The Medium

# The Medium with AMD Ryzen 7 9700X + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060

The Medium presents a demanding workload for this pairing, with the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 combo ranking 1326th out of 1689 tested combinations in this horror title. The benchmark data shows a system that can handle 1080p gaming comfortably at lower settings but struggles to maintain playable frame rates at higher resolutions and quality presets. The measured results reveal a clear performance hierarchy across resolutions, with the GPU emerging as the primary bottleneck as pixel count increases.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate progression from 1080p to 4K tells a story of GPU-bound performance. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo delivers 85.6 FPS, which drops to 72.6 FPS at 1440p and 54 FPS at 4K. This represents a 37% reduction from 1080p to 4K at Low settings, indicating that even at the lowest quality preset, resolution scaling has a substantial impact on performance.

Moving to Medium settings, the pattern intensifies. The system produces 54 FPS at 1080p, 47 FPS at 1440p, and 37 FPS at 4K. The 1080p to 4K drop here is 31.5%, slightly less severe than Low settings, suggesting that quality settings begin to load the GPU more uniformly across resolutions. At High settings, the frames fall to 40 FPS at 1080p, 31.8 FPS at 1440p, and 27.4 FPS at 4K — a 31.5% reduction from the lowest to highest resolution.

Ultra settings produce the most demanding scenario: 32.4 FPS at 1080p, 27.2 FPS at 1440p, and 22.7 FPS at 4K. The 1080p to 4K drop at Ultra is 30%, showing a consistent scaling pattern where each resolution step costs roughly 15% of the frame rate. This consistency across all four settings presets strongly indicates that the RTX 2060's rendering throughput is the limiting factor, not the CPU.

The data reveals that the RTX 2060's 6 GB VRAM and 336.0 GB/s bandwidth become increasingly taxed as resolution rises. At 4K Ultra, the 22.7 FPS result is essentially unplayable, while 1080p Low at 85.6 FPS shows the system's ceiling. The gap between Low and Ultra at any given resolution is significant — at 1080p, the difference is 53.2 FPS, confirming that the GPU's compute and memory resources are heavily stressed by the game's quality settings.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution and settings combination for playable performance?

A: The data shows 1080p Medium produces 54 FPS, which is the minimum threshold for smooth gameplay. At 1080p Low, the system achieves 85.6 FPS, offering the highest headroom. 1440p Low at 72.6 FPS is also viable, but 1440p Medium drops to 47 FPS, which may feel stuttery.

Q: How does the RTX 2060 perform at 4K in this game?

A: The RTX 2060 delivers 54 FPS at 4K Low, but this falls to 37 FPS at Medium, 27.4 FPS at High, and 22.7 FPS at Ultra. Only the Low preset approaches playability at 4K, while all other settings produce sub-40 FPS results.

Q: Is the Ryzen 7 9700X bottlenecking the RTX 2060 in The Medium?

A: Benchmark results indicate the GPU is the limiting component. The consistent 30-37% frame rate drops from 1080p to 4K across all settings presets suggest the CPU has ample headroom. The 9700X's 8 cores and 16 threads with a 5.50 GHz boost clock are sufficient to feed the GPU.

Q: What is the frame rate difference between Low and Ultra at 1080p?

A: At 1080p, Low settings produce 85.6 FPS while Ultra produces 32.4 FPS, a difference of 53.2 FPS. This 62% reduction from Low to Ultra highlights the significant cost of the game's highest quality preset.

Q: How does this combo rank among all tested configurations?

A: The combo ranks 1326th out of 1689 tested combinations, placing it in the lower 21.5% percentile. This reflects the RTX 2060's age and the demanding nature of The Medium, despite the modern Ryzen 7 9700X CPU.

Q: Can the system hold 60 FPS at any resolution with High settings?

A: No. The highest High-settings result is 40 FPS at 1080p, with 31.8 FPS at 1440p and 27.4 FPS at 4K. To reach 60 FPS, users must drop to Low settings at 1080p or 1440p.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 9700X brings substantial processing power to this pairing, built on the Zen 5 architecture with a 4 nm process node from TSMC. Its 8 cores and 16 threads operate with a base clock of 3.80 GHz and a boost clock of 5.50 GHz, supported by 32 MB of shared L3 cache. The CPU's 65 W TDP and DDR5 memory support with 89.6 GB/s bandwidth provide a modern foundation for gaming workloads.

Benchmark results confirm the 9700X's strength. Its Cinebench R23 multicore score of 31588 and single-core score of 4459 place it well within the upper tier of desktop processors. The Geekbench multicore result of 17002 and single-core score of 3353 reinforce this positioning. The CPU achieves an 89th percentile ranking among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 36029.

The nearest rivals show how tightly grouped the competition is. The Intel Core i5-14500HX scores 35940, just 0.2% behind the 9700X, while the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5845 trails by 0.6%. The Intel Core Ultra 9 185H leads by 0.4%, and the Intel Core Ultra 5 225H leads by 0.8%. This clustering indicates that the 9700X offers competitive performance within its segment, though The Medium's frame rates are not limited by CPU throughput.

In The Medium specifically, the CPU's role appears secondary to the GPU. The frame rate scaling across resolutions follows a pattern consistent with GPU-bound rendering, meaning the 9700X's 16 threads and high boost clock are sufficient to maintain frame delivery. The game's horror genre with fixed camera angles and pre-rendered elements likely places less demand on CPU physics and AI than on GPU fill rate and memory bandwidth.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Ryzen 7 9700X and RTX 2060 achieves a rank of 1326 out of 1689 tested combos in The Medium, placing it in the bottom 21.5% of configurations. This ranking reflects the GPU's limitations more than the CPU's capabilities, as the 9700X is a modern high-end processor paired with an aging graphics card.

The GPU's percentile ranking of 58th among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 16074, contextualizes its position. The RTX 2060's nearest rivals — the AMD Radeon RX 7600S at 15996 (0.5% behind), AMD Radeon Pro 5600M at 16351 (1.7% ahead), AMD Radeon Pro 5700 at 16351 (1.7% ahead), and AMD Radeon Pro W5500 at 15786 (1.8% behind) — show that the 2060 sits in a competitive mid-range bracket.

The combo's low rank in this specific game suggests that The Medium is particularly demanding on GPU resources. With only 6 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus and 336.0 GB/s bandwidth, the RTX 2060 struggles with the game's high-resolution textures and effects. The 1920 shading units and 30 RT cores provide Turing-era ray tracing capability, but the game's requirements exceed what this GPU can deliver at higher settings.

The 9700X's 89th percentile CPU ranking contrasts sharply with the combo's 1326th rank, underscoring that the CPU is not the limiting factor. The data indicates that upgrading the GPU would yield significant frame rate improvements, while the CPU would remain underutilized in this title.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 serves as the primary constraint in this combo, with its Turing architecture and 12 nm process from TSMC defining its capabilities. The GPU features 1920 shading units, 120 TMUs, and 48 ROPs, with 30 RT cores and 240 tensor cores providing hardware acceleration for ray tracing and DLSS. Its base clock of 1365 MHz boosts to 1680 MHz, while the 6 GB of GDDR6 memory operates at 1750 MHz with 14 Gbps effective speed.

Memory configuration is a critical factor in The Medium's performance. The 192-bit bus delivers 336.0 GB/s bandwidth, which becomes a bottleneck at higher resolutions and quality settings. The 6 GB capacity may also prove insufficient for the game's largest texture sets, potentially causing streaming issues that compound the frame rate drops observed at 4K.

The GPU's benchmark scores reflect its mid-range positioning. The 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 1242 and Passmark G3D score of 14111 place it comfortably in the mainstream segment. Its Passmark DirectX 12 score of 53 is notably lower than DirectX 11's 110, suggesting that the Turing architecture's DX12 path may not be fully optimized. The Geekbench OpenCL score of 71278 and Vulkan score of 67425 provide additional compute performance data.

The RTX 2060's 58th percentile ranking among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 16074, confirms its mid-tier status. Its nearest rivals cluster within 1.8% of its score, indicating a tightly contested performance band. The AMD Radeon RX 7600S at 15996 (0.5% behind) and AMD Radeon Pro W5500 at 15786 (1.8% behind) represent the closest competition from below, while the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M and Pro 5700 both at 16351 (1.7% ahead) edge it out from above.

In The Medium, the GPU's role is decisive. The frame rate data shows that at 1080p Low, the system achieves 85.6 FPS, but this drops to 54 FPS at Medium, 40 FPS at High, and 32.4 FPS at Ultra. This progression demonstrates that the GPU's compute units and memory bandwidth are overwhelmed by the game's increasing quality demands. The 6.451 TFLOPS FP32 performance and 201.6 GTexel/s texture rate provide a baseline for what the GPU can sustain, but The Medium's visual complexity exceeds these capabilities at higher presets.

The RTX 2060's ray tracing cores, while present, do little to help in this title at playable frame rates. The 22.7 FPS at 4K Ultra suggests that even without ray tracing enabled, the GPU is saturated. The 160 W TDP and dual-slot design indicate a power envelope that limits sustained boost clocks under heavy load, potentially contributing to the frame rate scaling observed across resolutions.