The Medium

The Medium is a fixed-camera horror title that leans heavily on dual-world rendering, which punishes the GPU far more than the CPU. This page covers the Intel Core i9-14900K paired with the Intel Arc B390, a combination tested across four settings tiers and three resolutions. The i9-14900K is a flagship 24-core processor based on the Raptor Lake architecture, while the Arc B390 is an integrated graphics solution built on the Xe3-LPG architecture. The measured performance data shows this combo produces consistently low frame rates in The Medium, with the Arc B390 operating at the bottom of the GPU performance percentile — the integrated GPU becomes the decisive bottleneck in nearly every configuration tested.

FAQ

Q: What is the fastest settings/resolution combination for this combo in The Medium?

A: The best result comes at 1080p with Low settings, which produces an average frame rate of 51 FPS. This is the only configuration that crosses the 50 FPS threshold across the tested matrix. The next best is 1440p Low at 43 FPS, followed by 1080p Medium at 32 FPS.

Q: What is the slowest configuration tested for this pairing?

A: At 4K with Ultra settings, the combo averages just 12 FPS. That is the lowest recorded result. The 4K High preset also falls short of playability at 15 FPS, and 1440p Ultra barely improves to 15 FPS. The gap between Ultra and Low is roughly 3.8x at 4K, underscoring the GPU's limited compute capacity.

Q: How much frame rate difference exists between the Low and Ultra settings at 1080p?

A: At 1080p, Low delivers 51 FPS while Ultra drops to a 18 FPS average. That is a 33 FPS difference, a 65% reduction in frame rate, entirely attributable to the settings escalation. Medium sits in between at 32 FPS, showing a steady progression of load.

Q: What are the minimum and maximum recorded frame rates for this combo?

A: The only configuration with min/max data is the Medium preset. The 1080p Medium run recorded a minimum of 27 FPS and a maximum of 37 FPS, with an average of 32. Moving to 2560x1440 Medium nets a 23 FPS minimum and 31 FPS maximum. At 4K Medium, the min is 18 FPS and max is 24 FPS. This data shows noticeable frame time variance even at moderate settings, which can lead to stutter-like pacing during transitions.

Q: Does this combo's CPU score influence its GPU bottleneck behavior?

A: No. The Intel Core i9-14900K posts an average benchmark score of 79097, which sits in the 95th percentile among all CPUs. The GPU's average score is 1482, placing it at the 9th percentile. That massive performance gap means the CPU delivers far more compute headroom than the integrated GPU can utilize — the GPU is the limiting factor in this pairing.

Q: What is the combo rank relative to all tested combinations?

A: This Intel Core i9-14900K + Arc B390 build ranks 3314th out of 3724 tested combinations for The Medium. It sits in the 89th percentile from the bottom — better than 410 test alternatives, but still one of the slower pairs in the database.

GPU Role

The Arc B390 is an integrated graphics solution — it uses system shared memory instead of dedicated VRAM, with a memory bus described as "System Shared" and bandwidth listed as "System Dependent." This means the GPU draws from a portion of system RAM, and performance is heavily dependent on the platform's memory configuration. The chip is built on Intel's 3 nm process node, using the Xe3-LPG architecture, and operates with a base clock of 300 MHz and a boost clock of 2500 MHz. Its pixel fill rate is 60.00 GPixel/s and it has a texture rate of 120.0 GTexel/s. In terms of raw compute, it offers 7.680 TFLOPS of FP32 performance, and a pair of 12 RT cores support hardware ray tracing.

Given that the GPU's average benchmark score (its Steel Nomad DX12 score) is 1482, it ranks only 9th percentile among all GPUs. Its nearest rivals in the database are the NVIDIA GT 520MX with a score of 1463, meaning the Arc B390 is 1.3% ahead of it; the GeForce 800M trailing by 1.5%; the GT 625 OEM behind 2.5%; and the GT 710 behind 2.7%. All of these are older or low-end discrete GPUs, which emphasizes how far this Arc solution sits below true gaming-class graphics hardware. It's the GPU that shapes the FPS in The Medium because the game is heavily loaded by its GPU-resident render tasks — and the card—measured FPS confirms that performance scales directly with the GPU's settings and resolution pressure.

The shared memory nature is relevant: with no dedicated VRAM bus value, the rendering loop depends on system memory bandwidth. This typically penalizes high-resolution textures, which is visible in the data at 4K. The 4K Ultra average of 12 FPS suggests the GPU is both bandwidth-starved and compute-limited. The low pixel-rate threshold combined with 12 RT cores but only 1536 unified shaders, 48 units, and 24 ROPs is insufficient for even the Medium's fixed-camera environments. The GPU clock boost from 300 to 2500 MHz does help at lower settings, but the raw compute capacity cannot keep up above 1440p.

How This Combo Ranks

Out of the database's 3724 recorded combos for The Medium, this i9-14900K + Arc B390 pairing ranks at position 3314. That puts it in the bottom 11th percentile — better than just about 410 other configurations, but slower than the vast majority of tested setups. The ranking is consistent with the measured FPS data, which shows only 1080p Low exceeds 50 FPS; all other configurations are below 44. The biggest factor in that ranking is the GPU, but also CPU fails to offload the load — the i9 has extremely high compute throughput but cannot translate that into additional framerate because the GPU's ULL strength is the limiting condition.

Interestingly, the i9-14900K is a widely-recommended, high-end desktop part — it rates 95th percentile among all CPUs — yet it pairs with a GPU that sits at just 9th percentile performance. The relatively low combo rank is a consequence of using an integrated GPU as the primary display adapter. For The Medium's engine, which shines with a properly-matched pair, this setup ranks the complete combination in the bottom tier. Users should understand that raising settings or resolution will move the combo further down, since the GPU scales down far faster than the CPU can compensate.

Measured FPS Breakdown

Tested configurations are listed by resolution and settings with average FPS, along with min/max where recorded.

1920x1080 Full HD

• Low: average 51 FPS
• Medium: average 32 FPS, min 27, max 37
• High: average 23 FPS
• Ultra: average 18 FPS

At 1080p, Low performs up to 51 FPS, the only mark that might provide a playable foundation for frame-limited demands. However, dropping to High drops to just 23 FPS, showing the sharp sensitivity this GPU has to preset.

2560x1440 Quad HD

• Low: average 43 FPS
• Medium: average 27 FPS, min 23, max 31
• High: average 19 FPS
• Ultra: average 15 FPS

Going from 1080p to 1440p at Low still yields over 43 FPS, but that's already a 15% cut compared to the 1080p low result. Ultra at 1440p provides only 15 FPS, effectively unplayable.

3840x2160 4K

• Low: average 34 FPS
• Medium: average 21 FPS, min 18, max 24
• High: average 15 FPS
• Ultra: average 12 FPS

At 4K the situation collapses; even at Low it falls to 34 FPS, and with the Ultra preset, it averages only 12 FPS. Between 1080p and 4K, the FPS nearly halved for every step of resolution under the same preset — Low goes from 51 to 34, Medium from 32 to 21, High from 19 to 15, and Ultra from 15 to 12.

The min/max spread in the Medium preset is an additional indicator of the GPU's fragile stability. At 1080p, there's a 10 FPS difference between min and max; at 1440p, it drops to 8; and at 4K, it's 6. That a stabilization in the average but the absolute low points remain below 20 even at 1440p, so no one should try to target frame-pacing around the average of 27 FPS at 1440p Medium.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS degradation due to pixel count increase follows a near-linear pattern — but the band is tight. Comparing the 1080p results to 4K to the same preset shows the falloff:

• Low: 51 → 34 (a 33% drop)
• Medium: 32 → 21 (a 34% drop)
• High: 23 → 15 (a 35% drop)
• Ultra: 18 → 12 (a 33% drop)

The remote consistency (around 33-35% loss across settings) indicates that resolution is an dominant cost driver for the Arc B390, regardless of detailed settings, for this game. It also suggests the game's workload maps primarily to fill-rate and pixel work — every multiplier of resolution adds roughly the same. The GPUs output the same limited pixel count at each setting, i.e., 24. The GPU maxes out its ROP throughput at any resolution above 1080p high.

Comparatively, the difference between Low and Ultra at 4K is 22 FPS (12 vs 34), which is about 2.83x scoring. That's a somewhat larger margin than at first glance, because at 4K, drops from Low to Medium in 34 to 21, a 38% hit. But the same drop from 1080p Low to Medium only costs 32 – 51 = 13 FPS, about a change-tolerance of a 39% step. The only change in trained results: 1440p Medium at 27 FPS vs 1080p Medium of 32, losing 5 FPS. Inversely, those numbers mean that at 4K even Lowest cannot match 1080p at Ultra – 34 vs 18.

The pixel-to-FPS ratios used – if we treat 4K as roughly 4.65 MP and 1080p as 2.07 MP – AMD operating systems are likely assigned to large-destination memory copies; that's the "System Dependent" memory bandwidth issue. This evaluation suggests that the Arc has effectively saturated its memory bandwidth, and no scaling tricks except reducing queue length intersect.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i9-14900K is a flagship 24-core, 32-thread processor based on the Raptor Lake Refresh architecture, fabricated on a 10 nm Intel process. It features a base clock of 3.20 GHz and a boost clock of 6.00 GHz, with a TDP of 125 W, and it supports Intel's 1700 socket with PCIe Gen 5 (16 lanes from the CPU). Core hierarchy is split into a physical top-address: 36 MB for interframe, shared L3; 2 MB of L2 per core, and 80 KB of L1 per core, with a memory controller supporting both DDR4 and DDR5, dual-channel suggesting the facts. It also incorporates the UHD 770 integrated graphics as part of its tile.

Its benchmark vault indicates a heavy lever in compute: Cinebench R23 multi-core score is 39,399; single-core 2,262; Geekbench multi 21697 and single 2655; and PassMark multi-thread 58674. The machine averages 79,097, setting it in the 95th percentile of all CPUs. Its closest ranked rivals are the Intel Core i9-14900KF (a -0.3% delta, almost identical performance), the Core Ultra 9 290HX (0.6% slower), the AMD EPYC 7413 (1.9% lower), and the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (1.7% higher). This means that the i9 has higher single-thread ceiling than nearly any CPU in the database, but that raw strength is not reflected in the game's FPS metric.

In The Medium, the CPU role is secondary because the Arc B390 cannot translate the processor's feed into rasterized frames. With GPU utilization staying low (not measured, but inferred from the wide disparity in scores), the CPU is essentially idle from a gaming standpoint. For resource-limited scenes, for instance, the engine could shift some workload to the CPU, but since the GPU Max output is only 15 FPS on Ultra, and even 1080p Ultra is just 18 FPS, the CPU sits unused headroom. The core spend at 2. CGA boost and 36 MB L3 would allow the game's logic and cut-streams to run, but the GPU's bottleneck prevents any prolongation. Pairing this CPU with the iGPU is a expressly mismatch: the i9 series heavyweight lifting conceptually tops, but the iGPU fails reference. It is the CPU's own integrated UHD 770, ironically a 60 GHz twin, possibly the stronger option — but only if the system config is changed. As configured, the i9's 40 threads and Cinebench R23 ::score 39,399.5 go unused except the physics/room-loaded elements that might be blocked by this GPU at 4K.

The CPU's 6.00 likely also contributes to memory latency and driver overhead but not to the frame rate walls — the GPU already fails to deliver a 1 FPS 4K. So the role of the CPU in this dataset is to sustain the minimum frame pacing once the GPU proves results; as those can't—faster than 18 FPS in 1080p Ultra—the CPU's compute resources remain unconsumed. Effectively, mixing these two parts produces a system where the in-game average FPS traces the GPU's pixel fill and shader performance curve while the CPU stands idle simultaneously, and all described combination — i3 14th Central ultra class — the Mali cpus of Winbix builds explore that available iGPU will dive quickly.