The Medium

Resolution Scaling

The Medium’s performance scaling across resolutions reveals a classic GPU-bound scenario for this combo. At 1080p with Low settings, the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and Radeon RX 7600 XT deliver 94.3 FPS. Moving to 1440p Low drops that to 80.1 FPS, a 15% reduction, while 4K Low falls further to 65.1 FPS. This relatively mild 31% total decline from 1080p to 4K at Low settings suggests the CPU still has headroom and the graphics card is managing the load well.

The picture changes dramatically once settings increase. At High quality, the frame rate collapses from 41.7 FPS at 1080p to 36.7 FPS at 1440p and then to 27.7 FPS at 4K. That is a 33.6% drop from 1080p to 4K, far steeper than the Low preset’s scaling. Ultra settings amplify this trend: 33.4 FPS at 1080p, 29.1 FPS at 1440p, and 23.7 FPS at 4K. The gap between 1440p and 4K at Ultra is 18.6%, while the 1080p-to-1440p gap is 12.9%. This non-linear scaling indicates that the RX 7600 XT’s compute resources, not memory bandwidth, become the limiting factor as pixel count and shading complexity rise together.

The Medium’s fixed-camera horror design does not demand high frame rates for competitive play, but the data shows a clear threshold. At 4K, only the Low preset stays above 60 FPS at 65.1 FPS. Medium at 4K manages 38.3 FPS, which is playable but far from smooth. The scaling pattern suggests that the 16 GB frame buffer is not the bottleneck — even at 4K Ultra, the card has enough memory. Instead, the 22.57 TFLOPS FP32 throughput and 352.6 GTexel/s texture rate are the constraining factors.

GPU Role

The Radeon RX 7600 XT, built on the RDNA 3.0 architecture with the Navi 33 chip, operates with a base clock of 1980 MHz and a boost clock of 2755 MHz. Its 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus provides 288.0 GB/s of bandwidth. In The Medium, this memory configuration proves adequate — the game’s measured FPS does not show signs of VRAM exhaustion, as even 4K Ultra with 23.7 FPS does not exhibit stutter or min-FPS drops in the recorded data.

The GPU’s 2048 shading units and 64 ROPs deliver a pixel rate of 176.3 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 352.6 GTexel/s. These specifications directly explain the scaling behavior. At 1080p Low, the card is underutilized, allowing 94.3 FPS. The jump to Medium at 1080p cuts performance to 58.6 FPS — a 37.9% penalty — because the increased shading complexity stresses the shader array. The card’s 32 ray accelerators do not appear to be a factor here, as The Medium’s benchmark results do not distinguish ray-traced workloads.

Comparing to its nearest rivals in the GPU benchmark database, the RX 7600 XT scores 1.9% higher than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER and 0.6% lower than the non-XT RX 7600. The RTX 3070 Mobile sits 1.9% higher. These marginal deltas suggest the RX 7600 XT is positioned mid-pack among its peers. In The Medium specifically, the 16 GB memory capacity does not translate into a decisive advantage — the game’s performance is compute-limited, not memory-limited.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific pairing of the Ryzen 5 3600 with the RX 7600 XT ranks 1095 out of 1689 tested combos in The Medium. That places it in the lower third of the database, at roughly the 35th percentile. The CPU alone sits at the 76th percentile among all processors, while the GPU is at the 63rd percentile. The combination underperforms both individual components’ standings, indicating a suboptimal pairing for this title.

The Ryzen 5 3600’s nearest rivals show how close the CPU competition is. The Intel Core i5-11400 scores 0.1% higher, while the AMD Ryzen 5 1600 is 0.2% lower. These deltas are within noise, meaning the CPU is not the differentiating factor. The GPU’s nearest rivals tell a similar story: the RX 7600 is 0.6% ahead, and the RTX 2060 SUPER is 1.9% behind. With both components clustered tightly around their rivals, the combo’s low rank in this game points to a software or driver interaction rather than raw hardware deficiency.

The Medium’s horror genre often favors atmospheric effects and volumetric lighting over raw geometry, which can stress GPUs unevenly. The data shows that at no resolution or setting does this combo reach 100 FPS at 1080p Low — it peaks at 94.3 FPS. This suggests the game engine has an inherent performance ceiling with this hardware, possibly due to the fixed-camera rendering technique that forces full-frame effects regardless of visible action.

Settings Recommendations

For a smooth experience, the data clearly points to Low settings as the only reliable choice. At 1080p Low, the combo delivers 94.3 FPS, which is well above the 60 FPS threshold. At 1440p Low, 80.1 FPS remains comfortable. Even 4K Low at 65.1 FPS is playable, making this the only preset that works across all three resolutions.

Medium settings present a compromise. At 1080p, 58.6 FPS is borderline acceptable, but 1440p drops to 50.3 FPS and 4K to 38.3 FPS. For a horror game where pacing matters more than twitch reflexes, Medium at 1080p might be acceptable, but the 41% performance hit over Low is substantial. High settings are not recommended — even at 1080p, 41.7 FPS feels sluggish, and 4K High at 27.7 FPS is near-unplayable.

Ultra settings are only for screenshots or static scenes. The 23.7 FPS at 4K Ultra and 33.4 FPS at 1080p Ultra are below the threshold for smooth motion. Given that the visual difference between High and Ultra in most games is minimal, the data suggests staying at Low for actual gameplay, with Medium as a visual upgrade only if the player accepts 50 FPS at 1440p as a target.

Measured FPS Breakdown

1920x1080:

• Low: 94.3 FPS
• Medium: 58.6 FPS
• High: 41.7 FPS
• Ultra: 33.4 FPS

The 1080p results show a monotonic decline with each settings tier. The gap from Low to Medium is 35.7 FPS, which is the largest single-step drop in the entire dataset. High to Ultra loses 8.3 FPS, a smaller penalty, suggesting diminishing returns from the highest preset.

2560x1440:

• Low: 80.1 FPS
• Medium: 50.3 FPS
• High: 36.7 FPS
• Ultra: 29.1 FPS

At 1440p, the Low preset still clears 60 FPS by a wide margin. Medium falls below 60 FPS, and the drop from Low to Medium is 29.8 FPS. The progression from Medium to High to Ultra is more linear here than at 1080p, with 13.6 FPS and 7.6 FPS drops respectively.

3840x2160:

• Low: 65.1 FPS
• Medium: 38.3 FPS
• High: 27.7 FPS
• Ultra: 23.7 FPS

4K is the most demanding scenario. Low remains playable at 65.1 FPS, but Medium halves that to 38.3 FPS. High and Ultra are both below 30 FPS, with Ultra scraping by at 23.7 FPS. The 4K data shows the steepest relative penalties for each settings increase, confirming that pixel count amplifies the cost of every graphical feature.

The overall pattern across all twelve measured points shows that this combo’s sweet spot is 1080p Low for maximum smoothness, with 1440p Low as the best balance of resolution and playability. The RX 7600 XT’s 16 GB memory is never a limiting factor, but its 22.57 TFLOPS compute budget is exhausted quickly as settings rise. The Ryzen 5 3600’s six cores and twelve threads at up to 4.20 GHz boost clock are sufficient to feed the GPU at all tested configurations, as evidenced by the smooth scaling from 1080p to 4K without CPU-induced plateaus.