The Medium

The Medium running on an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H paired with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5060 Mobile is a study in a GPU-bound horror title on mobile silicon. Bloober Team's 2021 psychological horror release, with its dual-reality rendering, pushes the RTX 5060 Mobile hard at every resolution tested, and the measured data shows frame rates that fall steeply as pixel count rises — the signature of a game limited far more by the GPU than by the 16-core Meteor Lake processor feeding it. Across twelve measured configurations spanning three resolutions and four quality presets, average frame rates range from 94 FPS at 1080p Low down to 22 FPS at 4K Ultra, and the pairing sits at rank 2476 out of 3724 tested hardware combinations in this game — a middling placement consistent with a mid-tier laptop GPU confronting a demanding title.

Resolution Scaling

The scaling behavior across the three tested resolutions tells a consistent story: The Medium leans heavily on the GPU at all times. Consider the Low preset trajectory. Average frame rate drops from 94 FPS at 1920x1080 to 79 FPS at 2560x1440, then to 62 FPS at 3840x2160. Moving from 1080p to 1440p roughly multiplies the pixel count by a factor of 1.8, yet the frame rate only fell by a smaller proportion — indicating the CPU and driver stack were absorbing part of the load at the lower resolution. From 1440p to 4K, where pixel count again expands sharply, the fall from 79 to 62 FPS is comparatively gentle, suggesting the GPU was already close to saturated at 1440p and additional pixels did not proportionally punish the frame rate.

The Medium preset shows the same pattern with different magnitude: 59 FPS at 1080p, 49 FPS at 1440p, and 39 FPS at 4K, with the only min/max data in the entire dataset captured here — a minimum of 50 and maximum of 67 at 1080p, 42 to 57 at 1440p, and 33 to 45 at 4K. Those Medium minimums are instructive. At 4K Medium the frame rate never falls below 33 FPS, which keeps the experience above the threshold where a horror game's slower pacing becomes unplayable, but the maximum of 45 FPS confirms the GPU never gets breathing room either.

The High preset descends from 42 FPS at 1080p to 35 at 1440p and 28 at 4K. Ultra drops from 33 to 28 to 22. The Ultra numbers are the clearest evidence of a hard GPU limit: at 1080p Ultra the combo manages only 33 FPS, which is barely higher than the 39 FPS it achieves at 4K Medium. When resolution changes by a large margin yet frame rate barely moves between those two configurations, the conclusion is that the RTX 5060 Mobile is the fixed constraint, not the resolution itself at the lower end.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H is a Meteor Lake mobile processor with 16 cores and 22 threads, a 3.80 GHz base clock, a 4.80 GHz boost clock, and a 28 W TDP on the Intel BGA 2049 socket. It carries 112 KB of L1 cache per core, 2 MB of L2 per core, and a shared 24 MB L3 slice, with dual-channel DDR5 support delivering 89.6 GB/s of memory bandwidth. In aggregate CPU benchmarks it posts a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 15028 and a single-core score of 1743, plus a PassMark multithread rating of 24873 and a single-thread rating of 3468. Those results place it in the 83rd percentile against all CPUs in the database.

Against its nearest rivals, the 155H is essentially deadlocked. The Intel Core i5-14600T and AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 sit at deltaPct 0 and 0.1 respectively, while the AMD Ryzen 5 7400F (-0.2) and Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H (-0.4) are marginally ahead. In practical terms this is a processor with no meaningful advantage or deficit against that peer group, and for The Medium it changes nothing about the verdict.

What the game data indicates is that the CPU is not the bottleneck. The tell is the Ultra preset: at 1080p, where CPU load is highest relative to GPU load, the combo delivers only 33 FPS. A CPU-limited configuration at 1080p would typically show flatter scaling and higher absolute frame rates at lower settings, yet even the Low preset tops out at 94 FPS — a frame rate the 155H's strong single-core showing (a PassMark single-thread score of 3468, 83rd percentile overall) should not struggle to feed. The dual-reality rendering that defines The Medium is a GPU workload, and the data reflects that. The Meteor Lake chip's role here is simply to stay out of the way, which its benchmark profile suggests it does comfortably.

How This Combo Ranks

Within The Medium's leaderboard of tested hardware combinations, the Core Ultra 7 155H plus RTX 5060 Mobile ranks 2476 out of 3724 combos. That placement sits below the midpoint, which aligns with the GPU's position rather than the CPU's. The 155H sits in the 83rd percentile of all CPUs, while the RTX 5060 Mobile sits in only the 67th percentile of all GPUs — the pairing's rank tracks the weaker component.

The RTX 5060 Mobile's rival cluster reinforces the picture. Its average benchmark score of 22435 is within 0.5 percent of the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT (deltaPct -0.5), 1.2 percent ahead of the RX 5700, 1.3 percent ahead of the RX 6700S, and 1.3 percent behind the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Mobile (deltaPct -1.3). So the GPU delivers performance in the territory of the previous-generation 4060 Mobile and AMD's mid-range RX 6700-class laptop silicon — capable hardware, but not the class of GPU that makes a demanding horror title with ray-tracing-era rendering fly at high resolutions. Given that the GPU is the limiting factor in this game, combinations ranked above this one will almost universally carry faster graphics hardware, regardless of their CPU.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the measured averages are: Low 94 FPS, Medium 59 FPS (minimum 50, maximum 67), High 42 FPS, and Ultra 33 FPS. At 2560x1440: Low 79 FPS, Medium 49 FPS (minimum 42, maximum 57), High 35 FPS, and Ultra 28 FPS. At 3840x2160: Low 62 FPS, Medium 39 FPS (minimum 33, maximum 45), High 28 FPS, and Ultra 22 FPS.

Several cross-comparisons are worth drawing out. The 1080p Medium average of 59 FPS sits just below a 60 FPS target, and its maximum of 67 shows the system can touch that level but cannot hold it on average. The 1440p Medium result of 49 FPS is close enough that a small settings reduction — dropping to Low, which yields 79 FPS at the same resolution — produces a large jump in headroom. At the top end, 4K Ultra's 22 FPS average is the weakest result in the dataset; even the 4K Low preset only reaches 62 FPS, meaning no 4K configuration tested clears the 60 FPS line. The High preset degrades in a tight, predictable band — 42, 35, 28 — losing roughly a third of its frame rate at each resolution step. Ultra compresses into a narrow 33-to-22 range across all three resolutions, which again points at GPU saturation at the top preset rather than resolution-driven cost.

GPU Role

The GeForce RTX 5060 Mobile is a Blackwell 2.0 part built on TSMC's 5 nm process, using the GB206 chip with 21,900 million transistors on a 181 mm² die — a transistor density of 121.0 million per square millimeter. It carries 3328 shading units, 104 TMUs, 48 ROPs, 26 RT cores, and 104 tensor cores. Clocks run at 952 MHz base and 1455 MHz boost, with memory clocked at 1500 MHz (24 Gbps effective). The 8 GB of GDDR7 on a 128-bit bus delivers 384.0 GB/s of bandwidth. Raw throughput figures include 9.684 TFLOPS of FP32 (with FP16 at a 1:1 ratio), a pixel rate of 69.84 GPixel/s, and a texture rate of 151.3 GTexel/s. The card is a 45 W IGP-form-factor mobile part with no power connectors and a PCIe 5.0 x16 interface, supporting DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.4.

In synthetic testing the GPU posts a 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 3013.5, a Geekbench OpenCL score of 96969, a Geekbench Vulkan score of 96451, and a PassMark G3D rating of 18852. Its overall database position is the 67th percentile.

How does this map to The Medium? The game's demanding rendering workload — its signature simultaneous dual-world scenes — consumes fill rate and memory bandwidth, and the 384 GB/s of GDDR7 bandwidth plus 26 RT cores are what stand between the player and unplayable frame rates. The results indicate they are sufficient at 1080p, marginal at 1440p, and insufficient for smooth 4K play. The memory situation deserves attention: 8 GB on a 128-bit bus is the defining constraint of this GPU class, and the steep falloff at Ultra presets — where texture and asset quality scale up — is consistent with a card that runs out of both shader and memory headroom at high settings. The fact that 1080p Ultra (33 FPS) and 4K Medium (39 FPS) land within a few frames of each other shows that once settings are maxed, resolution is no longer the dominant cost; the preset itself is.

FAQ

Q: Can the Core Ultra 7 155H + RTX 5060 Mobile run The Medium at 60 FPS?

A: Only at select configurations. The 60 FPS mark is exceeded at 1080p Low (94 FPS) and 1440p Low (79 FPS). At 1080p Medium the average is 59 FPS with a maximum of 67 — right at the threshold but below it on average. No High, Ultra, or 4K configuration reaches 60 FPS.

Q: Is The Medium CPU-limited or GPU-limited on this hardware?

A: The data indicates GPU-limited. Frame rates fall steadily with both resolution and preset quality, and 1080p Ultra (33 FPS) performs similarly to 4K Medium (39 FPS), showing the GPU saturates before the CPU becomes a factor. The 155H sits in the 83rd CPU percentile and is not the constraint.

Q: How does this combo rank among tested hardware configurations in The Medium?

A: It ranks 2476 out of 3724 tested combinations — below the midpoint, consistent with the RTX 5060 Mobile's 67th percentile GPU standing rather than the CPU's stronger 83rd percentile position.

Q: Is 4K playable on this pairing?

A: Not comfortably. 4K Low averages 62 FPS, but 4K Medium drops to 39 FPS (minimum 33), 4K High to 28 FPS, and 4K Ultra to 22 FPS. Only the Low preset clears 60 FPS, and fidelity at that setting is reduced considerably.

Q: How does the RTX 5060 Mobile compare to rival GPUs?

A: Its average benchmark score of 22435 places it within 0.5 percent of the Radeon RX 7700 XT, 1.2 percent ahead of the RX 5700, 1.3 percent ahead of the RX 6700S, and 1.3 percent behind the RTX 4060 Mobile — a tight mid-range cluster.

Q: What is the minimum frame rate recorded in this dataset?

A: The lowest recorded minimum is 33 FPS, at 3840x2160 on the Medium preset. Minimums were captured only on Medium: 50 at 1080p, 42 at 1440p, and 33 at 4K.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data supports a clear ladder of choices. For a 1080p display, Medium is the balanced pick: 59 FPS average with a 67 FPS maximum and a 50 FPS floor keeps the experience fluid for a horror title that does not demand competitive frame rates. Players sensitive to drops should take 1080p Low at 94 FPS, which trades fidelity for near-total stability. 1080p High at 42 FPS and 1080p Ultra at 33 FPS are below comfortable thresholds for a game built on atmosphere and smooth camera movement.

At 1440p, the recommendation shifts to Low. Its 79 FPS average provides generous headroom, while Medium at 49 FPS (minimum 42) is the upper boundary of playable. High at 35 FPS and Ultra at 28 FPS are not advisable at this resolution.

For 4K, no preset delivers an ideal experience. Low at 62 FPS is the only configuration above 60, and Medium at 39 FPS with a 33 FPS minimum is the compromise ceiling — playable for The Medium's slower pacing, but visibly less smooth. High at 28 FPS and Ultra at 22 FPS should be avoided entirely. The overall verdict: this combination is best matched to a 1080p Medium experience, with Low settings as the escape hatch at higher resolutions.