The Medium

The AMD Ryzen 5 8400F paired with the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX delivers a fascinating split personality in The Medium. At 1080p, the combination produces playable frame rates across the board, but the data reveals a steep performance cliff as resolution and visual fidelity climb. The benchmark results show a system that is exceptionally strong at lower settings but struggles to maintain fluid motion at the highest presets, making it a study in how GPU load and memory bandwidth interact with this particular horror title.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data shows a dramatic scaling curve from 1080p to 4K, indicating where the bottleneck shifts as pixel count increases. At Low settings, the transition from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 results in a drop from 153.7 FPS to 148.8 FPS, a modest decline of roughly 3%. However, pushing further to 3840x2160 at Low yields 116.1 FPS, which represents a 24% reduction from the 1080p figure. This pattern suggests that at Low settings, the CPU can keep feeding the GPU even at 1440p, but the 4K resolution begins to tax the rendering pipeline more heavily.

The scaling behavior changes character entirely at High settings. The 1080p result of 80.7 FPS falls to 67.3 FPS at 1440p, a 17% drop, and then plummets to 48.7 FPS at 4K, a further 28% reduction. This steeper slope at higher quality presets points to the GPU becoming the primary limiter, as the additional shading work and texture bandwidth requirements scale superlinearly with resolution. The Ultra preset amplifies this effect: 59.8 FPS at 1080p, 54.9 FPS at 1440p, and 42.8 FPS at 4K. The gap between 1080p and 4K at Ultra is only 28%, which is notably smaller than the 48% gap seen at Low settings, indicating that at Ultra the GPU is already saturated even at 1080p.

The Medium preset offers an interesting middle ground. It delivers 106.6 FPS at 1080p, 90.4 FPS at 1440p, and 74.7 FPS at 4K. The scaling from 1440p to 4K here is 17%, while from 1080p to 1440p it is 15%, showing a nearly linear relationship. This suggests that Medium settings balance the load between CPU and GPU more evenly, allowing the RX 7900 XTX's 24 GB frame buffer to work without becoming the sole constraint until the highest resolutions are reached.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX brings substantial resources to The Medium, and the benchmark results reflect how those resources are utilized. With 24 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 384-bit bus delivering 960.0 GB/s of bandwidth, the card has ample headroom for the game's fixed-camera scenes and layered rendering. The 4K Ultra result of 42.8 FPS, while below the 60 FPS target, indicates that the GPU is not running out of memory but rather hitting compute limits.

The clock behavior is telling. The GPU's base clock of 1929 MHz, game clock of 2365 MHz, and boost clock of 2498 MHz show a wide operational range. At 1080p Low, where the card achieves 153.7 FPS, the GPU is likely boosting aggressively since the workload is light. However, at 4K Ultra, the sustained load may cause clocks to settle closer to the game clock, explaining the disproportionate drop to 42.8 FPS. The 61.39 TFLOPS FP32 compute rating is substantial, but The Medium's use of fixed camera angles and pre-baked lighting means raw throughput only helps so much.

The card's 96 ray accelerators are relevant here, as the game uses ray-traced reflections and shadows. The 4K High result of 48.7 FPS versus the 4K Medium result of 74.7 FPS shows a 35% performance penalty for the High preset, which likely enables more aggressive ray tracing effects. The Ultra preset at 4K drops to 42.8 FPS, a further 12% reduction, suggesting that Ultra adds additional post-processing that disproportionately impacts the GPU's shading units. The 192 ROPs and 959.2 GTexel/s texture rate are sufficient for the game's streaming textures, but the pixel fill rate of 479.6 GPixel/s becomes a constraint at 4K Ultra.

FAQ

*Q: Can this combination run The Medium at 4K smoothly?*

A: The data shows 4K performance ranges from 42.8 FPS at Ultra to 116.1 FPS at Low. Only the Low preset at 4K exceeds 60 FPS, while Medium delivers 74.7 FPS. High and Ultra fall below 50 FPS, indicating that smooth 4K gameplay requires sacrificing visual quality.

Q: How does the RX 7900 XTX compare to its nearest rivals in this game?

A: The nearest rival data is from synthetic benchmarks, not The Medium specifically. The RX 7900 XTX has an average benchmark score of 44019, which is 0.8% higher than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile and 2% lower than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. This suggests the card should trade blows with these parts depending on the workload.

Q: What is the best settings preset for 1440p gameplay?

A: At 2560x1440, the Medium preset delivers 90.4 FPS, which is well above playable thresholds. High produces 67.3 FPS, still smooth for most users. Ultra drops to 54.9 FPS, which may be acceptable but shows the GPU is nearing its limit. Low achieves 148.8 FPS but looks noticeably worse.

*Q: Does the 24 GB VRAM matter for The Medium?*

A: The game was released in 2021 and does not require 24 GB of VRAM at any resolution in this test. The performance drops from 1080p to 4K are more consistent with compute and bandwidth limitations than memory capacity issues, as even the 4K Ultra result of 42.8 FPS does not indicate out-of-memory behavior.

Q: How does the 1080p Ultra performance compare to 1080p Low?

A: The difference is stark: 59.8 FPS at Ultra versus 153.7 FPS at Low, a 61% reduction. This shows that the Ultra preset imposes a massive rendering cost, likely through ray tracing and volumetric effects, that cuts performance to nearly one-third of the Low setting.

Q: Is the CPU holding back the GPU in any scenario?

A: At 1080p Low, the 153.7 FPS result suggests the CPU can keep up with the GPU. However, the 3DMark max threads score of 6165 and single-thread score of 951 indicate the Ryzen 5 8400F is a mid-range part. In CPU-bound scenes at low settings, the frame rate may be limited by the processor's 6 cores and 12 threads.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete measured FPS table for The Medium shows twelve distinct data points across three resolutions and four settings presets. At 1920x1080, the results are 153.7 FPS (Low), 106.6 FPS (Medium), 80.7 FPS (High), and 59.8 FPS (Ultra). The progression from Low to Ultra represents a 61% reduction in frame rate, with each step up in quality costing roughly 25-30% performance.

Moving to 2560x1440, the numbers are 148.8 FPS (Low), 90.4 FPS (Medium), 67.3 FPS (High), and 54.9 FPS (Ultra). The Low preset only drops 3% from 1080p, but Medium drops 15%, High drops 17%, and Ultra drops 8%. This uneven scaling suggests that Medium and High add resolution-dependent effects that tax the GPU more heavily, while Ultra's effects are already so expensive that the additional resolution has less relative impact.

At 3840x2160, the results are 116.1 FPS (Low), 74.7 FPS (Medium), 48.7 FPS (High), and 42.8 FPS (Ultra). The Low preset maintains a playable frame rate, and Medium is close to 75 FPS. High and Ultra both fall below 50 FPS, making them marginal for smooth gameplay. The gap between High and Ultra at 4K is only 12%, compared to 26% at 1080p, indicating that at 4K the Ultra preset's additional effects are mitigated by the resolution's overall GPU load.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 8400F is a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on Zen 4 architecture, running at a base clock of 4.20 GHz and boost clock of 4.70 GHz. Its 3DMark single-thread score of 951 and 16-thread score of 6091 place it in the 82nd percentile of all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 25064. The nearest rival, the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, scores 25057, a 0% delta, while the AMD Ryzen 5 7500F scores 24993, a 0.3% delta in the 8400F's favor.

In The Medium, the CPU's role is most evident at 1080p Low, where the 153.7 FPS result approaches the practical ceiling for this processor. The 16 MB of shared L3 cache and 83.2 GB/s memory bandwidth are adequate for the game's streaming requirements, but the 4 nm process node and 65 W TDP suggest power efficiency rather than raw throughput. The Cinebench R23 multicore score of 20851 and single-core score of 2943 indicate solid performance for a 6-core part, though the game's fixed-camera design means it likely relies more on single-thread performance for game logic.

The data shows that at 1080p, the CPU is not a bottleneck except possibly at Low settings. The frame rate difference between 1080p Low (153.7 FPS) and 1440p Low (148.8 FPS) is only 3%, which could indicate the CPU is near its limit at 1080p but has headroom at higher resolutions. However, the 4K Low result of 116.1 FPS shows a 24% drop from 1080p, confirming that the GPU becomes the dominant constraint at 4K. The 8400F's 82nd percentile ranking among all CPUs suggests it is a capable mid-range processor, but the 3DMark 2-thread score of 1874 highlights that its dual-thread performance is modest, which could affect games with heavy physics or scripting workloads on a few threads.