The Medium

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600 paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 delivers a playable but heavily settings-dependent experience in The Medium. Benchmark data shows a fixed-function pattern where performance scales predictably with resolution and quality presets, revealing a system balanced between its six-core processor and mid-range graphics card. The combination ranks 958th out of 1,689 tested combos, placing it in the lower-middle tier of the database, yet the measured frames per second tell a more nuanced story about where this hardware excels and where it falters.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K is steep and consistent across all settings, signaling that the RTX 4060 becomes the primary constraint as pixel count rises. At Low settings, the average frame rate falls from 108.2 FPS at 1920x1080 to 89.6 FPS at 2560x1440, a reduction of 18.6 FPS, and then to 73.2 FPS at 3840x2160, a further 16.4 FPS drop. This progression shows a roughly 32% loss from 1080p to 4K at Low, indicating that even the lowest quality preset cannot escape the GPU’s memory bandwidth and compute limits at higher resolutions.

The scaling becomes more punishing at higher quality settings. At High, the average drops from 47 FPS at 1080p to 39.1 FPS at 1440p, then to 32.3 FPS at 4K — a total decline of 14.7 FPS or about 31%. At Ultra, the numbers are 41.6 FPS at 1080p, 34.4 FPS at 1440p, and 25.7 FPS at 4K, representing a 38% reduction from the lowest to highest resolution. This steeper relative decline at Ultra suggests that the GPU’s 8 GB memory buffer and 128-bit bus are being saturated by the game’s high-resolution textures and effects, forcing the renderer to swap or compress data.

The pattern across Medium settings mirrors this trend: 69.4 FPS at 1080p, 58.6 FPS at 1440p, and 42.4 FPS at 4K. The consistent 30-38% scaling penalty across all presets indicates that resolution, not quality, is the dominant factor in performance loss. This is a classic sign of a GPU-bound scenario where the RTX 4060’s 272.0 GB/s bandwidth and 15.11 TFLOPS of FP32 compute are the limiting components, rather than the CPU’s processing power.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, built on the 5 nm Ada Lovelace architecture with the AD107 chip, provides the graphical muscle for this combo. Its 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus delivers 272.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is modest for 4K workloads but adequate for 1080p and 1440p gaming. The card’s boost clock of 2460 MHz and 3072 shading units allow it to maintain solid frame rates at lower resolutions, but the data shows a clear ceiling when pixel count increases.

At 1920x1080, the GPU achieves 108.2 FPS on Low settings, which is a strong result for a card that sits at the 66th percentile among all GPUs. However, at 4K Ultra, the average drops to 25.7 FPS, rendering the experience unplayable for smooth gameplay. The 128-bit memory interface is likely the bottleneck here, as the 8 GB capacity is sufficient for most scenes but the bandwidth cannot keep up with the data demands of 3840x2160 rendering. The card’s 24 RT cores and 96 tensor cores do not appear to offset this limitation in the measured results.

The GPU’s performance relative to its nearest rivals is tight. The RTX 4060 averages a benchmark score of 23,181, which is 0.6% below the AMD Radeon RX 6600M and 0.7% below the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti in the database’s aggregate tests. It sits 0.7% above the Intel Arc B580 and 0.8% above the AMD Radeon 760M. These narrow margins suggest that the RTX 4060 is competitive with its peers but does not offer a decisive advantage in raw compute, which is reflected in the measured FPS where it struggles to exceed 60 FPS at 1440p on anything above Low settings.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo ranks 958th out of 1,689 tested combinations, placing it in the 57th percentile of all system pairings. This position is lower than the individual component percentiles — the CPU sits at the 79th percentile among all processors, and the GPU at the 66th percentile — indicating that the combination underperforms relative to what each part might suggest on its own. The data implies that The Medium is particularly demanding on the GPU, and the RTX 4060’s mid-range positioning drags the combo down despite the Ryzen 5 5600’s capable multi-threaded performance.

The ranking is also affected by the game’s release date of 2021-01-27, which means the title was optimized for older hardware generations. The RTX 4060, released on 2023-05-17, should theoretically handle this game well, but the measured FPS at 4K Ultra (25.7 FPS) and even 1440p Ultra (34.4 FPS) show that the card is not overpowered for this workload. The combo’s rank of 958 suggests that many other pairings with stronger GPUs or better-balanced configurations achieve higher frame rates, particularly at higher resolutions where the GPU becomes the sole limiting factor.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo delivers playable performance across all settings. Low settings produce an average of 108.2 FPS, which is smooth for any display. Medium settings yield 69.4 FPS, providing a good balance between visual quality and responsiveness. High settings drop to 47 FPS, still acceptable for slower-paced horror gameplay, while Ultra falls to 41.6 FPS, which may cause noticeable stutter in fast-moving scenes.

Moving to 2560x1440, the performance becomes more marginal. Low settings maintain a strong 89.6 FPS average, but Medium drops to 58.6 FPS, which is just above the 60 FPS threshold. High settings produce 39.1 FPS, and Ultra falls to 34.4 FPS, both of which are below ideal smoothness targets. The data shows that 1440p requires a significant settings compromise to maintain playability.

At 3840x2160, the combo struggles. Low settings yield 73.2 FPS, which is playable, but Medium drops to 42.4 FPS, High to 32.3 FPS, and Ultra to 25.7 FPS. These numbers indicate that 4K is only viable at Low settings, and even then, the frame rate is not high enough for competitive play but sufficient for a narrative-driven horror game. The min and max FPS values are not recorded, so the data only reflects average performance, which may hide frame time spikes.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600, a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on Zen 3 architecture (codename Vermeer), provides the computational foundation for this combo. Its base clock of 3.50 GHz and boost clock of 4.40 GHz, combined with 32 MB of shared L3 cache, deliver strong single-threaded and multi-threaded performance. In Cinebench R23, the CPU scores 18,309 in multicore and 2,584 in single-core, placing it at the 79th percentile among all CPUs.

The CPU’s role in The Medium appears secondary to the GPU, as the FPS scaling with resolution shows no evidence of CPU bottlenecking. At 1080p Low, the system achieves 108.2 FPS, which is well within the CPU’s capability to feed frames to the GPU. The 3DMark scores support this: single-thread performance is 882, and 16-thread performance is 5,641, indicating that the CPU can handle the game’s logic and physics without becoming a limiting factor.

The CPU’s nearest rivals in the database — the Intel Xeon D-1746TER (0.6% higher average score), AMD EPYC 9554P (0.6% lower), AMD EPYC 9534 (0.6% lower), and Intel Core i7-11700F (0.9% lower) — all show similar aggregate performance. This suggests that the Ryzen 5 5600 is well-matched to its peers, and any performance differences in The Medium are more likely attributable to the GPU. The CPU’s 65 W TDP and dual-channel DDR4 memory support (51.2 GB/s bandwidth) are adequate for this game, and the data shows that the processor does not hinder the RTX 4060’s output at any resolution or settings combination.