The Medium

The Intel Core Ultra 9 185H paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Mobile presents a curious case in The Medium. The data set reveals a configuration that is clearly capable of smooth gameplay, but only when the settings are chosen with an understanding of the hardware's specific strengths and weaknesses. The measured frames per second across the matrix of resolutions and presets tell a story of a system that is well-balanced at some points and severely constrained at others, making the choice of visual preset the single most critical decision for the player.

Settings Recommendations

Based strictly on the measured frame rate data, the "Medium" preset stands out as the most balanced and recommended starting point for this hardware combination. At 1920x1080, the Medium preset delivers an average of 60 FPS, with a recorded minimum of 51 FPS and a maximum of 69 FPS. This is a definitive threshold for smooth, playable performance, ensuring that the frame rate does not dip into the territory where the horror genre's atmospheric tension would be compromised by stutter. While the "Low" preset at the same resolution pushes the average higher to 97 FPS, the jump to Medium provides a substantial visual quality uplift for a relatively modest cost in performance, making it the superior experience for the majority of players.

The case for Medium becomes even more compelling when considering the higher resolutions. At 2560x1440, the Medium preset still maintains a highly respectable average of 51 FPS, with a minimum of 43 FPS. This suggests the system can comfortably handle a higher-resolution display without sacrificing the core playability. For those with a 4K display, the Medium preset at 3840x2160 drops to an average of 40 FPS, a figure that is on the borderline of playability for a horror title where precise timing is rarely critical but smooth motion is still vital for immersion.

The data suggests that "High" and "Ultra" presets are not viable options for a consistently smooth experience. At 1080p, High averages 43 FPS, and Ultra averages 34 FPS. At 1440p, the situation worsens, with High at 36 FPS and Ultra at 29 FPS. The Ultra preset at 4K falls to 23 FPS, rendering it unplayable. These numbers indicate that the jump from Medium to High incurs a massive performance penalty, likely due to specific effects that are disproportionately taxing on this GPU. Therefore, the analysis strongly points to the Medium preset as the "sweet spot" where the game's visual fidelity is balanced against the hardware's frame delivery capabilities, offering a consistent 60 FPS experience at 1080p and a very playable experience at 1440p.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Mobile, with its 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus, is the primary driver of the frame rate in this test. The GPU's performance, as measured by its average benchmark score, places it in the 67th percentile of all GPUs, and its nearest rivals are the desktop RTX 2080 and the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT, with a delta of -0.7% and +0.8% respectively. This context is crucial; it indicates that the RTX 4060 Mobile is a solidly mid-range performer, capable of handling modern titles but not at the highest settings. The measured FPS in The Medium confirms this, showing a clear ceiling on the Ultra preset across all resolutions.

The 8 GB VRAM capacity appears to be a significant factor in the performance collapse at higher settings. While the exact VRAM usage is not in the data, the pattern of frame rates strongly suggests that the High and Ultra presets exceed the comfortable memory capacity of the GPU, leading to severe bottlenecks. The shift from Medium to High at 1080p results in a 17 FPS drop (from 60 to 43), which is a substantial 28% performance hit. This is not a typical scaling curve; it suggests the game is swapping assets between system memory and VRAM, which is a much slower process. The GPU's memory bandwidth of 256.0 GB/s is sufficient for medium textures, but the combination of higher resolution and higher preset likely overwhelms the 128-bit memory bus and the 8 GB frame buffer.

Furthermore, the GPU's clock speeds (base 1545 MHz, boost 1890 MHz) and its FP32 performance of 11.61 TFLOPS are respectable for a mobile part. The benchmark data reveals that the GPU is operating well in synthetic tests, but the real-world The Medium results highlight that raw compute power is not the limiting factor. The analysis indicates that the RTX 4060 Mobile's architecture, built on the 5 nm process, is efficient, but the memory subsystem is its Achilles' heel in this title. The fact that the "Low" preset at 4K achieves 64 FPS while "High" at 1080p only manages 43 FPS is particularly telling. It demonstrates that when the memory pressure is low, the GPU has ample spare capacity to render at a much higher resolution, but when the settings are increased, the memory bottleneck becomes the dominant constraint, crippling performance even at lower resolutions.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling from 1080p to 4K provides a fascinating insight into the system's limiting factors. When considering the "Low" preset, the performance scales almost linearly with the pixel count, indicating a GPU-bound scenario. At 1080p Low, the system achieves 97 FPS. At 1440p Low, it drops to 81 FPS, a 16% decrease. At 4K Low, it falls to 64 FPS, a further 21% decrease from 1440p. This pattern demonstrates that at low settings, the RTX 4060 Mobile's compute and memory resources are being utilized efficiently, and the drop in frame rate is directly proportional to the increased rendering load.

However, the scaling pattern for the "Medium" preset reveals a different story. Moving from 1080p (60 FPS) to 1440p (51 FPS) results in a 15% drop, which is somewhat expected. But the jump from 1440p to 4K (40 FPS) is a 22% drop. This steeper decline suggests that the system is starting to become more constrained, likely by the memory bandwidth as the number of pixels and the texture data required to fill them increases. The GPU's 256.0 GB/s bandwidth is a fixed resource, and higher resolutions demand more data to be fed to the renderer.

The most striking data point is the performance at "High" settings. Here, the drop from 1080p (43 FPS) to 1440p (36 FPS) is a 16% decrease, similar to the low preset. However, the gap between 1080p and 4K (29 FPS) is a 33% decrease. This disproportionate drop at 4K High, compared to the smaller drops at lower settings, points directly to the VRAM capacity being exceeded. The game is likely attempting to load ultra-high-resolution textures that do not fit within the 8 GB frame buffer, forcing constant paging from the system's DDR5 memory. This paging overhead is independent of resolution, but its relative impact becomes more pronounced as the baseline frame rate drops, resulting in the severe performance cliff observed at 4K High. The data implies that the GPU's compute capability is more than enough for 4K, but the memory subsystem is the limiting factor that prevents a playable experience at that resolution with higher visual fidelity.

How This Combo Ranks

In the grand database of tested combinations, this specific pairing of the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and the RTX 4060 Mobile holds a rank of 2285 out of 3724 combos for The Medium. This places it in the bottom half of the tested systems, which is a somewhat surprising result given the individual components' benchmark scores. The GPU is in the 67th percentile, and the CPU is in the 85th percentile of all its peers, yet the combined system performance is only in the 39th percentile (calculated as 2285/3724). This discrepancy is a clear indication that the game is not well-optimized for this hardware pairing or that a specific component bottleneck is dragging down the overall experience.

The rank suggests that while the CPU is a high-performing part, its advantage is not being fully realized in this title. The game appears to be heavily GPU-dependent, and the RTX 4060 Mobile's mid-range standing becomes the determining factor for the system's overall rank. The fact that the combo ranks so low despite having a top-tier CPU implies that a system with a slower CPU but a faster GPU would likely rank significantly higher in this specific game. This is a classic example of how a system's performance is only as strong as its weakest link for a given workload.

This ranking data also puts the "Medium" preset recommendation into perspective. The system is not a high-end performer for this title, and expecting it to run at "Ultra" settings with high frame rates is unrealistic based on its position. The rank of 2285 suggests that users should temper their expectations and focus on achieving a stable, playable experience rather than pushing for maximum visual fidelity. The data indicates that this combo is best suited for 1080p or 1440p gaming with medium settings, where it can deliver a solid performance that is more in line with its mid-pack ranking.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 9 185H is a 16-core, 22-thread processor based on the Meteor Lake architecture, with a base clock of 3.90 GHz and a boost clock of 5.10 GHz. Its synthetic benchmark scores are impressive, with a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 17984.5 and a single-core score of 1810.5. Its average benchmark score places it in the 85th percentile of all CPUs, and it performs nearly identically to the AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 350, with a delta of -0.1%. This data paints a picture of a very capable processor that should not be a bottleneck in most gaming scenarios.

However, in The Medium, the CPU's role appears to be secondary to the GPU. The evidence for this lies in the frame rate scaling. When comparing the 1080p Low preset (97 FPS) to the 4K Low preset (64 FPS), the CPU is clearly able to feed the GPU enough data to maintain a high frame rate at lower resolutions. If the CPU were the limiting factor, we would expect to see a plateau in frame rate regardless of resolution, where the GPU finishes its work and waits for the CPU. The data shows no such plateau; the frame rate continues to change significantly with resolution, indicating the GPU is the primary bottleneck.

The CPU's 24 MB of shared L3 cache and dual-channel memory support (89.6 GB/s bandwidth) are sufficient for the game's logic and asset streaming. The high single-core performance, as evidenced by the Cinebench R23 score, is likely what allows the game's main thread to run efficiently without becoming a constraint. The data suggests that the CPU is performing its role admirably, providing a stable platform for the GPU to work. The consistent frame rates at Medium settings across all resolutions further confirm that the processor is not causing any stutter or frame time inconsistencies, as the minimum FPS recorded (e.g., 51 at 1080p) is still reasonably close to the average. The CPU is an enabling component, not a limiting one, in this configuration.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The following is the complete measured FPS data for this combo in The Medium.

1920x1080 (1080p)

• Low: Average 97 FPS.
• Medium: Average 60 FPS, with a minimum of 51 FPS and a maximum of 69 FPS.
• High: Average 43 FPS.
• Ultra: Average 34 FPS.

2560x1440 (1440p)

• Low: Average 81 FPS.
• Medium: Average 51 FPS, with a minimum of 43 FPS and a maximum of 59 FPS.
• High: Average 36 FPS.
• Ultra: Average 29 FPS.

3840x2160 (4K)

• Low: Average 64 FPS.
• Medium: Average 40 FPS, with a minimum of 34 FPS and a maximum of 46 FPS.
• High: Average 29 FPS.
• Ultra: Average 23 FPS.

This data confirms the analysis that "Medium" is the only preset that offers a consistent 60 FPS experience at 1080p and a 30+ FPS experience at 4K. The "Low" preset is the only other option that breaks the 60 FPS barrier at 1080p, but it does so at a significant visual cost. The delta between "Medium" and "High" is substantial across all resolutions, indicating a clear algorithmic or memory-related performance cliff. The "Ultra" preset is effectively unplayable at any resolution, with frame rates dropping to as low as 23 FPS at 4K.

FAQ

Q: What is the best settings preset for a smooth 60 FPS experience?

A: The "Medium" preset at 1920x1080 is the only configuration that achieves a true 60 FPS average, with a minimum of 51 FPS, ensuring smooth gameplay.

Q: Can this laptop combo handle 4K gaming?

A: Yes, but only at "Low" settings, where it achieves an average of 64 FPS. At "Medium" settings, it drops to 40 FPS, which is playable but not ideal. Higher presets are not recommended due to sub-30 FPS averages.

Q: Why is the performance difference between "Medium" and "High" so large?

A: The data shows a significant FPS drop when moving from "Medium" to "High" at all resolutions (e.g., from 60 to 43 FPS at 1080p), suggesting a major increase in memory or rendering load that the GPU's 8 GB VRAM cannot efficiently handle.

Q: Is the CPU or GPU the main bottleneck in this game?

A: The GPU is the primary bottleneck. The frame rates scale significantly with resolution, indicating the graphics card is working at its limit. The CPU's high benchmark scores and the continuous FPS changes with resolution point to the GPU being the limiting component.

Q: How does this specific combo rank compared to other tested systems?

A: This combo ranks 2285 out of 3724 tested combos for The Medium, placing it in the lower half of systems. This is despite having a high-performance CPU, indicating the mid-range GPU holds the system back in this title.

Q: What is the average frame rate at 1440p with Medium settings?

A: The average frame rate at 2560x1440 with the "Medium" preset is 51 FPS, with a recorded range between 43 and 59 FPS.