of all CPUs. The nearest rival, the Intel Core i7-13620H, scores 25201 (0.1% delta), while the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D scores 25365 (-0.5% delta). This processor has ample headroom for gaming workloads.

In The Medium, however, the CPU is effectively idle relative to the GPU bottleneck. The measured FPS deltas between Low and Ultra settings at the same resolution are far larger than any CPU-driven variation would produce. For instance, at 1080p, the spread from Low (45.7 FPS) to Ultra (13.9 FPS) is a 3.3x difference, which is entirely attributable to GPU load. The CPU's role is to feed the render thread, and with 16 threads available, it is not a limiting factor even during the game's split-screen moments that render two camera views simultaneously.

The processor's 20 MB shared L3 cache and dual-channel memory support provide adequate bandwidth for the game's asset streaming. The data shows no scenario where a stronger CPU would improve results, as even the weakest GPU-bound frame rates at 4K Ultra (10 FPS) would not benefit from faster single-thread performance. The i5-13400F's single-thread score of 3004 in Cinebench R23 is sufficient for the game's logic and camera control, leaving the GTX 1650 as the sole performance arbiter.

FAQ

Q: What is the best playable configuration for this combo?

A: The data shows 1920x1080 with Low settings produces 45.7 FPS, which is the only measured configuration above 30 FPS. All other settings and resolutions fall below this threshold, with 1080p Medium at 25 FPS being the next closest.

Q: Can this combo run The Medium at 4K?

A: Yes, but only at Low settings, which achieves 31.2 FPS. At Medium, 4K drops to 20.7 FPS, and at High it falls to 12.9 FPS. Ultra at 4K is the worst result in the dataset at exactly 10 FPS.

Q: How does the GTX 1650 compare to its nearest rival in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The GTX 1650 has an average benchmark score of 8713, placing it in the 43rd percentile of all GPUs. Its nearest rival, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 A Mobile, scores 8746, a delta of -0.4%, meaning the GTX 1650 is slightly behind. The AMD Radeon 550X scores 8749 (-0.4%), and the NVIDIA Quadro P2200 scores 8671 (0.5% ahead of the GTX 1650).

Q: Is the CPU or GPU responsible for the low frame rates?

A: The GPU is the sole bottleneck. The i5-13400F ranks in the 82nd percentile of CPUs, while the GTX 1650 ranks in the 43rd percentile of GPUs. The FPS scaling from Low to Ultra at any resolution shows a 2-3x drop, which is characteristic of GPU-bound rendering, not CPU limitations.

Q: What is the frame rate at 1440p Medium compared to 1080p Medium?

A: The results are nearly identical: 25.2 FPS at 1440p Medium versus 25 FPS at 1080p Medium. This suggests that the game's render pipeline at Medium settings is not primarily resolution-limited, but rather constrained by the GPU's compute or bandwidth capabilities.

Q: How does this combo rank among all tested configurations?

A: It ranks 1627 out of 1689 combos for The Medium, placing it in the bottom 4% of all tested systems. This rank reflects the GPU's limited performance tier rather than any CPU deficiency.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo rank of 1627 out of 1689 tested configurations places this pairing in the bottom 3.7% of all systems measured in The Medium. This is a decisive result that aligns with the component-level percentiles: the CPU sits in the 82nd percentile while the GPU sits in the 43rd percentile. The wide delta between these two component rankings indicates a severely unbalanced system for this game, where the GPU is two performance tiers below what the CPU can support.

The rank is consistent with the measured FPS data. A rank of 1627 means only 62 other combos performed worse, which correlates with the GPU's sub-30 FPS performance at 1080p Medium and above. The GTX 1650's nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks—the RTX 3050 A Mobile, Radeon 550X, and Radeon Pro WX 5100—all have similar average scores within a 0.5% delta, suggesting that any of these GPUs would produce nearly identical in-game results. The CPU's nearest rivals (i7-13620H, Ryzen 5 5600X3D, EPYC 9474F) all exceed the i5-13400F's score by less than 0.5%, so swapping the CPU would not move the combo rank meaningfully.

The data suggests that improving this combo's rank would require a GPU upgrade to a significantly higher tier, as the CPU is not the limiting factor. The i5-13400F's Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 21279 and single-core of 3004 indicate it can handle far more demanding GPU loads without becoming a bottleneck. This rank is a GPU-limited outcome, not a balanced system result.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 is built on the Turing architecture using the TU117 chip, fabricated on a 12 nm process at TSMC with 4,700 million transistors on a 200 mm² die. It has 896 shading units, 56 texture mapping units, and 32 ROPs. The GPU operates at a base clock of 1485 MHz with a boost of 1665 MHz, and its 4 GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 2001 MHz (8 Gbps effective) across a 128-bit bus, yielding 128.1 GB/s of bandwidth. This memory configuration is the most likely culprit for the game's poor scaling, as The Medium's dual-world rendering requires streaming large textures for both perspectives.

The GPU's compute capabilities are modest: 2.984 TFLOPS FP32 and 5.967 TFLOPS FP16 (2:1 ratio). The pixel rate of 53.28 GPixel/s and texture rate of 93.24 GTexel/s are low by modern standards. In The Medium, these limits manifest as the observed frame rates. The 4 GB VRAM capacity is also a concern, as the game's Ultra preset at 1080p produces only 13.9 FPS, suggesting the GPU is thrashing memory or hitting a compute wall rather than a bandwidth limit alone.

The GTX 1650's average benchmark score of 8713 places it in the 43rd percentile of all GPUs, which is below the median. Its nearest rival, the RTX 3050 A Mobile, scores 8746 (-0.4% delta), indicating that the GTX 1650 is essentially at parity with a mobile part from a newer generation. The GPU's predecessor is the GeForce 10 series and its successor is the GeForce 20 series, positioning it as a transitional part. The data shows that this GPU is end-of-life, which is reflected in its inability to handle The Medium at playable frame rates except at 1080p Low, where it achieves 45.7 FPS. At every other setting, the GPU delivers sub-30 FPS, and at Ultra across all resolutions it falls below 14 FPS.