The Medium

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT combination produces a clear hierarchy across the tested presets in The Medium. The data shows that the Medium preset delivers the most balanced experience, with an average of 93.4 FPS at 1080p, 80.2 FPS at 1440p, and 61.3 FPS at 4K. This preset avoids the steep performance penalty of High and Ultra settings, which drop to 67.5 and 55.4 FPS at 1080p respectively, while providing substantially more visual fidelity than the Low preset that reaches 138.4 FPS at 1080p. For users prioritizing frame rate above all else, the Low preset at 1440p yields 123.3 FPS, but the Medium preset is the recommended starting point for this hardware pairing.

Settings Recommendations

Benchmark results indicate that the Medium preset offers the optimal ratio of visual quality to performance for this combination. At 1080p, the jump from Medium to High costs 25.9 FPS (from 93.4 to 67.5), representing a 27.7% reduction for what is typically a modest increase in graphical detail. The Ultra preset compounds this issue, delivering only 55.4 FPS at 1080p, which falls below the 60 FPS threshold that most users consider the baseline for smooth gameplay. At 1440p, the Medium preset maintains 80.2 FPS, leaving sufficient headroom for demanding scenes, while High drops to 54.2 FPS and Ultra falls to 44.2 FPS. The 4K results reinforce this pattern: Medium achieves 61.3 FPS, barely crossing the playability line, whereas High manages only 45.6 FPS and Ultra struggles at 36.5 FPS. The Low preset, while delivering 95.7 FPS at 4K, sacrifices too much visual quality for a horror game that relies heavily on atmospheric lighting and shadows. Consequently, Medium represents the highest preset that consistently maintains playable frame rates across all three resolutions tested.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is the dominant component in this pairing, equipped with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, providing 644.6 GB/s of memory bandwidth. This memory configuration is particularly relevant for The Medium, which features a dual-reality mechanic that renders two distinct worlds simultaneously, placing significant pressure on both memory capacity and bandwidth. The GPU operates with a base clock of 1660 MHz, a game clock of 2400 MHz, and a boost clock of 2970 MHz, with the boost behavior directly influencing the measured frame rates. The 4096 shading units and 128 ROPs provide the raw throughput needed to handle the game's complex shader work, while the 64 ray tracing cores support the game's lighting effects, though the data suggests they are not heavily utilized at Medium settings. The performance scaling across presets shows the GPU becoming the limiting factor at higher settings; the difference between Low and Ultra at 1080p is 83 FPS (from 138.4 to 55.4), indicating that the GPU's compute resources are being saturated by the increased shading and texture work. The GPU's 82nd percentile ranking among all tested GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 39647, places it in the upper tier, and its nearest rivals include the AMD Radeon Pro 575 with a delta of -0.1% and the NVIDIA RTX A500 Mobile at +0.2%, showing tight competition in synthetic benchmarks.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600 provides the processing foundation for this combination, featuring 6 cores and 12 threads based on the Zen 3 architecture. The CPU operates with a base clock of 3.50 GHz and a boost clock of 4.40 GHz, with a 65 W TDP that keeps thermal demands modest. The 32 MB of shared L3 cache is advantageous for The Medium's streaming requirements, as the game loads large environments and texture sets. The CPU's single-thread performance, evidenced by a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 2584, is sufficient to avoid bottlenecking the GPU at lower settings, as shown by the 138.4 FPS result at 1080p Low. However, the multi-threaded workload, reflected in the Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 18309, becomes more relevant when the game engine processes background streaming. The CPU's 79th percentile ranking among all tested CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 21765, places it slightly above mid-pack. Its nearest rivals include the Intel Xeon D-1746TER with a delta of 0.6% and the AMD EPYC 9554P at -0.6%, indicating that the 5600 sits in a crowded performance band. In this game, the CPU's role is secondary to the GPU, as evidenced by the frame rate scaling: dropping from 1440p to 1080p at Medium settings only increases performance by 13.2 FPS (from 80.2 to 93.4), suggesting that the CPU can feed the GPU adequately at these resolution levels.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of the AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT ranks 458th out of 1689 tested combos in The Medium, placing it in the 72.9th percentile of all configurations. This ranking reflects the balance between the CPU and GPU, where the GPU's strong performance is somewhat tempered by the CPU's mid-range standing. The CPU's 79th percentile and GPU's 82nd percentile suggest a well-matched pair, with neither component dramatically outperforming the other. The data shows that this combo achieves higher frame rates than what the CPU's synthetic benchmarks might suggest alone, indicating that the GPU is effectively utilized. Conversely, the GPU's potential is not fully realized at lower resolutions; the 1080p Low result of 138.4 FPS, while high, does not approach the GPU's theoretical maximum, suggesting some CPU limitation at very high frame rates. The combo's rank of 458 out of 1689 means it outperforms approximately 73% of all tested configurations, which is a strong result for a mid-range CPU paired with a high-end GPU. This placement is consistent with the component-level percentiles, showing that the pairing does not introduce any unusual bottlenecks or synergies.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals how this combination scales across resolutions, providing insight into which component limits performance. At Medium settings, the frame rates are 93.4 FPS at 1080p, 80.2 FPS at 1440p, and 61.3 FPS at 4K. The transition from 1080p to 1440p results in a 13.2 FPS drop (14.1% reduction), while moving from 1440p to 4K costs 18.9 FPS (23.6% reduction). This scaling pattern indicates a GPU-bound scenario, as the frame rate decreases proportionally with the increase in pixel count. The 1080p to 4K total drop is 32.1 FPS (34.4% reduction), which is less than the 75% pixel increase might suggest, indicating that the GPU has sufficient headroom. At Low settings, the scaling is more dramatic: 138.4 FPS at 1080p, 123.3 FPS at 1440p, and 95.7 FPS at 4K. The 1080p to 4K drop of 42.7 FPS (30.9% reduction) is smaller in percentage terms than at Medium, suggesting that at Low settings, the CPU begins to play a more significant role at 1080p, limiting the GPU's ability to push even higher frame rates. At Ultra settings, the frame rates fall to 55.4 FPS at 1080p, 44.2 FPS at 1440p, and 36.5 FPS at 4K, with the 1080p to 4K drop being 18.9 FPS (34.1% reduction). This consistent scaling pattern across presets confirms that the RX 9070 XT is the primary determinant of performance, with the Ryzen 5 5600 providing adequate support without introducing major bottlenecks. The data suggests that users targeting 60 FPS should use Medium settings at 1080p or 1440p, while 4K gaming at Medium settings is borderline, and High or Ultra presets are only viable at lower resolutions.