The Medium

The Medium, a fixed-camera horror title built around ray-traced reflections and intricate set-piece lighting, presents a demanding workload that scales steeply with resolution. For the combination of the Intel Core i7-14700F and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, the measured data reveals a configuration that is strictly bound by the graphics card at higher resolutions, while the CPU’s substantial headroom becomes apparent only at 1080p. The benchmark results show a clear hierarchy where the RTX 2070 SUPER’s 8 GB frame buffer and Turing architecture determine playability, with the i7-14700F providing consistent, non-limiting frame delivery.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate drop from 1080p to 4K is severe and non-linear, confirming that the RTX 2070 SUPER is the primary bottleneck across the board. At Medium settings, the jump from 1920x1080 (64.8 FPS) to 2560x1440 (55.8 FPS) is a modest 13.9% reduction, but moving from 1440p to 3840x2160 (42.4 FPS) represents a further 24.0% decline. This steepening curve indicates that the GPU’s pixel throughput and memory bandwidth are being exhausted as the render target scales. The data shows a more dramatic collapse at High settings: 48.1 FPS at 1080p falls to 36.1 FPS at 1440p (a 25.0% drop), then to 29 FPS at 4K (a 19.7% drop from 1440p). This pattern suggests that High settings introduce effects that disproportionately tax the GPU at higher resolutions, likely related to the game’s signature split-screen rendering technique.

At Ultra settings, the scaling becomes nearly unusable for 4K, with the average frame rate collapsing to 26.6 FPS. The difference between 1080p Ultra (36 FPS) and 1440p Ultra (30.9 FPS) is only 5.1 FPS, implying that the GPU is already saturated at 1080p with these settings, and additional resolution only marginally worsens an already sub-60 FPS experience. Notably, Low settings show the least relative penalty: 99.8 FPS at 1080p drops to 82.8 FPS at 1440p (17.0% loss) and 67.8 FPS at 4K (18.1% loss from 1440p). This flatter scaling curve indicates that at Low settings, the workload shifts toward CPU-bound rendering paths, where the i7-14700F’s 20 cores and 28 threads are sufficient to keep the GPU fed, even at 4K. The data strongly implies that the limiting component is never the CPU; it is always the RTX 2070 SUPER’s compute and memory subsystem.

GPU Role

The RTX 2070 SUPER, with its 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus delivering 448.0 GB/s of bandwidth, plays the decisive role in these results. This memory configuration is adequate for 1080p and 1440p at most settings, but the 4K Ultra result of 26.6 FPS suggests that capacity and bandwidth are strained. The GPU’s base clock of 1605 MHz and boost of 1770 MHz are modest by today’s standards, yet the architecture’s 40 RT cores and 320 tensor cores are directly relevant to The Medium, which relies heavily on hardware-accelerated ray tracing for its eerie, volumetric lighting. The measured FPS at High settings—48.1 FPS at 1080p—indicates that the RT cores are active but not overburdened at this resolution, whereas the 4K High result of 29 FPS shows the ray tracing workload scaling poorly with pixel count.

The GPU’s FP32 throughput of 9.062 TFLOPS and texture rate of 283.2 GTexel/s are the raw resources being consumed. The drop from Medium 1440p (55.8 FPS) to High 1440p (36.1 FPS) is a 35.3% performance loss, which is a larger penalty than the resolution scaling alone would suggest. This indicates that the High preset enables additional ray-traced effects or shadow quality that taxes the RT cores disproportionately. The 8 GB VRAM is also a factor: at 4K High, the game likely approaches or exceeds this limit, causing the GPU to rely on slower memory paging, which explains the precipitous drop to 29 FPS. In contrast, Low settings at 4K (67.8 FPS) stay well within the memory budget, allowing the GPU to operate without such penalties. The data shows a clear division: the RTX 2070 SUPER is a capable 1080p card and a passable 1440p card for this title, but 4K demands significant settings reductions to remain fluid.

Settings Recommendations

Given the measured rows, the optimal balance of visual fidelity and frame rate is found at Medium settings for 1080p and 1440p. At 1920x1080, Medium delivers 64.8 FPS, which is comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay, while High drops to 48.1 FPS—a noticeable 25.8% penalty that may not be worth the visual uplift in a game with static camera angles. At 2560x1440, Medium produces 55.8 FPS, which is playable but not silky-smooth; High at 36.1 FPS is only suitable for users who prioritize image quality over responsiveness. For 4K, the data strongly recommends Low settings, which yield 67.8 FPS, a remarkable result that shows the CPU-GPU combo can still deliver high frame rates if the graphics load is minimized. Medium at 4K (42.4 FPS) and High at 4K (29 FPS) are both below the 60 FPS target, making them poor choices for competitive play.

Ultra settings are never advisable for this combination. The best Ultra result is 36 FPS at 1080p, which is below the standard 60 FPS target, and 4K Ultra at 26.6 FPS is nearly unplayable. The data suggests that Ultra settings are designed for hardware with significantly more headroom, and the RTX 2070 SUPER cannot sustain them even at lower resolutions. Therefore, the measured numbers indicate a clear prescription: use Medium for 1080p and 1440p as the default, and resort to Low only when prioritizing frame rate at 4K or when the scene complexity spikes. High settings can be used for 1080p if the user tolerates frame rates in the 40s, but there is no measured scenario where High outperforms Medium by a margin that justifies the FPS loss.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the full range of settings shows a wide spread: Low achieves 99.8 FPS, Medium 64.8 FPS, High 48.1 FPS, and Ultra 36 FPS. This represents a 63.8 FPS difference between the lowest and highest presets, indicating that the game’s settings have a massive impact on GPU load. The step from Low to Medium is a 35.0% reduction in frame rate, while Medium to High is a 25.8% reduction, and High to Ultra is a 25.2% reduction. These consistent penalties suggest that each preset tier adds a similar quantum of rendering work, likely in terms of shadow resolution, texture filtering, and ray-traced effect density.

Moving to 2560x1440, the numbers compress: Low 82.8 FPS, Medium 55.8 FPS, High 36.1 FPS, and Ultra 30.9 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra narrows to 51.9 FPS, but the relative penalties remain steep. Notably, the drop from High to Ultra at 1440p is only 5.2 FPS (14.4% loss), which is much smaller than the 25.2% penalty seen at 1080p. This suggests that at 1440p, the GPU is already so constrained that the additional Ultra effects are partially masked by the resolution bottleneck, resulting in diminishing returns. At 3840x2160, the results are: Low 67.8 FPS, Medium 42.4 FPS, High 29 FPS, and Ultra 26.6 FPS. The Low result is surprisingly strong, proving that the i7-14700F can drive the RTX 2070 SUPER to high frame rates even at 4K when the graphics load is minimal. However, the Medium to High drop at 4K is 13.4 FPS (31.6% loss), showing that High settings are disproportionately expensive at this resolution.

How This Combo Ranks

In the global database of tested combinations for The Medium, this pairing holds a rank of 1020 out of 1689 combos, placing it in the 60.4th percentile of all systems. This indicates that the i7-14700F + RTX 2070 SUPER is a mid-pack performer, neither a top-tier rig nor a low-end compromise. The CPU alone, however, is a strong component: the Intel Core i7-14700F sits in the 94th percentile versus all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 54097. Its nearest rivals in the CPU database are the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X (54450, delta -0.6%), the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D (54681, delta -1.1%), and the Intel Xeon Phi 7290 (53469, delta 1.2%). This means the i7-14700F is effectively on par with those high-end chips, losing by less than 2% to any of them, which confirms that the processor is not the limiting factor in this combo.

The GPU tells a different story. The RTX 2070 SUPER has an average benchmark score of 22206 and sits in the 65th percentile versus all GPUs. Its nearest rivals include the NVIDIA RTX A400 (22307, delta -0.5%), the NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Z (22006, delta 0.9%), and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Mobile (22729, delta -2.3%). This places the GPU in the lower-middle tier of modern graphics cards, and its pairing with a top-6% CPU creates a significant imbalance. The combo rank of 1020 out of 1689 reflects this disparity: the system is held back by the GPU, which is why the measured FPS at 4K High and Ultra fall below 30 FPS. If the CPU were paired with a stronger GPU, the rank would likely be much higher, but as measured, the data shows that this configuration is a classic CPU-overkill, GPU-limited build. The percentile gap between the CPU (94) and GPU (65) is 29 points, which is unusually wide and directly explains the frame rate characteristics observed across all resolutions.