The Medium

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and Radeon RX 6700 XT combination delivers a solid, playable experience in The Medium, but the data clearly shows that the game's demanding visual effects require careful settings management to achieve smooth performance. The measured frame rates across resolutions and presets reveal a system that is heavily constrained by the graphics card, making the choice of preset more critical than CPU performance.

Settings Recommendations

Benchmark results indicate that the Medium preset offers the best balance of visual fidelity and performance for this hardware combo. At 1920x1080, the Medium preset achieves an average of 69.4 FPS, which is comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay. This is a significant improvement over the High preset's 49.9 FPS, providing a 39% performance uplift. While the Low preset at 1080p pushes the average to 113 FPS, the visual quality drop is substantial and unnecessary given the playability of the Medium settings.

The case for Medium becomes even stronger at higher resolutions. At 2560x1440, the Medium preset delivers 58 FPS, which is playable for a horror title where atmosphere matters more than competitive frame rates. The High preset at this resolution drops to 42.3 FPS, which introduces noticeable stutter during camera pans and fast-moving scenes. At 3840x2160, Medium still manages 47.6 FPS, whereas High falls to 34.2 FPS and Ultra becomes unplayable at 26.8 FPS.

The Ultra preset is not recommended at any resolution. It produces only 39.2 FPS at 1080p, 31.2 FPS at 1440p, and 26.8 FPS at 4K. This preset appears to enable ray-traced or similarly demanding effects that this GPU cannot handle while maintaining fluid motion. The data shows a steep performance cliff between Medium and Ultra settings, suggesting that the Ultra preset's visual enhancements come at an unacceptable cost. For the best experience, players should select Medium and, if they own a 144Hz display, consider dropping to Low at 1080p to fully utilize the refresh rate with 113 FPS.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is the primary performance driver in this configuration. Its 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus provides 384.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is substantial for a horror game with detailed textures. The GPU's 2560 shading units and 64 ROPs handle the game's rendering workload, with a boost clock of 2581 MHz and a game clock of 2424 MHz ensuring consistent throughput. The card's 13.21 TFLOPS of FP32 compute power is put to the test by The Medium's dual-reality rendering mechanic, which effectively doubles the scene complexity.

The frame rate scaling across presets confirms the GPU-bound nature of this game. At 1080p, moving from Low to Medium costs 44% of the performance (113 to 69.4 FPS), while moving from Medium to High costs another 28% (69.4 to 49.9 FPS). This steep drop-off indicates that the GPU's resources are being consumed by increasingly complex shaders and post-processing effects. The RX 6700 XT's position in the GPU hierarchy is strong, ranking in the 77th percentile of all GPUs. Its average benchmark score of 33721 places it slightly ahead of the AMD Radeon RX 6800 by 0.7% and the NVIDIA RTX A5000 by 1.3%, though it trails the AMD Radeon HD 7950 and RX 480 by 1%.

The GPU's 40 ray accelerators are likely responsible for the Ultra preset's heavy performance penalty. When enabled, these cores process ray-traced reflections and shadows, which can halve the frame rate. The measured data supports this, as the Ultra preset at 1080p (39.2 FPS) is barely half of the Medium preset (69.4 FPS). Players should leave ray tracing off and stick with the traditional rasterization path to maintain playable frame rates.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600 provides ample processing power for The Medium, which is not a heavily threaded title. This 6-core, 12-thread processor based on the Zen 3 architecture (codename Vermeer) boosts up to 4.40 GHz and features 32 MB of shared L3 cache. The CPU's single-thread performance is its strongest asset, as evidenced by its 3DMark single-thread score of 882 and Cinebench R23 single-core score of 2584. This matters for games that rely on a few primary threads for game logic and physics.

The CPU's benchmark scores suggest it is not a bottleneck in this configuration. Its average benchmark score of 21765 places it in the 79th percentile of all CPUs, ranking just 0.6% above the Intel Xeon D-1746TER and 0.9% above the Intel Core i7-11700F. The 5600 trails the AMD EPYC 9554P and EPYC 9534 by 0.6% each, but those are server-class processors with far higher core counts. For gaming, the 5600's 3DMark 2-thread score of 1737 and 4-thread score of 3313 indicate strong latency-sensitive performance.

The proof of the CPU's adequacy lies in the frame rate scaling. At all resolutions, the performance gap between Low and Medium presets is consistent, suggesting the CPU has headroom to feed the GPU without becoming a limiting factor. Even at 1080p Low, where the GPU is least stressed, the CPU delivers 113 FPS without apparent issues. The 5600's 65W TDP and 7nm process node also ensure it operates within thermal limits during extended gaming sessions, preventing any clock throttling that could impact frame pacing.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Ryzen 5 5600 and RX 6700 XT ranks 909th out of 1689 tested combos in The Medium, placing it in the 46th percentile of all configurations. This mid-pack position reflects the GPU's solid but not top-tier performance, as well as the fact that many tested combos include newer or higher-end graphics cards. The rank is more indicative of GPU performance than CPU, as the game's engine is heavily graphics-dependent.

Within the context of its rival components, this combo sits in a competitive position. The GPU's 77th percentile ranking among all GPUs and the CPU's 79th percentile ranking among all CPUs suggest a well-balanced pairing. The combo's rank of 909 is slightly worse than what either component's individual percentile might suggest, which indicates that The Medium is particularly demanding on the GPU. This is corroborated by the fact that the RX 6700 XT's nearest rival, the RX 6800, has a higher average benchmark score by 0.7%, and in a GPU-heavy game like this, that small margin can translate to a few extra frames per second.

The data shows that this combo is more than capable of running the game at Medium settings across all resolutions, but it will struggle at Ultra. For players targeting 60 FPS at 1440p, the Medium preset is the sweet spot. Those with 1080p displays can push to High and still maintain nearly 50 FPS, though Medium offers a more comfortable margin. The rank of 909 out of 1689 combos indicates that while this is not a top-tier setup for The Medium, it is far from inadequate, delivering a thoroughly enjoyable horror experience with proper settings management.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate progression from 1080p to 4K reveals the GPU's load characteristics. At the Medium preset, performance drops from 69.4 FPS at 1080p to 58 FPS at 1440p (a 16% decrease) and then to 47.6 FPS at 4K (an additional 18% decrease). This scaling pattern indicates that the GPU is being progressively more stressed as pixel count increases, with the 4K resolution requiring more than twice the pixel throughput of 1080p.

The Low preset shows a similar but more pronounced scaling. At 1080p, the system produces 113 FPS, which drops to 93.3 FPS at 1440p (a 17% decline) and 74 FPS at 4K (a 21% decline from 1440p). This steeper drop at higher resolutions suggests that even at Low settings, the GPU's fill rate and memory bandwidth become limiting factors as resolution increases. The 12 GB frame buffer is sufficient for 4K textures, but the 384.0 GB/s bandwidth is strained by the higher pixel throughput.

The High preset demonstrates the most dramatic resolution penalty. From 49.9 FPS at 1080p, the frame rate falls to 42.3 FPS at 1440p (a 15% decline) and then to 34.2 FPS at 4K (a 19% decline). This consistent degradation pattern across all settings confirms that the GPU is the limiting component. The CPU's performance remains constant regardless of resolution, as its workload is tied to game logic rather than pixel rendering. The fact that the 4K-to-1080p ratio is roughly 0.68 at Medium settings (47.6 vs 69.4 FPS) and 0.65 at Low settings (74 vs 113 FPS) indicates that the GPU is scaling predictably with resolution, with no unexpected bottlenecks or thermal throttling. Players should treat 4K as a showcase resolution for this combo, using Medium settings for a playable 47.6 FPS or Low for a more fluid 74 FPS.