Minimum

# Minimum — AMD Ryzen 5 5600G + AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

This pairing of a Zen 3 desktop processor with RDNA 2 flagship silicon produces a fascinating case study in how a 2014 third-person shooter responds to modern hardware. The measured frame rates span from a barely-playable 44 FPS at 4K Ultra to a blistering 259 FPS at 1080p Low, revealing that Minimum's rendering engine scales in decidedly non-linear ways across resolutions and presets. The data suggests this combo sits in the 1173rd position out of 3712 tested combinations for this game, placing it comfortably in the upper third of all possible system pairings.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate trajectory from 1080p to 4K tells a clear story about where the bottleneck shifts. At 1080p Low, this system produces 259 FPS, but dropping to 1440p Low reduces that to 167 FPS — a 35.5% decline. Moving further to 4K Low yields 90 FPS, another 46.1% drop from the 1440p figure. This steep scaling curve at Low settings indicates the GPU is already becoming the primary constraint even at modest resolutions, despite the RX 6800 XT's substantial compute resources.

Switching to High settings reveals a similar pattern with compressed absolute values: 166 FPS at 1080p, 107 FPS at 1440p (a 35.5% reduction), and 58 FPS at 4K (a 45.8% reduction from 1440p). The consistency of these percentage drops across presets — roughly one-third lost going to 1440p and nearly half of the 1440p value lost again at 4K — points to a rendering engine that scales resolution demands in a predictable, GPU-bound fashion. The CPU's role appears largely neutralized above 1080p, as the 5600G's six Zen 3 cores provide ample headroom for a game from this era.

The Ultra preset tells the most dramatic scaling story: 127 FPS at 1080p, 82 FPS at 1440p (35.4% drop), and just 44 FPS at 4K (46.3% drop). This near-identical percentage scaling across all four presets — Low, Medium, High, and Ultra — strongly suggests that resolution scaling in Minimum is purely a function of pixel count and rasterization load, with minimal CPU involvement. The 4K Ultra result of 44 FPS falls below the 60 FPS threshold, indicating that even this powerful GPU cannot fully tame the game's most demanding configuration at maximum resolution.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution for maintaining 60+ FPS on this system?

A: All four tested settings presets at 1080p exceed 60 FPS, with the lowest being 127 FPS at Ultra. At 1440p, every preset also stays above 60 FPS, bottoming out at 82 FPS on Ultra. Only at 4K does performance dip below 60 FPS, specifically at High (58 FPS) and Ultra (44 FPS) settings.

Q: How much performance is gained by dropping from Ultra to Low at 1080p?

A: The difference is substantial — 259 FPS at Low versus 127 FPS at Ultra represents a 103.9% improvement. This more than doubles the frame rate and suggests Low settings remove significant rendering overhead that the GPU would otherwise process.

Q: Does the Medium preset offer a balanced experience?

A: Medium produces 198 FPS at 1080p, 128 FPS at 1440p, and 69 FPS at 4K. The 4K Medium result includes a measured minimum of 59 FPS and maximum of 79 FPS, making it the only 4K preset with a documented frame time range that stays near the 60 FPS target.

*Q: How does this combo rank among all tested systems for Minimum?*

A: The combination ranks 1173rd out of 3712 tested combos, placing it in the 68.4th percentile. This means roughly two-thirds of all system pairings tested for this game perform worse, though a substantial number of more powerful configurations do outperform it.

Q: What is the difference between High and Ultra at 1440p?

A: High delivers 107 FPS while Ultra produces 82 FPS — a 23.4% performance penalty for the highest preset. Both remain fluid, but the gap narrows at 4K where High achieves 58 FPS and Ultra drops to 44 FPS, a 24.1% difference.

Q: Is the RX 6800 XT the limiting factor at 1080p?

A: The 259 FPS result at 1080p Low suggests the GPU still has headroom, but the steep drops when moving to higher resolutions indicate that pixel throughput becomes the constraint quickly. The CPU's 74th percentile ranking among all processors suggests it is not holding back the system in this title.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data offers a clear hierarchy for optimizing the experience across different display targets. For 1080p displays, even Ultra settings produce 127 FPS — well beyond what most monitors can display — so players can freely max out the game's visuals without concern. The Medium preset at 1080p provides 198 FPS with a documented range of 168-228 FPS, which would satisfy even high-refresh-rate displays at 144Hz or 165Hz.

For 1440p, the High preset at 107 FPS appears to be the sweet spot for most users, offering a 30.5% improvement over Ultra's 82 FPS while maintaining a visually rich experience. The Low preset's 167 FPS at this resolution serves competitive players who prioritize frame rate above all else, though the visual compromise may be significant. Medium at 128 FPS sits between these extremes and likely represents the best balance of quality and speed for the majority of users.

The 4K situation is more constrained. Medium is the only preset that maintains an average above 60 FPS (69 FPS), with a minimum of 59 FPS that barely dips below the target. High at 58 FPS is borderline playable but may exhibit noticeable stutter on variable refresh rate displays. Ultra at 44 FPS is not recommended for smooth gameplay, and Low at 90 FPS, while fast, may look excessively sparse at this resolution. For 4K owners, Medium represents the only sensible choice that keeps frame pacing near the 60 FPS target without sacrificing too much visual fidelity.

How This Combo Ranks

The 1173rd position out of 3712 total combinations places this system in the top 31.6% of all tested configurations for Minimum. This is a strong showing for a pairing that combines a mainstream 65-watt processor with a high-end GPU from the previous generation. The ranking suggests that while the RX 6800 XT provides ample graphics horsepower, the Ryzen 5 5600G's position in the CPU hierarchy — 74th percentile among all processors — does not constrain the system's overall gaming performance in this title.

The delta between this combo's rank and what one might expect from the GPU's 85th percentile standing indicates that Minimum is not exceptionally CPU-sensitive, or that the 5600G's Zen 3 architecture handles the game's workload efficiently. The fact that this combination outperforms 68.4% of all tested systems — many of which likely include newer, more expensive components — speaks to the efficiency of the RDNA 2 architecture in this workload. The gap between this rank and the top configurations suggests that extreme high-refresh-rate play at 1080p would benefit from a more powerful CPU, but for standard 60-144Hz gaming, this combo punches well above its component-tier expectations.

GPU Role

The Radeon RX 6800 XT brings substantial resources to this title: 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus providing 512.0 GB/s of bandwidth, 4608 shading units, 288 texture mapping units, and 128 render output units. The 72 ray accelerators are irrelevant for a 2014 game that predates hardware ray tracing, but the raw rasterization throughput — 20.74 TFLOPS FP32, 288.0 GPixel/s pixel rate, and 648.0 GTexel/s texture rate — directly drives the measured frame rates. The GPU's 85th percentile ranking among all graphics cards and average benchmark score of 48477 confirm its position as a high-end part, even though it is now end-of-life.

The clock behavior reveals how the card sustains performance: a base clock of 1825 MHz, game clock of 2015 MHz, and boost clock of 2250 MHz. The memory runs at 2000 MHz (16 Gbps effective), which delivers the 512.0 GB/s bandwidth that becomes critical at 4K resolutions where the frame buffer demands escalate. The 16 GB capacity is far more than Minimum requires, but the bandwidth utilization at 4K Ultra — where the card produces only 44 FPS — suggests the game's rendering engine is heavily dependent on memory throughput for its highest settings.

The measured FPS at 4K Medium, with a minimum of 59 FPS and maximum of 79 FPS, shows how the GPU's performance varies frame-to-frame under load. The passmark DirectX 11 score of 264 and DirectX 12 score of 100 indicate that the card's API-specific performance characteristics may influence how Minimum's engine — likely using an older DirectX path — interacts with the hardware. The GPU's 300 W TDP and requirement for a 700 W power supply are consistent with its high-end positioning, and the dual-slot design with 2x 8-pin connectors reflects the power delivery needed for sustained boost clocks.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 3840x2160, the system produces 90 FPS on Low, 69 FPS on Medium (with a 59-79 FPS range), 58 FPS on High, and 44 FPS on Ultra. These four data points form a clear progression where each preset step costs roughly 20-25% performance: Low to Medium costs 23.3%, Medium to High costs 15.9%, and High to Ultra costs 24.1%. The cumulative drop from Low to Ultra is 51.1%, showing that the most demanding settings nearly halve the frame rate at 4K.

At 2560x1440, the values shift upward: 167 FPS on Low, 128 FPS on Medium (109-147 FPS range), 107 FPS on High, and 82 FPS on Ultra. The percentage penalties between presets are 23.4% (Low to Medium), 16.4% (Medium to High), and 23.4% (High to Ultra), mirroring the 4K pattern almost exactly. This consistency suggests the preset scaling is multiplicative rather than additive, with each tier imposing a roughly similar relative cost.

At 1920x1080, the system delivers 259 FPS on Low, 198 FPS on Medium (168-228 FPS range), 166 FPS on High, and 127 FPS on Ultra. The preset-to-preset drops are 23.6%, 16.2%, and 23.5% respectively — nearly identical to the patterns at higher resolutions. The Medium preset's frame time range at 1080p (168-228 FPS) shows a 60 FPS spread, indicating that even at this resolution, frame pacing varies considerably depending on scene complexity.

CPU Role

The Ryzen 5 5600G provides six cores and twelve threads based on the Zen 3 Cezanne architecture, built on TSMC's 7 nm process with 10,700 million transistors in a 180 mm² die. Its base clock of 3.90 GHz and boost clock of 4.40 GHz, combined with 16 MB of L3 cache, deliver strong single-threaded performance — evidenced by a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 1409 and Geekbench single-core score of 1801. The 65 W TDP and 51.2 GB/s memory bandwidth via dual-channel DDR4 are modest figures, but they prove sufficient for Minimum's workload.

The CPU's benchmark profile shows balanced capabilities: a 3DMark single-thread score of 872, 2-thread score of 1705, 4-thread score of 3258, 8-thread score of 4694, and max-thread score of 5455. The Cinebench R15 results (228 single-core, 1724 multi-core) and R23 results (1409 single-core, 10551 multi-core) demonstrate that the 5600G scales well with thread count, which matters for a game that may spawn background threads for physics or audio. The PassMark multi-thread score of 19717 and single-thread score of 3177 place this processor at the 74th percentile of all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 21088.

The nearest rivals in CPU benchmarks — the Intel Core i3-1220P (0.1% higher score), Intel Core Ultra 7 256V (0.1% lower), AMD Ryzen 5 7530U (0.2% lower), and Intel Core Ultra 7 155U (0.4% lower) — all sit within a 0.5% band, indicating that the 5600G's performance is tightly clustered with these mobile and low-power parts. For Minimum, the CPU's role appears to be that of a capable but not limiting component: the frame rates scale cleanly with resolution and settings in a way that points to GPU-bound behavior, and the 5600G's 74th percentile standing gives it ample headroom to feed the RX 6800 XT without becoming a bottleneck. The integrated Radeon Vega 7 graphics are irrelevant in this configuration, as the discrete GPU handles all rendering duties.