The Medium

The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Radeon RX 7900 XT combination delivers a wide range of performance in The Medium, scaling from highly playable framerates at lower presets to a demanding experience at Ultra settings. This analysis breaks down the measured data to explain what each setting tier means for your experience, how resolution impacts performance, and which component is the primary driver at different points.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution and settings combo for a smooth 60 FPS experience?

A: Based on the data, 1440p Medium delivers 88 FPS, providing a significant buffer. For a locked 60 FPS at 4K, Medium settings are required, as they yield 64.2 FPS. High settings at 1440p produce 63.2 FPS, which is also viable.

Q: Is the RX 7900 XT powerful enough for 4K gaming in this title?

A: Yes, but with caveats. At 4K, the GPU achieves 106.1 FPS on Low settings and 64.2 FPS on Medium. However, High settings drop to 50.7 FPS, and Ultra falls to 36.3 FPS, indicating that 4K Ultra is not a smooth experience with this hardware.

Q: How much of a performance jump is there from High to Low settings?

A: The jump is substantial. At 1080p, moving from High (73.6 FPS) to Low (161 FPS) more than doubles the framerate, a 118.7% increase. At 4K, the same settings change results in a 109.3% increase (from 50.7 to 106.1 FPS).

Q: What is the difference in performance between 1080p and 1440p at the same settings?

A: At Ultra settings, 1080p yields 54.3 FPS, while 1440p yields 48.5 FPS, a modest 10.7% drop. At Low settings, the drop is more pronounced, going from 161 FPS at 1080p to 135.2 FPS at 1440p, an 16% decrease.

Q: Does the CPU or GPU bottleneck performance in this game?

A: The data indicates a GPU bottleneck. The large framerate jumps when lowering settings (e.g., from 64.2 to 106.1 FPS at 4K) show that the GPU is the limiting factor. The CPU’s high thread count and clock speeds are sufficient to keep up, as the FPS scales almost linearly with resolution changes.

Q: How does this combo rank compared to other tested systems?

A: This specific configuration (Ryzen 9 9900X + RX 7900 XT) ranks 308th out of 1689 tested combos for The Medium, placing it in the top 18.2% of all systems tested for this game.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data suggests that Medium is the optimal preset for this hardware combination. It provides the best balance between visual fidelity and performance across all tested resolutions. At 1080p, Medium yields 99.1 FPS, which is excellent for high-refresh-rate monitors. At 1440p, it produces 88 FPS, ideal for a smooth 1440p experience. Even at 4K, Medium settings maintain a playable 64.2 FPS.

High settings are viable for users prioritizing visual quality on 1440p or 1080p displays. The 1440p result of 63.2 FPS is playable, and the 1080p result of 73.6 FPS is solid. However, the cost of moving from Medium to High is significant: a 27.3% framerate drop at 1080p (from 99.1 to 73.6 FPS). At 4K, High settings become risky, as the 50.7 FPS average is below the 60 FPS target.

Ultra should be avoided for smooth gameplay. Even at 1080p, the average framerate of 54.3 FPS is below 60 FPS. At 1440p (48.5 FPS) and 4K (36.3 FPS), Ultra settings are not a practical choice. Low settings are only recommended for maximizing framerates on high-refresh displays, offering 161 FPS at 1080p and 135.2 FPS at 1440p, but sacrificing significant visual quality.

Resolution Scaling

The framerate scaling from 1080p to 4K shows a clear GPU-bound workload. At Low settings, the framerate drops from 161 FPS at 1080p to 135.2 FPS at 1440p and finally to 106.1 FPS at 4K. The drop from 1080p to 4K is 34.1%, which is less than the theoretical 4x pixel count increase, indicating that the CPU is helping to feed the GPU efficiently.

At Medium settings, the scaling is more pronounced: 99.1 FPS (1080p) → 88 FPS (1440p) → 64.2 FPS (4K). The 4K framerate is 35.2% lower than the 1080p figure. This pattern continues at High settings, where the numbers are 73.6 FPS, 63.2 FPS, and 50.7 FPS respectively, with a 4K performance deficit of 31.1% compared to 1080p.

Ultra settings show the most severe resolution penalty. The framerate drops from 54.3 FPS at 1080p to 48.5 FPS at 1440p (a 10.7% drop) and then to 36.3 FPS at 4K (a 33.1% drop from 1080p). The consistent pattern across all settings indicates the GPU is the limiting component; as pixel count increases, the GPU's fill rate and shading capacity become the primary constraint. The CPU maintains enough headroom to avoid becoming a bottleneck, as evidenced by the smooth scaling.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a complete picture of performance across three resolutions and four quality presets.

1080p:

• Low: 161.0 FPS
• Medium: 99.1 FPS
• High: 73.6 FPS
• Ultra: 54.3 FPS

1440p:

• Low: 135.2 FPS
• Medium: 88.0 FPS
• High: 63.2 FPS
• Ultra: 48.5 FPS

4K (2160p):

• Low: 106.1 FPS
• Medium: 64.2 FPS
• High: 50.7 FPS
• Ultra: 36.3 FPS

The data shows that the gap between Medium and High is consistently around 25-30 FPS at lower resolutions (25.5 FPS at 1080p, 24.8 FPS at 1440p). At 4K, this gap narrows to 13.5 FPS, as the GPU becomes more strained. The difference between High and Ultra is also notable, with a 19.3 FPS drop at 1080p and a 14.4 FPS drop at 4K. As resolution increases, the absolute framerate differences between settings shrink, though the percentage impact remains significant.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT is the defining component in this system's gaming performance. With 20 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 320-bit bus, the card provides a massive 800.0 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is crucial for feeding the high-resolution textures and complex scenes in The Medium at 4K. The GPU's 84 ray accelerators support the game's DirectX 12 Ultimate features, though the measured performance suggests the game's implementation is not heavily reliant on them.

The card's clock behavior is key to understanding its performance. The base clock of 1387 MHz, with a boost clock of 2394 MHz and a game clock of 2025 MHz, allows the GPU to dynamically adjust its power output. The 51.48 TFLOPS of FP32 compute power is substantial, but the data shows that even this level of performance struggles with Ultra settings at 4K (36.3 FPS). The pixel rate of 459.6 GPixel/s is a limiting factor at higher resolutions, explaining the significant framerate drops when moving from 1440p to 4K.

The GPU's benchmark percentile of 82 places it in the top 18% of all GPUs. However, its nearest rivals in the database include the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Mobile and RTX 4080 Mobile, showing that in raw compute terms, this desktop card is comparable to top-tier mobile parts. In The Medium, the GPU's performance is clearly the bottleneck, as lowering settings from Ultra to Medium at 4K yields a 76.9% framerate increase (from 36.3 to 64.2 FPS), demonstrating the heavy load the game places on the GPU.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X provides a robust foundation for gaming. With 12 cores and 24 threads based on the Zen 5 architecture, the CPU has far more processing power than most games require. The 4.40 GHz base clock and 5.60 GHz boost clock ensure that single-threaded performance is excellent, as evidenced by the Cinebench R23 single-core score of 6555 points.

In The Medium, the CPU's role is to feed the GPU with draw calls and game logic updates. The benchmark results show that the CPU is not a limiting factor. The 3DMark max threads score of 13929 and the Cinebench R23 multicore score of 46438 indicate that the CPU has ample headroom for the game's threading model. Even at 1080p Low settings, where the GPU is least stressed and the CPU is most likely to bottleneck, the system achieves 161 FPS, a figure that is likely near the game engine's limit.

The CPU's 64 MB of shared L3 cache and dual-channel DDR5 memory support with 89.6 GB/s of bandwidth provide low-latency access to game data. The Ryzen 9 9900X's average benchmark score of 54450 places it at the 94th percentile of all CPUs. Its nearest rival, the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D, scores nearly identically (54681, a -0.4% delta), showing that the standard 9900X is not meaningfully slower in general compute tasks. This CPU performance headroom means that in The Medium, the GPU is always the determining factor for framerates, and users should focus on GPU settings to achieve their performance targets.