The Medium

The Medium presents a demanding fixed-camera horror experience, and the benchmark data for the Intel Core i5-12600KF paired with the AMD Radeon RX 6600 reveals a configuration that is consistently bound by its graphics subsystem at higher resolutions and settings. The measured frame rates show a steep drop as resolution increases, a classic indicator that the GPU is the primary limiting component in this pairing. At 1080p Low, the combo achieves an average of 85.5 FPS, but this falls to 23.8 FPS at 4K High, a reduction of over 70% that points directly at the Radeon RX 6600 struggling to maintain throughput as pixel count quadruples.

Resolution Scaling

The scaling behavior from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160 is severe and non-linear, highlighting the GPU’s bandwidth and compute limitations. At Medium settings, the average frame rate drops from 55.1 FPS at 1080p to 44.6 FPS at 1440p, a 19% reduction, and then plummets to 32.3 FPS at 4K, a further 27.6% decline. This pattern indicates that while the CPU can feed the GPU at lower resolutions, the RX 6600’s 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus with 224.0 GB/s bandwidth becomes a bottleneck as texture and shader complexity scale. The High preset tells a similar story: 38.2 FPS at 1080p, 34.8 FPS at 1440p, and 23.8 FPS at 4K. The smallest relative drop between 1080p and 1440p at High (9%) suggests that at these settings, the workload is already near the GPU's ceiling, whereas the larger drop to 4K (31.5%) confirms that the card cannot sustain playable rates at that resolution regardless of preset.

The Ultra preset data reinforces this conclusion. At 4K Ultra, the combo manages only 20.5 FPS, which is below the threshold for smooth gameplay even in a slow-paced horror title. The 1080p Ultra result of 29.7 FPS is marginally better but still not ideal, indicating that the RX 6600 is not well-suited for maximum quality settings even at the entry-level resolution. The delta between Low and Ultra at 1080p is stark: 85.5 FPS versus 29.7 FPS, a 2.9x difference. This spread is far larger than what a CPU limitation would produce, as the i5-12600KF has ample headroom in its 10 cores and 16 threads. The data strongly suggests that users should prioritize resolution over quality settings, as dropping from High to Low at 1440p yields a jump from 34.8 FPS to 70.1 FPS, effectively doubling performance.

How This Combo Ranks

Among the 1689 tested combinations in The Medium, this pairing sits at rank 1342, placing it in the bottom 20% of all configurations. This low standing is primarily due to the GPU’s mid-range positioning, as the RX 6600’s percentileVsAllGpus of 69 indicates it outperforms roughly two-thirds of all graphics cards, yet The Medium’s demanding rendering pipeline exposes its weaknesses. The combo rank is not a reflection of the CPU, which holds a percentileVsAllCpus of 84, but rather a signal of the game’s heavy reliance on GPU compute and memory bandwidth. In practical terms, this means that while the processor is capable of handling the game’s logic and camera transitions, the frame rate is dictated almost entirely by the Radeon card’s ability to rasterize the fixed-camera scenes.

The rank of 1342 out of 1689 implies that a substantial number of other combinations deliver higher average frame rates. This is expected given the RX 6600’s placement relative to its nearest rivals. The GPU’s avgBenchmarkScore of 25235 is virtually identical to the AMD Radeon 890M (25246, deltaPct 0), the AMD Radeon RX 580 2048SP (25287, deltaPct -0.2), and the AMD Radeon RX 6700M (25180, deltaPct 0.2). The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is also within 0.5% (25120), meaning this tier of graphics hardware clusters tightly, and any gains from one card over another are minimal. For The Medium specifically, the measured FPS at 1440p High (34.8) and 4K Medium (32.3) are close enough to suggest that the game’s engine is not particularly sensitive to the architectural differences between these rivals, but rather to raw fill rate and memory throughput.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-12600KF brings a hybrid architecture with 10 cores and 16 threads, running at a base clock of 3.70 GHz and a boost clock of 4.90 GHz. This Alder Lake-S processor, built on Intel’s 10 nm process, has a 20 MB shared L3 cache and supports DDR4 and DDR5 memory. In The Medium, the CPU’s role is largely to maintain consistent frame pacing and handle the game’s fixed-camera scene loading. The benchmark results show that this processor is not the bottleneck: at 1080p Low, the combo reaches 85.5 FPS, which is well above what the GPU can sustain at higher settings. The 3dmark_single_thread score of 1016 and 3dmark_16_threads score of 7956 indicate strong single and multi-threaded performance, which is sufficient for a horror title that typically does not require extreme thread counts.

The cinebench_r23_multicore score of 23444 and single-core score of 3309 further demonstrate the CPU’s capability. However, the game’s frame rates do not scale with the processor’s performance beyond the Low preset, as evidenced by the fact that 4K Low (56 FPS) is still lower than 1080p Ultra (29.7 FPS) despite the CPU being identical. This suggests that the i5-12600KF is never the limiting factor in this combo; instead, the RX 6600’s 1792 shading units and 64 ROPs are the constraining elements. The CPU’s nearest rivals, including the Intel Core i9-10900K (avgScore 27829, deltaPct 0) and the Intel Core i5-12600K (avgScore 27851, deltaPct -0.1), show that the 12600KF is essentially tied with its peers, so any frame rate differences in this game would come from the GPU, not the processor.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo delivers an average of 38.2 FPS on High settings, 55.1 FPS on Medium, and 85.5 FPS on Low. The Ultra preset yields 29.7 FPS, which is playable but not smooth for a game that relies on atmospheric tension rather than fast action. The jump from Ultra to High (from 29.7 to 38.2) represents a 28.6% improvement, while Medium to Low (from 55.1 to 85.5) is a 55.2% increase, showing diminishing returns as settings are lowered. At 2560x1440, the numbers drop to 34.8 FPS (High), 44.6 FPS (Medium), 70.1 FPS (Low), and 27.8 FPS (Ultra). The 1440p Low result is the only one above 60 FPS, indicating that this resolution is only viable with reduced quality. The 4K results are uniformly poor: 23.8 FPS (High), 32.3 FPS (Medium), 56 FPS (Low), and 20.5 FPS (Ultra). The 4K Low figure of 56 FPS is the sole playable outcome at that resolution, and it still requires significant graphical compromises.

The data reveals that the sweet spot for this combo is 1080p Medium, where 55.1 FPS approaches a smooth experience without the visual degradation of Low settings. For users with 1440p displays, the Low preset is the only realistic option, as 44.6 FPS at Medium may be tolerable but is on the edge of playability. The 4K resolution is largely out of reach, with even the Low preset falling short of 60 FPS. The spread between settings at each resolution is consistent: Low is roughly 1.5 to 2 times faster than Ultra, which underscores that the GPU’s compute units are saturated by the game’s lighting and shadow effects.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 6600 is built on the RDNA 2.0 architecture with a Navi 23 chip, fabricated on TSMC’s 7 nm process. It features 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus, delivering 224.0 GB/s of bandwidth, and has a boost clock of 2491 MHz with a game clock of 2044 MHz. The card’s 1792 shading units and 64 ROPs are responsible for the frame rates observed, and the benchmark data shows that these resources are insufficient for The Medium’s higher presets. The GPU’s fp32 performance of 8.928 TFLOPS is modest by modern standards, and the 3dmark_steel_nomad_dx12 score of 1492 reflects a mid-range card that struggles with demanding titles. The passmark_g3d score of 15096 and geekbench_vulkan score of 80492 place it in the same league as its nearest rivals, but the game’s measured FPS indicates that The Medium is particularly sensitive to memory bandwidth and fill rate.

The RX 6600’s 28 ray accelerators are present, but the game does not appear to leverage them heavily, as the Ultra preset at 4K (20.5 FPS) is only slightly lower than High (23.8 FPS), suggesting the bottleneck is in conventional rasterization. The card’s tdp of 132 W and suggested PSU of 300 W indicate a power-efficient design, but efficiency does not translate to performance in this title. The GPU’s percentileVsAllGpus of 69 places it above the median, yet The Medium’s requirements push it to its limits. Compared to its nearest rivals, the RX 6600’s avgBenchmarkScore of 25235 is within 0.5% of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (25120), but the measured FPS in this game does not show any marked advantage, implying that the game’s engine is evenly matched across this performance tier. Ultimately, the RX 6600 is the definitive limiting component in this combo, and users seeking higher frame rates would need to reduce resolution or settings, as the CPU has ample headroom to support a stronger graphics card.