The Medium

The Medium presents a unique challenge for the Intel Core i5-14400F and AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT combination, with benchmark results revealing a system that is heavily constrained by its graphics processor at higher fidelity settings. The data paints a clear picture of a pairing whose CPU headroom is largely untapped, while the GPU’s architectural limits dictate the playable envelope across resolutions.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data shows a steep and consistent performance drop as resolution increases from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160, a pattern that firmly identifies the GPU as the limiting component in this configuration. At High settings, the transition from 1080p to 1440p reduces the average frame rate from 39.3 FPS to 35.2 FPS, a relatively modest 10% decline, but moving to 4K High cuts the average to 26.9 FPS, representing a 32% reduction from the 1080p baseline. This scaling behavior indicates that while the rasterization load increases with pixel count, the RX 5700 XT’s RDNA 1.0 architecture begins to hit its throughput ceiling well before the CPU’s capabilities are taxed.

The Low settings data confirms this GPU-bound scenario with even greater clarity. At 1080p Low, the combo achieves 91.4 FPS, which scales down to 74.3 FPS at 1440p and 60.3 FPS at 4K. The fact that 4K Low still produces a playable frame rate while 1080p Ultra drops to exactly 30 FPS underscores how dramatically settings impact the workload. The Medium preset tells a similar story, with 55.5 FPS at 1080p falling to 44.3 FPS at 1440p and 38.2 FPS at 4K. The Ultra preset is the most demanding, yielding 30 FPS at 1080p, 28.9 FPS at 1440p, and an unplayable 19.3 FPS at 4K. This resolution scaling curve is classic GPU-limited behavior: the CPU’s frame delivery capacity is never the bottleneck, as evidenced by the consistent frame rate degradation proportional to pixel count rather than a sudden plateau.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the benchmark database, this specific pairing ranks at position 1299 out of 1689 tested combinations for The Medium, placing it in the 23rd percentile of all tested systems. This relatively low ranking reflects the GPU’s modest standing in the broader hardware landscape, as the RX 5700 XT holds a percentile rank of 68 against all GPUs, meaning it outperforms only 68% of the graphics cards in the database. The CPU, by contrast, sits at the 88th percentile against all processors, a significant gap that highlights the imbalance of this pairing for this particular title.

The combination’s overall rank is dragged down by the fact that The Medium appears to favor graphics throughput over processor performance. The CPU’s nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks—the Intel Core i7-12800H, AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 7645, AMD Ryzen 7 250, and Intel Core i7-13705H—all post average scores within 0.2% of the i5-14400F, yet none of these alternatives would meaningfully change the outcome in this game, as the GPU remains the dominant constraint. The GPU’s nearest rivals, including the NVIDIA RTX A5000 Mobile and Intel Arc A350M, show delta percentages within 0.9% of the RX 5700 XT’s average score, indicating that this card sits in a tightly contested performance tier where small architectural differences translate directly into frame rate variations.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT is built on the Navi 10 chip using the RDNA 1.0 architecture, manufactured on a 7 nm process at TSMC. The card operates with a base clock of 1605 MHz, a game clock of 1755 MHz, and a boost clock of 1905 MHz, paired with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, delivering a bandwidth of 448.0 GB/s. These specifications define a GPU that was designed for 1440p gaming in its era, but The Medium’s demanding rendering techniques push it to its limits at higher resolutions.

The GPU’s compute capabilities include 2560 shading units, 160 texture mapping units, and 64 raster operation units, with a peak FP32 throughput of 9.754 TFLOPS. In practice, this translates to 121.9 GPixel/s of pixel fill rate and 304.8 GTexel/s of texture fill rate. The measured frame rates suggest that the card’s 8 GB VRAM capacity is sufficient for the game’s memory footprint, as the performance degradation across resolutions follows a smooth curve rather than showing a sudden cliff that would indicate memory capacity exhaustion. However, the RDNA 1.0 architecture lacks dedicated ray tracing cores, which likely contributes to the significant frame rate drops when moving from Medium to High and Ultra settings, as the game’s visual effects become more computationally expensive.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete dataset reveals a consistent hierarchy across all four settings presets and three resolutions. At 1920x1080, the Low preset delivers 91.4 FPS, Medium drops to 55.5 FPS, High delivers 39.3 FPS, and Ultra hits exactly 30 FPS. Moving to 2560x1440, the same progression yields 74.3 FPS on Low, 44.3 FPS on Medium, 35.2 FPS on High, and 28.9 FPS on Ultra. At 3840x2160, the numbers fall to 60.3 FPS on Low, 38.2 FPS on Medium, 26.9 FPS on High, and 19.3 FPS on Ultra.

The delta between Low and Medium presets is particularly telling: at 1080p, the difference is 35.9 FPS, which represents a 39% performance penalty for the Medium preset. This gap narrows to 30 FPS at 1440p and 22.1 FPS at 4K, suggesting that the GPU’s shading units become the limiting factor as resolution increases, reducing the relative impact of the settings change. The jump from Medium to High is less severe but still substantial, costing 16.2 FPS at 1080p, 9.1 FPS at 1440p, and 11.3 FPS at 4K. The Ultra preset represents the most punishing step, particularly at 4K where it falls below 20 FPS, making it effectively unplayable.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-14400F provides 10 cores and 16 threads, with a base clock of 2.50 GHz and a boost clock of 4.70 GHz, built on the Raptor Lake architecture using a 10 nm process. The processor features an 80 KB L1 cache per core, 1.25 MB L2 cache per core, and 20 MB of shared L3 cache, along with support for both DDR4 and DDR5 memory. Its benchmark results are strong, with a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 21914 and a single-core score of 3093, alongside a Geekbench multi-core score of 11209.

Despite this substantial compute power, the measured frame rates in The Medium show no evidence of CPU limitation. The consistent FPS scaling across resolutions—where 1080p Low achieves 91.4 FPS but 4K Low still manages 60.3 FPS—indicates that the processor is delivering frames well ahead of what the GPU can render. The CPU’s 88th percentile ranking against all processors, combined with the fact that its nearest rivals in synthetic tests all score within 0.2% of its average, confirms that this is a high-performing chip. However, in this specific game, the CPU’s 10 cores and 16 threads are largely idle headroom, as the GPU’s RDNA 1.0 architecture and its 9.754 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput become the definitive ceiling on performance.

The data suggests that for The Medium, the i5-14400F is never the constraint, and the combination’s overall rank of 1299 out of 1689 is a direct consequence of the GPU’s 68th percentile standing rather than any CPU deficiency. The processor’s single-thread performance, as evidenced by its Passmark single-thread score of 3723, is more than adequate for the game’s logic and rendering pipeline. The bottleneck is unequivocally the graphics subsystem, and any improvement in frame rates would require a GPU upgrade rather than a processor change.