The Medium

The Medium, a horror title released on 2021-01-27, is tested here with a mobile build combo: the Intel Core Ultra 7 165H paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Mobile. Measured FPS data spans 1080p, 1440p, and 4K across Low, Medium, High, and Ultra presets, with min/max figures available for the Medium preset. This combo ranks 2476th out of 3724 tested configurations, placing it in the 66th percentile of all tested combos for this game. The data shows a system that is firmly GPU-bound at higher resolutions, while the CPU holds enough headroom to push well above 90 FPS at 1080p Low.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate drop from 1080p to 4K is remarkably consistent across all four presets, pointing to a single dominant bottleneck. At Low settings, the average FPS falls from 94 at 1080p to 79 at 1440p and finally to 62 at 4K. That is a 32 FPS drop from 1080p to 4K, a reduction of 34%. The Medium preset shows the same pattern: 59 FPS at 1080p, 49 at 1440p, and 39 at 4K, a 20 FPS loss or 34% reduction. High settings drop from 42 to 35 to 28, a 33% loss, and Ultra falls from 33 to 28 to 22, a 33% loss. This uniformity indicates that the resolution scaling is entirely constrained by the GPU's rendering pipeline, not by CPU or memory bottlenecks. At 1080p, the Low preset reaches 94 FPS, which suggests the CPU is not limiting anything; the GPU is the ceiling. At 4K, the 128-bit memory bus and 8 GB of VRAM become the hard limits, dragging Ultra down to 22 FPS. The 1440p numbers sit neatly between the two extremes, confirming that the scaling curve is linear and predictable. For a horror game that relies on fixed camera angles and pre-rendered environments, this means players will see the biggest gains by dropping the internal resolution rather than tweaking individual settings.

GPU Role

The RTX 5060 Mobile is built on the Blackwell 2.0 architecture with a 5 nm process and packs 3328 shading units, 104 texture mapping units, and 48 ROPs. Its boost clock is 1455 MHz, with a base of 952 MHz, and it has 26 ray tracing cores and 104 tensor cores. The memory subsystem consists of 8 GB of GDDR7 on a 128-bit bus, delivering 384.0 GB/s of bandwidth. This bandwidth is the defining specification for this game's 4K performance. The 8 GB VRAM is sufficient for 1080p and 1440p, but the 3840x2160 resolution at Ultra settings likely exceeds the frame buffer, causing the 22 FPS result. The GPU's synthetic average score is 22435, placing it in the 67th percentile of all GPUs. Compared to its nearest rivals, the RTX 5060 Mobile is 0.5% slower than the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT (which scores 22549) and 1.3% slower than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Mobile (score 22729). It is 1.2% faster than the RX 5700 (22170) and 1.3% faster than the RX 6700S (22154). In The Medium, this means the GPU is a solid 1080p and 1440p performer, but it lacks the bandwidth to maintain 60 FPS at 4K. The 69.84 GPixel/s pixel rate and 151.3 GTexel/s texture rate are the theoretical limits that the game's engine hits at 4K, which explains why the Low preset at 4K only reaches 62 FPS. The 3DMark Steel Nomad score of 3013.5 and the Geekbench OpenCL score of 96969 corroborate the mid-range positioning of this chip.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Intel Core Ultra 7 165H and the RTX 5060 Mobile ranks 2476th out of 3724 tested combos in The Medium. This places it in the 66th percentile, meaning 2475 combos perform better, while 1248 combos are slower. This is a modest result for a pairing that includes a CPU in the 84th percentile and a GPU in the 67th percentile. The combo's rank is slightly lower than the GPU's individual percentile, which suggests that the game's engine does not fully leverage the CPU's 16 cores. The measured FPS data confirms this: at 1080p Low, the system hits 94 FPS, but at 4K Ultra it drops to 22 FPS, a spread of 72 FPS that is entirely GPU-driven. The CPU's high percentile does not translate into a high combo rank because The Medium is not a CPU-bound title. The rank is respectable for a mobile build, but it is clear that the GPU is the limiting component for higher resolutions. The 2476th rank places it in the lower half of the tested pool, which is expected for a mobile GPU with 8 GB of VRAM and a 128-bit memory interface. The data indicates that for this specific game, the GPU is the performance ceiling, and the CPU's 84th percentile is irrelevant at 4K.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data provides a clear hierarchy of playable presets. For a stable 60 FPS experience, the Low preset is the only option that delivers at all three resolutions: 94 FPS at 1080p, 79 at 1440p, and 62 at 4K. Low sacrifices visual fidelity, but for a horror game, smoothness is often more important than texture quality. The Medium preset is the best balance of quality and performance. At 1080p, it averages 59 FPS with a minimum of 50 and a maximum of 67, which is smooth enough for the game's slower pacing. At 1440p, Medium drops to 49 FPS (min 42, max 57), which is acceptable for a cinematic title. At 4K, Medium only manages 39 FPS (min 33, max 45), which is borderline. The High preset is not recommended for this combo: it drops to 42 FPS at 1080p, 35 at 1440p, and 28 at 4K. The Ultra preset is unplayable at 4K (22 FPS) and even at 1440p (28 FPS). For the best balance of visual fidelity and frame stability, the 1080p Medium preset is the sweet spot, offering a 50-67 FPS range that stays above the 40 FPS threshold typical for a horror game. If the player prioritizes 60 FPS, 1440p Low is the only way to achieve it. The data shows that the game's Medium preset is significantly more demanding than Low, with a 59 FPS vs 94 FPS gap at 1080p, but the visual quality improvement is worth the trade-off on a 1080p display.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured data is presented as follows, with average FPS and, where recorded, minimum and maximum values:

• 3840x2160 (4K):
• Low: 62 FPS average
• Medium: 39 FPS average (min 33, max 45)
• High: 28 FPS average
• Ultra: 22 FPS average
• 2560x1440 (1440p):
• Low: 79 FPS average
• Medium: 49 FPS average (min 42, max 57)
• High: 35 FPS average
• Ultra: 28 FPS average
• 1920x1080 (1080p):
• Low: 94 FPS average
• Medium: 59 FPS average (min 50, max 67)
• High: 42 FPS average
• Ultra: 33 FPS average

The Medium preset is the only one with recorded min/max values, showing that the frame pacing is stable at 1080p and 1440p. At 4K, the min of 33 FPS and max of 45 FPS indicate a noticeable frame rate variance, which can cause stutter in a horror title. The Low preset at 4K (62 FPS) has no min/max data, but its average is 23 FPS higher than the Medium preset, indicating a significant performance headroom when shadows and textures are reduced. The 1080p Low result of 94 FPS is the highest recorded value in the entire dataset, confirming that the CPU can feed the GPU at high rates when the resolution is low.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 7 165H is a 16-core, 22-thread mobile processor based on the Meteor Lake architecture, fabricated on a 7nm process. It has a base clock of 3.80 GHz and a boost clock of 5.00 GHz, with a TDP of 28 W. The L3 cache is 24 MB shared. In Cinebench R23, it scores 14551 multi-core and 1759 single-core. Its Passmark single-thread score is 3509, and its average benchmark score is 34083, placing it in the 84th percentile of all CPUs. Compared to its nearest rivals, the Core Ultra 7 165H is 0.3% faster than the Intel Core Ultra 5 338H (score 33989), and 0.4% slower than the AMD EPYC 4244P (score 34220) and the AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 (score 34222). It is also 0.5% slower than the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (score 34260). These are desktop-level scores for a mobile chip, confirming that the CPU is not a weak link in this combo. In The Medium, the CPU's role is primarily to maintain frame pacing and handle game logic. The 5.00 GHz boost clock ensures that single-threaded tasks are handled quickly, and the 22 threads provide enough headroom for background processes. At 1080p Low, the 94 FPS result demonstrates that the CPU can deliver data to the GPU without stalling. The 28 W TDP means this is a power-efficient chip, but the data shows it is fully capable of driving the RTX 5060 Mobile at 1080p and 1440p. The 84th percentile CPU score and the 67th percentile GPU score together explain why the combo rank is 66th percentile: the CPU is stronger than the GPU, but the game's bottleneck is the GPU's memory bandwidth, not the CPU's cores. The CPU's 89.6 GB/s memory bandwidth is also more than adequate for this game, as the measured FPS scales linearly with resolution, not with CPU load.