The Medium

This combo places 1319th out of 1689 tested combinations in The Medium, putting it in the bottom 22% of all systems measured. That rank is heavily influenced by the GPU’s struggle with the game’s fixed-camera rendering style, which punishes raw pixel throughput. The AMD Ryzen 7 5700X is not the bottleneck, as its CPU benchmark percentile sits at 83, indicating strong multi-threaded headroom that the game rarely exploits. The data shows a system that can hit playable framerates at low settings, but falls apart as soon as visual fidelity increases. The gap between this combo and mid-pack performers is substantial, and the limiting factor is clear from the FPS scaling: the Intel Arc B580 simply runs out of shader and memory bandwidth headroom when the game’s heavy volumetric effects and dual-world rendering kick in.

How This Combo Ranks

The 1319 rank out of 1689 combos places this pairing firmly in the lower third of the database for The Medium. This is a horror title that relies on split-screen rendering for its signature mechanic, which doubles the effective geometry load. The data indicates that most other tested systems outperform this combo by a significant margin at standard quality presets. The CPU’s 83rd percentile standing among all processors suggests the processor is doing its job; the ranking collapse must be attributed to the graphics card. When compared to other combinations tested with similar CPUs, the Arc B580 drags the overall score down because the game’s engine is not optimized for Intel’s current architecture. The result is a system that ranks below average, and users should expect to make major compromises in settings to achieve smooth gameplay.

GPU Role

The Intel Arc B580 features 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus, providing 456.0 GB/s of bandwidth. Its base and boost clocks are identical at 2670 MHz, with memory clocked at 2375 MHz (19 Gbps effective). The GPU has 2560 shading units, 160 TMUs, and 80 ROPs, with 20 ray tracing cores. In The Medium, the 4K High preset delivers only 24.5 FPS, which is below playable thresholds. The card’s FP32 throughput of 13.67 TFLOPS is theoretically adequate, but the game’s use of asynchronous compute and heavy texture streaming seems to underutilize the Xe2-HPG architecture. The 12 GB frame buffer is sufficient for 4K, as evidenced by the fact that dropping to Low settings at 4K yields 61.1 FPS, proving the memory capacity is not the issue. Instead, the bottleneck is the card’s 80 ROPs, which limits fill-rate in a game that draws two full scenes simultaneously. The GPU’s 66th percentile ranking among all GPUs aligns with this analysis: it is a mid-pack card that gets pushed to its limits by this specific title.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700X is an 8-core, 16-thread processor based on the Zen 3 architecture (Vermeer). It runs at a base clock of 3.40 GHz and boosts to 4.60 GHz, with 32 MB of shared L3 cache. The CPU’s multi-threaded performance is strong, as shown by a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 22620 and a Geekbench multi-core score of 9720. However, The Medium is not a CPU-heavy title in most scenes; the game’s dual-world rendering is primarily a GPU workload. The CPU’s single-thread score of 921 in 3DMark and 3193 in Cinebench R23 single-core is sufficient for the game’s logic and scripting. The data confirms this: at 1080p Low, the system hits 91.2 FPS, indicating that the CPU can feed the GPU fast enough when the GPU is not the bottleneck. The processor’s 65W TDP and 7nm process node are irrelevant to the gaming results here, but the 16 threads ensure no stutter from background tasks. The CPU’s nearest rival, the Intel Core i9-11900KF, scores nearly identically (26196 vs 26214 average), confirming the 5700X is not holding this combo back.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data shows a clear pattern across all resolutions. At 1080p, the system produces 91.2 FPS on Low, 54.1 FPS on Medium, 40.1 FPS on High, and 29.9 FPS on Ultra. This is a playable range only at Low and Medium, with High being borderline. At 1440p, the numbers drop to 75.6 FPS on Low, 48.1 FPS on Medium, 31.1 FPS on High, and 24.2 FPS on Ultra. The 1440p Low result is still smooth, but Medium dips below 60 FPS, making it marginal. At 4K, the situation worsens dramatically: Low yields 61.1 FPS, Medium drops to 35.7 FPS, High falls to 24.5 FPS, and Ultra is effectively unplayable at 19.9 FPS. The gap between Low and Medium at 4K is 25.4 FPS, which is the largest single-setting jump in the entire dataset. This suggests the Medium preset activates a heavy render feature (likely the dual-world split or volumetric fog) that the Arc B580 cannot handle. The 1080p Ultra result of 29.9 FPS is telling: even at the lowest resolution, the highest preset overwhelms the GPU, indicating a hard architectural limit rather than a mere resolution scaling issue.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals the GPU-bound nature of this combo. At Low settings, the system goes from 91.2 FPS at 1080p to 61.1 FPS at 4K, a drop of 33%. This is a relatively mild decline, showing that at low visual complexity, the GPU has enough headroom to handle the pixel count increase. At Medium settings, the drop is steeper: from 54.1 FPS to 35.7 FPS, a 34% reduction. At High settings, the drop is 40.1 to 24.5, a 39% reduction. At Ultra settings, the drop is 29.9 to 19.9, a 33% reduction. The consistency of these percentage drops (all between 33% and 39%) indicates that the limiting component scales linearly with resolution. This pattern is characteristic of a GPU that is fundamentally fill-rate limited. The ROP count of 80 is low for a card in this class, and The Medium’s rendering of two perspectives simultaneously doubles the pixel shading workload. The CPU’s role in this scaling is minimal, as evidenced by the fact that the 1080p Low result (91.2 FPS) is nearly double the 4K Low result (61.1 FPS), which would not happen if the CPU were the constraint. The data strongly suggests that the Arc B580’s memory bandwidth (456 GB/s) is adequate, but its pixel throughput is the ceiling. For users, this means the only way to get consistently smooth framerates above 60 FPS is to stick to 1080p or 1440p with Low or Medium settings, as any higher preset pushes the GPU past its effective limits.