The Medium

The Medium presents a demanding fixed-camera horror experience, and the pairing of the Intel Core i7-14700F with the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT produces a wide spread of results depending on the graphics preset selected. The measured data across three resolutions shows that the choice of settings is not merely a visual preference but a decisive factor in playability. At 1080p, the Ultra preset yields an average of 42.8 FPS, which is playable but not ideal for a game that relies on atmospheric tension. The High preset improves this to 55 FPS, while Medium reaches 80.2 FPS. The Low preset delivers 128.1 FPS, effectively removing any performance ceiling. At 1440p, the pattern holds: Ultra drops to 37.7 FPS, High to 49.2 FPS, Medium to 64.7 FPS, and Low to 105.4 FPS. At 4K, the Ultra preset falls to 27.8 FPS, which is below the threshold for a smooth experience, while High manages 37.5 FPS, Medium reaches 54.3 FPS, and Low jumps to 85.6 FPS.

Settings Recommendations

The optimal experience for this combination is the Medium preset. This is the only setting tier that consistently maintains a playable frame rate across all three tested resolutions, with averages of 80.2 FPS at 1080p, 64.7 FPS at 1440p, and 54.3 FPS at 4K. The data indicates that Medium provides a balanced experience, avoiding the steep performance penalties of the Ultra preset while offering a significant visual upgrade over Low. The jump from Low to Medium at 4K is particularly telling, as the frame rate drops from 85.6 to 54.3, but the latter figure remains comfortably within the playable range. For users prioritizing a locked 60 FPS experience at 1440p, the High preset falls short at 49.2 FPS, making Medium the superior choice. The Ultra preset is not recommended for any resolution, as its highest average is only 42.8 FPS at 1080p, and at 4K it produces a stutter-prone 27.8 FPS. The Low preset, while delivering the highest frame rates, sacrifices the atmospheric detail that defines the horror genre, making Medium the best compromise between fidelity and performance.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT is the primary driver of the frame rate differences between presets. Its 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus provides a 432.0 GB/s bandwidth, which is sufficient for the game’s texture-heavy environments at Medium settings. The GPU’s clock behavior is notable: a base clock of 1435 MHz and a boost clock of 2544 MHz, with a game clock of 2171 MHz. These figures show that the card has significant headroom to scale its frequency under load, which explains why the Low preset can achieve 128.1 FPS at 1080p. However, the GPU’s performance degrades sharply as the preset increases, with the Ultra preset at 4K producing only 27.8 FPS. This suggests that the RX 7700 XT’s compute resources, comprising 3456 shading units and 54 ray accelerators, are heavily taxed by the game’s higher-fidelity effects. The 35.17 TFLOPS of FP32 performance is adequate for Medium settings, but the data shows that the card’s memory bandwidth becomes a limiting factor at Ultra, where the frame rate drops by roughly half compared to Medium at the same resolution. The GPU’s 73rd percentile ranking among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 30097, places it in the upper-midrange, and this is reflected in its ability to handle Medium settings at 4K but not Ultra.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i7-14700F provides a robust foundation that does not bottleneck the GPU in this title. With 20 cores and 28 threads, the CPU offers substantial parallel processing capability, though The Medium is not a heavily threaded game. The processor’s boost clock of 5.40 GHz is critical for maintaining consistent frame times, particularly in scenes with complex scripting. The CPU’s benchmark scores support this analysis: a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 35443 and a single-core score of 5003 indicate strong per-thread performance. The 94th percentile ranking among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 54097, shows that this processor is near the top of the performance hierarchy. In this game, the CPU’s role is secondary to the GPU, as evidenced by the frame rate scaling between presets. At 1080p Low, the system achieves 128.1 FPS, which is likely near the CPU’s ceiling for frame generation in this title. However, the fact that frame rates drop by more than half when moving from Low to Ultra at the same resolution indicates that the GPU becomes the primary bottleneck at higher settings. The CPU’s 33 MB of shared L3 cache and 2 MB per-core L2 cache help maintain low latency for game logic, but the data does not show any scenario where the CPU limits performance below the GPU’s capabilities.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of the Core i7-14700F and the Radeon RX 7700 XT ranks 700th out of 1689 tested combos in The Medium. This places it in the 58th percentile of all tested systems, indicating a slightly above-average configuration for this game. The ranking is influenced by the GPU’s midrange positioning and the CPU’s high-end capability. The CPU alone sits in the 94th percentile, with rivals such as the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X scoring 54450 in average benchmarks, a mere 0.6% higher than the i7-14700F’s 54097. The GPU, however, sits in the 73rd percentile, with its average benchmark score of 30097 being essentially tied with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060, which scores 30109. This near-parity explains the combo’s mid-pack ranking: the CPU is not the limiting factor, but the GPU’s performance ceiling caps the overall system result. The combo’s rank of 700 out of 1689 suggests that while many systems outperform it, a substantial number of configurations also fall behind, making this a balanced but not exceptional pairing for this particular horror title.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling across resolutions reveals the GPU as the dominant constraint. At the Low preset, the drop from 1080p to 4K is from 128.1 FPS to 85.6 FPS, a reduction of 33%. At the Medium preset, the drop is from 80.2 FPS to 54.3 FPS, a reduction of 32%. At the High preset, the drop is from 55 FPS to 37.5 FPS, a reduction of 32%. At the Ultra preset, the drop is from 42.8 FPS to 27.8 FPS, a reduction of 35%. The consistency of this ~33% reduction across all presets indicates that the scaling is primarily resolution-driven rather than settings-driven. This pattern suggests that the GPU’s pixel throughput, with a pixel rate of 244.2 GPixel/s, is the limiting factor. As resolution increases, the number of pixels rendered grows, and the GPU’s fill rate becomes the bottleneck. The CPU’s performance does not degrade with resolution, so the frame rate drop is entirely attributable to the GPU’s workload. The fact that the Low preset at 4K (85.6 FPS) is higher than the Ultra preset at 1080p (42.8 FPS) further confirms that the graphics settings have a more significant impact on performance than resolution alone. This indicates that users seeking higher resolutions should prioritize lowering the preset over reducing resolution, as the Medium preset at 4K offers a better frame rate than the Ultra preset at 1080p.