The Medium

Settings Recommendations

The Medium’s measured frame rates across presets reveal a clear hierarchy, with the Low preset delivering the only consistently high-refresh experience on this platform. At 1920x1080, Low produces 112.9 FPS, which is more than double the Medium preset’s 73.6 FPS and nearly triple the High preset’s 52.1 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra at 1080p is stark: 112.9 FPS versus 40.4 FPS, a difference of 72.5 FPS that underscores how heavily this horror title taxes the GPU at higher quality settings.

For players prioritizing smoothness, Low at 1080p is the clear recommendation, as it remains the only preset that exceeds the 100 FPS threshold across all tested resolutions. At 2560x1440, Low still manages 97.2 FPS, which is respectable for a 1440p panel, while Medium drops to 59 FPS and High falls to 41.7 FPS. The 4K results are more punishing: Low at 3840x2160 yields 75.8 FPS, but Medium plummets to 47.1 FPS, High to 37.1 FPS, and Ultra to 29 FPS.

The data suggests that the Medium preset offers a balanced compromise only at 1080p, where 73.6 FPS is playable, but the scaling behavior at higher resolutions makes Low the only sensible choice for maintaining fluidity. The Ultra preset is effectively unplayable at every resolution, with its best result being 40.4 FPS at 1080p. Given that the measured rows show no minimum FPS data, average rates alone suggest that High and Ultra carry substantial performance penalties that are unlikely to be offset by visual gains in a game with The Medium’s fixed-camera presentation.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT is the dominant performance factor in this configuration, as evidenced by the pronounced frame rate swings when settings change. The GPU’s 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus provides 432.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is substantial for a horror game that often loads large texture sets. The 2560 shading units, 160 texture mapping units, and 64 render output units are complemented by 40 ray accelerators, though The Medium’s use of ray tracing is not explicitly measured in the provided data.

The GPU’s clock behavior is notable: a base clock of 2150 MHz, a game clock of 2495 MHz, and a boost clock of 2600 MHz. These frequencies, combined with the 13.31 TFLOPS FP32 throughput, explain why the card scales so dramatically across presets. At 1080p Low, the GPU is clearly not the bottleneck, as 112.9 FPS suggests headroom, but at 4K Ultra, the 29 FPS result indicates the card is fully saturated. The 250 W TDP and dual-slot cooler suggest thermal headroom is adequate for sustained loads, but the benchmark results indicate that the RX 6750 XT’s raw compute is the limiting factor at higher settings.

The GPU’s benchmark percentile of 79 versus all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 35327, places it slightly below the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (which sits 1.3% higher in average score) and roughly on par with the AMD Radeon RX 5600M (0.2% difference). This positioning confirms that the RX 6750 XT is a mid-to-upper-tier card that can handle 1080p and 1440p gaming well, but struggles with 4K Ultra settings in demanding titles like The Medium.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate degradation from 1080p to 4K is severe and consistent across all presets, indicating that the GPU is the primary scaling bottleneck. At Low settings, the drop from 112.9 FPS at 1080p to 97.2 FPS at 1440p (a 15.7 FPS reduction) is relatively mild, but the further drop to 75.8 FPS at 4K represents a 32.9% decrease from the 1440p figure. This pattern suggests that at Low settings, the CPU still has some influence, but the GPU becomes progressively more dominant as pixel count rises.

The Medium preset shows a more aggressive scaling curve: 73.6 FPS at 1080p, 59 FPS at 1440p, and 47.1 FPS at 4K. The percentage drop from 1080p to 4K is 36%, which is slightly larger than the Low preset’s 32.9% drop. High settings amplify this further: 52.1 FPS at 1080p, 41.7 FPS at 1440p, and 37.1 FPS at 4K, representing a 28.8% reduction from 1080p to 4K. Ultra is the most punishing, with 40.4 FPS at 1080p falling to 37.2 FPS at 1440p and 29 FPS at 4K.

The data reveals that the resolution scaling is not linear; the largest absolute drops occur between 1080p and 1440p for Low and Medium, while High and Ultra show their biggest declines between 1440p and 4K. This non-uniform behavior suggests that the RX 6750 XT’s memory bandwidth (432.0 GB/s) and ROP throughput (64 ROPs) become progressively more strained as resolution increases, with the 4K Ultra result of 29 FPS indicating that the card is operating at its absolute limit.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT ranks 822 out of 1689 tested combos in The Medium, placing it in the 48.7th percentile of all tested configurations. This mid-pack ranking is somewhat surprising given the individual component percentiles: the CPU sits at the 78th percentile versus all CPUs, and the GPU at the 79th percentile versus all GPUs. The combo’s rank suggests that The Medium’s performance profile does not favor this pairing as strongly as synthetic benchmarks might imply.

The CPU’s nearest rivals provide context for its contribution. The AMD Ryzen 5 5600GT has an average benchmark score of 20740, just 0.3% higher than the 5600X’s 20680. The Intel Core i7-10700 (20746, 0.3% higher) and Intel Core i5-12490F (20794, 0.5% higher) are similarly close, while the Intel Xeon 6325P (20538) is 0.7% lower. These tiny deltas indicate that the 5600X is not a performance outlier in either direction, and its 6-core, 12-thread configuration with a 3.70 GHz base and 4.60 GHz boost clock provides adequate compute for the game.

On the GPU side, the RX 6750 XT’s nearest rivals show a similar clustering: the RX 5600M (35264, 0.2% lower), RTX 5070 Ti Mobile (35435, 0.3% higher), AMD Radeon 880M (35646, 0.9% higher), and RTX 3080 (35787, 1.3% higher) are all within a narrow band. This suggests that the GPU’s performance is well within the expected range for its class, and the combo’s rank of 822 is more a reflection of the game’s demanding nature than any component deficiency.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600X contributes a solid foundation, but the benchmark data indicates that it is not the primary bottleneck in The Medium. The CPU’s Zen 3 architecture, built on a 7 nm process with 4,150 million transistors, provides strong single-thread performance: a Geekbench single-core score of 2111 and a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 2622. These results are complemented by multi-threaded scores that show the 6-core, 12-thread processor scaling well, with a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 18578 and a PassMark multi-thread score of 21858.

The CPU’s 32 MB of L3 cache and 512 KB per-core L2 cache are generous for a desktop processor, and the 51.2 GB/s memory bandwidth (dual-channel DDR4) is adequate for feeding the GPU. The 65 W TDP and unlocked multiplier suggest headroom for overclocking, though the measured FPS data does not indicate any CPU-induced frame drops. The fact that Low settings at 1080p achieve 112.9 FPS while the GPU’s own benchmark scores are moderate suggests the CPU is capable of driving the GPU to its limits at lower graphical loads.

However, the resolution scaling analysis shows that the CPU’s influence diminishes rapidly as resolution increases. At 4K, the frame rates are almost entirely GPU-bound, with Low, Medium, High, and Ultra producing 75.8, 47.1, 37.1, and 29 FPS respectively. These figures align closely with what the GPU alone would be expected to deliver, implying that the 5600X’s 3.70 GHz base clock and 4.60 GHz boost clock are sufficient to avoid becoming a limiting factor. The CPU’s percentile of 78 versus all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 20680, places it in the upper quartile, and its nearest rivals are all within 0.7% of its score, confirming that it performs as expected for its class.