The Medium

The AMD Ryzen 5 2600 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 combination delivers playable results in The Medium only at the lowest settings and resolution, with the data showing a hard ceiling imposed by the GPU. At 1080p Low, the average frame rate reaches 42.3 FPS, which is the only configuration in the measured set that approaches a smooth experience. Every other preset or resolution drops below 30 FPS, indicating that this pairing is fundamentally constrained in this horror title.

FAQ

*Q: What is the best average frame rate this combo can achieve in The Medium?*

A: The highest measured average is 42.3 FPS, recorded at 1920x1080 with Low settings. This is the only result above 40 FPS in the entire dataset.

Q: How does the GTX 1650 compare to its closest rivals in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The GPU’s average benchmark score is 8713, placing it 0.4% behind the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 A Mobile (8746) and 0.4% behind the AMD Radeon 550X (8749). It sits 0.5% ahead of the NVIDIA Quadro P2200 (8671).

Q: Is the Ryzen 5 2600 a bottleneck at 4K Ultra settings?

A: No. At 3840x2160 Ultra, the average FPS is 7.8, which is far below the CPU’s capability. The GPU’s 4 GB VRAM and 128.1 GB/s bandwidth are the limiting factors, not the processor.

Q: What performance difference exists between Low and Ultra at 1080p?

A: At 1920x1080, Low settings yield 42.3 FPS, while Ultra yields 17.6 FPS. This represents a 58% drop in average frame rate when moving from the lowest to the highest preset.

Q: How does the CPU’s multi-threaded score compare to its nearest rival?

A: The Ryzen 5 2600 has an average benchmark score of 19616, which is 0.6% higher than the AMD Ryzen 5 7530U (19508) and 0.7% higher than the Intel Core i7-10700F (19485).

Q: Does the GPU’s VRAM capacity affect 4K performance?

A: Yes. The 4 GB frame buffer is a severe constraint at 3840x2160, where even Low settings only produce 28.8 FPS. High settings at the same resolution drop to 12.5 FPS, indicating memory capacity limits are hit early.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data strongly favors the Low preset for any playable session. At 1920x1080, Low delivers 42.3 FPS, which is the only configuration above the 30 FPS threshold. Medium at the same resolution drops to 28.1 FPS, a 33% reduction that makes the game feel noticeably less fluid. High and Ultra both produce 17.6 FPS at 1080p, rendering them effectively unplayable for action sequences.

For users willing to accept lower visual fidelity, Low at 1440p offers 39 FPS, which is close to the 1080p Low result. This suggests that the GPU can handle a resolution increase when the shading load is reduced. However, the 4K Low result of 28.8 FPS indicates that even the lowest settings cannot overcome the memory bandwidth wall at that resolution.

The data shows no scenario where Medium or higher is recommended. At 2560x1440, Medium averages 23.2 FPS, and at 3840x2160 it falls to 19.8 FPS. The optimal experience, based purely on frame rate, is 1080p Low. This preset provides the highest average FPS while avoiding the sub-20 FPS territory that dominates all other settings. Users should prioritize frame rate over visual quality here, as the GPU lacks the headroom for higher presets.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals a GPU-bound system with severe memory limitations. At Low settings, the progression is 42.3 FPS (1080p) → 39 FPS (1440p) → 28.8 FPS (4K). The drop from 1080p to 1440p is only 7.8%, but the drop from 1440p to 4K is 26%. This non-linear scaling indicates that the 128-bit memory bus and 128.1 GB/s bandwidth become the primary bottleneck when pixel count increases.

At Medium settings, the scaling is steeper: 28.1 FPS (1080p) → 23.2 FPS (1440p) → 19.8 FPS (4K). The 1080p to 1440p drop is 17.4%, and the 1440p to 4K drop is 14.7%. This more consistent degradation suggests that shading workload, rather than memory bandwidth, dominates at Medium. The GPU’s 896 shading units and 2.984 TFLOPS FP32 performance are insufficient for the added pixel load.

High settings show a different pattern: 17.6 FPS (1080p) → 19 FPS (1440p) → 12.5 FPS (4K). The 1440p result is actually higher than 1080p, which is unusual and points to measurement variance or driver-level optimizations. However, the 4K result collapses to 12.5 FPS, a 34% drop from 1440p. Ultra settings follow a similar collapse: 17.6 FPS (1080p) → 14.1 FPS (1440p) → 7.8 FPS (4K), with the 4K result being only 44% of the 1080p value.

The data indicates that the CPU is not the limiting factor at any resolution. The Ryzen 5 2600’s 12 threads and 16 MB shared L3 cache provide sufficient throughput, as evidenced by the relatively small frame rate differences between 1080p and 1440p at Low settings. The GPU’s memory subsystem and compute resources are the clear constraints.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the full settings range shows a wide spread. Low achieves 42.3 FPS, Medium drops to 28.1 FPS, and both High and Ultra settle at 17.6 FPS. The identical High and Ultra results suggest that the game’s Ultra preset adds effects that are not measurable with this GPU, or that the GPU hits a hard compute limit beyond High. The step from Low to Medium is a 33.6% reduction, while the step from Medium to High is a 37.4% reduction.

At 2560x1440, Low averages 39 FPS, which is remarkably close to the 1080p Low result. Medium averages 23.2 FPS, High averages 19 FPS, and Ultra averages 14.1 FPS. The 1440p Low result being only 7.8% lower than 1080p Low indicates that the GPU has spare shading capacity at low settings, but the memory bandwidth becomes a factor at higher presets. The Ultra result at 1440p is 63.8% lower than Low.

At 3840x2160, all settings produce sub-30 FPS results. Low averages 28.8 FPS, Medium averages 19.8 FPS, High averages 12.5 FPS, and Ultra averages 7.8 FPS. The 4K Low result is the only one above 20 FPS at this resolution. The scaling from Low to Ultra at 4K is a 72.9% reduction, the steepest drop in the entire dataset. This confirms that the GTX 1650’s 4 GB VRAM is exhausted at 4K, forcing the game to swap or reduce textures, which devastates performance.

The 1080p High and Ultra results being identical (17.6 FPS) is a notable anomaly. This could indicate that the game’s High preset already includes the most demanding features, and Ultra adds only minor effects that do not affect this GPU’s rendering path. The same pattern does not hold at 1440p or 4K, where High and Ultra differ by 4.9 FPS and 4.7 FPS respectively.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 is the definitive bottleneck in this configuration. Its 4 GB GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit bus provides 128.1 GB/s of bandwidth, which is insufficient for The Medium’s high-resolution textures. The benchmark data shows that at 4K, even Low settings cannot exceed 28.8 FPS, while the CPU’s benchmark percentile (77th) suggests it has ample headroom.

The GPU’s core configuration includes 896 shading units, 56 texture mapping units, and 32 ROPs. The pixel rate of 53.28 GPixel/s and texture rate of 93.24 GTexel/s are modest figures that explain the performance collapse at higher presets. The boost clock of 1665 MHz helps at lower resolutions, but the FP32 throughput of 2.984 TFLOPS is the hard limit for compute-heavy effects.

The 4 GB VRAM capacity is the most critical constraint. At 1080p, the difference between Low and Medium is 14.2 FPS, which is a larger gap than the difference between Medium and High (10.5 FPS). This suggests that Medium settings require more than 4 GB of VRAM, causing the GPU to fall back on slower memory access. The 4K results confirm this: the gap between Low and Medium is 9 FPS, while the gap between High and Ultra is 4.7 FPS.

The GPU’s percentile rank of 43rd places it below the median of all GPUs. Its nearest rivals, the RTX 3050 A Mobile and Radeon 550X, score within 0.4% of it, indicating that this performance level is typical for the class. However, the game’s specific demands on VRAM and bandwidth exacerbate the GPU’s weaknesses. The 12 nm process node and 4,700 million transistors do not compensate for the narrow memory bus.

The 75 W TDP and lack of power connectors suggest a power-efficient design, but this does not translate into gaming performance. The data shows that the GPU’s memory subsystem is overwhelmed by 1440p and 4K resolutions, regardless of settings. For this game, the GTX 1650’s role is that of a limiting agent, capping the experience at 1080p Low. Any attempt to raise settings or resolution results in frame rates below 30 FPS, making the game feel sluggish and unresponsive.