The Medium

The Medium, a fixed-camera horror title, presents an unusual performance curve for this AMD pairing. The data shows a configuration where the Radeon RX 6800 XT provides substantial headroom, but the Ryzen 5 5500 can become a limiting factor at lower resolutions. The most balanced experience is found at Medium settings, which delivers a smooth frame rate across all tested resolutions without the steep performance penalty of High or Ultra presets.

Settings Recommendations

Benchmark results indicate that the Medium preset offers the most sensible trade-off between visual quality and frame rate for this combo. At 1920x1080, the Medium preset delivers an average of 84.8 FPS, which is a significant improvement over the 61.4 FPS seen at High settings. The jump to Low settings at 1080p yields 126.3 FPS, but the visual degradation in a game that relies heavily on atmosphere and lighting is rarely worth the extra 41.5 FPS.

At 2560x1440, the Medium preset produces 74.9 FPS, remaining comfortably playable. This is particularly notable because the High preset at this resolution drops to 50.4 FPS, and Ultra falls to 42.9 FPS. The data suggests that the Ultra preset is not viable for this combination, as it produces the lowest average frame rates across all resolutions, including a 33.6 FPS result at 3840x2160. The performance gap between Medium and High is consistent, with Medium outperforming High by roughly 48% at 1080p (84.8 vs 61.4 FPS) and by an even larger margin at 4K (57 vs 41.6 FPS).

For 4K gaming, the Medium preset remains the only reasonable choice, offering 57 FPS. The High preset at this resolution falls to 41.6 FPS, which is below the threshold for a smooth experience in a slow-paced horror game. Low settings at 4K provide 92 FPS, but the visual compromise is substantial. The measured data shows that the Medium preset is the clear recommendation, as it maintains playability at all three resolutions while avoiding the harsh frame rate drops of the higher presets.

GPU Role

The Radeon RX 6800 XT is the dominant component in this pairing, with its 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus providing 512.0 GB/s of bandwidth. The card's 4608 shading units and 72 ray accelerators are built on the RDNA 2.0 architecture, with a game clock of 2015 MHz and a boost clock of 2250 MHz. In The Medium, the GPU's performance is evident in the scaling between presets, which follows a predictable pattern that indicates the card is not being bottlenecked by memory capacity or bandwidth.

The GPU's strong position is reflected in its benchmark scores, where it averages 49982 across all tests and sits in the 87th percentile versus all GPUs. Its nearest rival, the Intel Arc A550M, has an average score of 49737, representing a 0.5% delta, while the NVIDIA RTX A1000 is 1.7% ahead. The RX 6800 XT's 20.74 TFLOPS of FP32 compute power is clearly sufficient for this title, as the frame rates at Medium settings demonstrate. The card's 128 ROPs and 288 TMUs ensure that texture-heavy scenes in the dual-reality gameplay don't cause unexpected stutters.

The GPU's role becomes more prominent at higher resolutions. At 4K, the difference between Medium and Low settings is 35 FPS (57 vs 92), while at 1080p, the same comparison shows a 41.5 FPS gap (84.8 vs 126.3). This suggests that the GPU is not the primary constraint at 1080p, but it becomes more significant as resolution increases. The card's 16 GB of VRAM is more than adequate for The Medium, which was released in early 2021 and does not appear to push memory usage to the limits of this card.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 5500 brings six cores and twelve threads to the system, with a base clock of 3.60 GHz and a boost clock of 4.20 GHz. This Zen 3 architecture processor has 16 MB of L3 cache and a 65 W TDP, making it a modest but capable companion for the high-end GPU. The CPU's benchmark results show it performing near the middle of the pack, with an average score of 20875 and a 79th percentile ranking versus all CPUs.

The CPU's influence on The Medium's performance is most apparent at 1080p, where the frame rates at Low settings (126.3 FPS) suggest that the processor can keep up with the GPU's output. However, the scaling between presets at this resolution shows a pattern that hints at CPU limitations. The jump from Low to Medium costs 41.5 FPS (126.3 to 84.8), and the jump from Medium to High costs another 23.4 FPS (84.8 to 61.4). This steep drop-off indicates that the CPU may be struggling to feed the GPU at higher settings, even though the GPU has ample headroom.

The Ryzen 5 5500's single-thread performance, which scores 836 in 3DMark and 2319 in Cinebench R23 single-core, is adequate for a horror game that doesn't rely heavily on physics simulations or complex AI. Its multi-threaded scores, such as 16429 in Cinebench R23 multi-core, show that it can handle the background tasks typical of modern games. The CPU's nearest rivals include the Intel Core i5-12500, which is only 0.1% faster, and the AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4655GE, also 0.1% faster, indicating that this processor is well-matched to its competition.

How This Combo Ranks

In the comprehensive database of tested combinations, this pairing of Ryzen 5 5500 and Radeon RX 6800 XT ranks 588th out of 1689 combos for The Medium. This places it in the upper third of all tested configurations, which is a respectable position given the CPU's mid-range status. The ranking reflects the GPU's strength, as the RX 6800 XT is capable of carrying the system to solid frame rates despite the processor's limitations.

The combo's ranking is particularly noteworthy when considering the GPU's percentile position. The RX 6800 XT sits in the 87th percentile of all GPUs, while the CPU is in the 79th percentile. This suggests a slight imbalance, with the GPU being relatively more powerful than the CPU. In a game like The Medium, which appears to be less CPU-intensive than many other titles, this imbalance works in favor of the overall system performance.

The data shows that this combo performs best at lower resolutions, where the GPU's power can be fully utilized. At 1440p, the Medium preset's 74.9 FPS is a strong result that would likely satisfy most players. The ranking of 588th out of 1689 combos indicates that there are many systems that perform better, but also a substantial number that perform worse. For a pairing that includes a processor with a $159 launch MSRP and a GPU with a $649 launch MSRP, this performance level is in line with expectations.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals important information about the system's bottleneck characteristics. At Medium settings, the average FPS drops from 84.8 at 1080p to 74.9 at 1440p, then further to 57 at 4K. This represents a 32.8% drop from 1080p to 4K, which is relatively modest and suggests that the GPU is not being overwhelmed by the resolution increase.

At Low settings, the scaling shows a similar pattern: 126.3 FPS at 1080p, 114.9 at 1440p, and 92 at 4K. The drop from 1080p to 4K is 27.2%, which is actually less than the drop at Medium settings. This indicates that at Low settings, the CPU becomes more of a limiting factor, as the GPU is able to render frames quickly enough that the processor's throughput becomes the bottleneck. The fact that the 4K Low result (92 FPS) is higher than the 1080p High result (61.4 FPS) underscores this point.

The High settings show the most significant resolution scaling, with 61.4 FPS at 1080p dropping to 50.4 at 1440p and 41.6 at 4K. This 32.2% drop from 1080p to 4K is consistent with the Medium preset's scaling, indicating that the GPU is the primary constraint at these higher quality settings. The Ultra preset shows the steepest decline, from 49.6 FPS at 1080p to 42.9 at 1440p and 33.6 at 4K, a 32.3% drop.

The data suggests that the system is well-balanced for 1440p gaming, where the Medium preset provides 74.9 FPS and even High settings remain playable at 50.4 FPS. At 4K, the GPU becomes the clear limiting factor, as the CPU has enough headroom to allow the GPU to work at its full capacity. The consistent percentage drops across presets indicate that the system scales predictably with resolution, making it easy for users to anticipate performance at different display configurations.