The Medium

The Medium running on an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H paired with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5070 Mobile is a study in how a GPU-bound horror title behaves on a modern gaming laptop. Bloober Team's dual-reality horror game, released in early 2021, leans heavily on ray-traced lighting and hardware acceleration, and the measured data shows a classic pattern: frame rates that scale almost linearly with resolution, indicating the RTX 5070 Mobile is the limiting component at every step. The combo ranks 2057 out of 3724 tested combinations in this game — squarely in the upper half, but well short of what a flagship pairing delivers.

Resolution Scaling

The measured numbers tell a clean story about where the bottleneck sits. At Low settings, the game runs at 107 FPS at 1920x1080, 90 FPS at 2560x1440, and 71 FPS at 3840x2160. That is a drop of roughly a third when moving from 1080p to 1440p, and roughly another fifth when jumping to 4K. Compare that with what a CPU-limited scenario looks like: when the processor is the ceiling, frame rates stay nearly flat as resolution rises because the CPU can only feed frames so fast regardless of how many pixels the GPU is asked to shade. That is not what happens here.

The same pattern repeats at every preset. Medium goes from 67 FPS at 1080p to 56 FPS at 1440p to 44 FPS at 4K. High goes from 48 to 40 to 32. Ultra goes from 38 to 32 to 25. In each case, increasing the pixel count from 1080p to 4K — roughly a fourfold increase in pixels rendered — costs between roughly a quarter and a third of the frame rate. That proportionality is the signature of a GPU-bound game. The 16-core, 22-thread Core Ultra 7 155H is never the component running out of headroom; the RTX 5070 Mobile is.

There is one nuance worth flagging. The gap between 1080p and 1440p is smaller than the gap between 1440p and 4K at the Low preset — 107 to 90 versus 90 to 71 — which hints that at 1080p Low, the frame rate may be drifting toward a platform limit near the triple-digit mark. But even if a touch of CPU or system limitation exists at the very fastest measured point, every other configuration in the dataset is clearly GPU-limited. For a 2021 horror title running on a 2025-generation mobile GPU, that is expected: The Medium's demanding lighting model and dual-world rendering stress shader throughput and memory bandwidth far more than raw CPU grunt.

GPU Role

The RTX 5070 Mobile sits in the 75th percentile of all GPUs in the database, with an average benchmark score of 29928. Its nearest rivals tell you exactly where it lands: the RTX 3070 Ti scores 29945 against its 29928, a delta of just -0.1 percent, while the RTX 2080 Ti sits 0.5 percent behind and the Radeon RX 6800 is 0.6 percent ahead. In other words, this is a mobile Blackwell part delivering performance comparable to well-regarded desktop-class cards of the previous couple of generations. The Radeon RX 6700 trails it by 1.7 percent.

Architecturally, the GB206 chip is built on TSMC's 5 nm process with 21,900 million transistors packed into an 181 mm² die — a density of 121 million transistors per square millimetre. It carries 4608 shading units, 144 texture mapping units, 48 render output units, 36 RT cores and 144 tensor cores, producing 13.13 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. Texture fill rate is 205.2 GTexel/s and pixel fill rate is 68.40 GPixel/s. The base clock is 907 MHz with a boost of 1425 MHz.

For The Medium specifically, the GPU characteristics that matter most are the ray tracing hardware and the memory subsystem. The Medium's visual identity is built on ray-traced lighting, and the 36 third-generation-era RT cores handle that load — but they handle it at a cost, as the steep drop from High (48 FPS at 1080p) to Ultra (38 FPS at 1080p) demonstrates. The 8 GB of GDDR7 on a 128-bit bus delivers 384 GB/s of bandwidth, with memory running at 1500 MHz (24 Gbps effective). That bandwidth figure is generous for the bus width and helps at higher resolutions, but the 8 GB capacity itself deserves attention: at 4K Ultra, modern textures and ray-traced effects consume VRAM quickly, and the measured 25 FPS average suggests the card is working at or near its limits at that setting. The data does not isolate VRAM pressure as a cause, but the Ultra presets at 1440p and 4K are the least comfortable results in the dataset.

Notably, the GPU's compute credentials are solid: Geekbench OpenCL scores 122238 and Vulkan scores 116960, and Passmark G3D comes in at 20355. Those numbers back up what the in-game measurements show — a GPU comfortably in the upper quartile of the database, but not one that can brute-force a demanding ray-traced title at native 4K with maxed settings.

CPU Role

The Core Ultra 7 155H is a Meteor Lake mobile processor released in December 2023, built on Intel's 7 nm process on the Intel BGA 2049 socket. It offers 16 cores and 22 threads with a 3.80 GHz base clock, a 4.80 GHz boost clock, and a 28 W TDP. Cache consists of 112 KB of L1 per core, 2 MB of L2 per core, and a shared 24 MB L3. Memory support is dual-channel DDR5 with 89.6 GB/s of bandwidth, and the chip integrates Arc Xe-LPG graphics with 128 execution units. Its launch MSRP was $503.

In CPU terms, the chip sits in the 83rd percentile of all processors in the database with an average benchmark score of 32697. Its nearest rivals are remarkably tight: the Core i5-14600T scores 32707 (a delta of 0 percent), the Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 scores 32662 (0.1 percent), the Ryzen 5 7400F scores 32750 (-0.2 percent), and the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H scores 32812 (-0.4 percent). That cluster means the 155H delivers effectively identical aggregate CPU performance to those parts — a solid upper-tier mobile and desktop-adjacent performer.

The single-thread numbers matter more for gaming: Cinebench R23 single-core lands at 1743, R20 single-core at 1235, and R15 single-core at 255. Passmark single-thread reads 3468. Multi-threaded, the chip scores 15028 in Cinebench R23, 8754 in R20, and 2450 in R15, plus 24873 in Passmark multithread. For The Medium, the relevant figure is the single-thread score — horror games built on the Unreal-style engines of that era are typically thread-light and clock-sensitive. The 4.80 GHz boost and 1743-point R23 single-core result indicate the 155H has more than enough per-core speed to feed the RTX 5070 Mobile in this title.

The evidence in the measured data supports that. Because frame rates fall proportionally with resolution at every preset rather than plateauing, the CPU is demonstrably not the constraint. The 155H's role here is simply to stay out of the way, and the data shows it does. Its Passmark physics score of 1727 and integer math result of 86870 further confirm a processor with broad capability well beyond gaming, but in The Medium none of that headroom is being tapped.

How This Combo Ranks

Within this game's leaderboard, the Core Ultra 7 155H + RTX 5070 Mobile pairing ranks 2057 out of 3724 tested combinations. That places it in the top half — but only just past the midpoint, sitting at roughly the 55th percentile of combinations measured in The Medium. The interpretation is straightforward: The Medium rewards raw GPU horsepower above all else, and while the RTX 5070 Mobile is a strong mobile part sitting at the 75th percentile of all GPUs, this game's field includes many desktop-class cards that push the leaderboard's upper reaches far beyond what a 50 W mobile GPU can deliver.

Note the contrast in percentile placement. The CPU ranks in the 83rd percentile of all processors and the GPU in the 75th percentile of all GPUs, yet the combination ranks around the 55th percentile in this specific game. That gap exists because The Medium is unusually GPU-heavy: a strong CPU cannot compensate for a GPU ceiling, so the combo's rank tracks the GPU's performance in this title rather than the pair's average capability. Users comparing laptops for this game should therefore weight the GPU choice heavily and treat the CPU as a secondary consideration — the 155H will not hold back any GPU class that typically ships alongside it.

Measured FPS Breakdown

All figures below are measured averages from the dataset, captured with this exact hardware pairing.

At 1920x1080:

• Low: 107 FPS average
• Medium: 67 FPS average, with a minimum of 57 and a maximum of 77
• High: 48 FPS average
• Ultra: 38 FPS average

At 2560x1440:

• Low: 90 FPS average
• Medium: 56 FPS average, with a minimum of 48 and a maximum of 65
• High: 40 FPS average
• Ultra: 32 FPS average

At 3840x2160:

• Low: 71 FPS average
• Medium: 44 FPS average, with a minimum of 37 and a maximum of 51
• High: 32 FPS average
• Ultra: 25 FPS average

The Medium preset is the only setting tier with recorded minimum and maximum values, and those frametime ranges are informative. At 1080p Medium, the 57-to-77 FPS band is narrow — a stable experience. At 1440p Medium, the band runs 48 to 65, still consistent. At 4K Medium, the 37-to-51 range dips below 40 FPS at the low end, which in a slow-paced horror game remains playable but is noticeable during camera pans through the game's detailed environments.

Reading across presets, each quality step costs meaningful frame rate. At 1080p, Low to Medium costs 40 FPS (107 to 67), Medium to High costs 19 FPS (67 to 48), and High to Ultra costs 10 FPS (48 to 38). The largest single penalty is always the Low-to-Medium jump, which is where the heavier lighting and shadow features typically engage. The High-to-Ultra step is the smallest price — roughly 10 FPS at 1080p and 7 FPS at 1440p and 4K — meaning Ultra's marginal visual cost is comparatively cheap once you are already at High.

Only the 1080p Low result clears 60 FPS comfortably, and only 1440p Low (90 FPS) and 4K Low (71 FPS) join it above that threshold. Every Medium-and-above configuration lands between 25 and 67 FPS. That defines this hardware pairing's envelope in The Medium: high frame rates at reduced settings, console-class frame rates at quality settings.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data supports a tiered approach by resolution.

At 1920x1080, Medium is the clear recommendation. It averages 67 FPS with a floor of 57 — effectively a locked 60-class experience with headroom — while preserving far more of the game's visual identity than Low. Players sensitive to frame rate dips can accept the 57 FPS minimum as comfortably smooth for a slower horror title. High at 48 FPS is viable for those who prioritize image quality and can tolerate sub-60 frame rates, but the drop from Medium is significant.

At 2560x1440, Medium again delivers the best balance: 56 FPS average with a 48 FPS minimum. That is a playable, consistent result for a game of this pace. High at 40 FPS sits in awkward territory — above the 4K Medium floor but below any conventional smoothness threshold — and Ultra at 32 FPS should be avoided at this resolution.

At 3840x2160, the honest answer is that this GPU cannot deliver quality settings at native 4K. Medium averages 44 FPS with dips to 37, High manages 32, and Ultra falls to 25. Low reaches 71 FPS but strips out the visual atmosphere that defines the game. The data indicates that players wanting a 4K panel experience would be better served by running a lower internal resolution — the 1080p Medium figures (67 FPS average) suggest the hardware's natural comfort zone — rather than pushing native 4K at any preset.

A final note on the Ultra preset generally: the measured deltas show Ultra costs only a modest amount of performance over High — 10 FPS at 1080p, 8 FPS at 1440p, 7 FPS at 4K — but since High itself is already below comfortable thresholds at 1440p and 4K, that "cheap" upgrade is only relevant at 1080p, where 38 FPS remains too low to recommend for most players. The overall verdict from the data: this combination handles The Medium well at 1080p Medium, adequately at 1440p Medium, and struggles at native 4K regardless of preset — a GPU-bound result consistent with the RTX 5070 Mobile's mid-upper-tier standing and a CPU that never breaks a sweat.