The Medium

The Intel Core i5-14600KF paired with the AMD Radeon RX 570 produces a severely constrained experience in The Medium, a horror title that demands far more from the GPU than this 2017 Polaris card can deliver. The measured data indicates that even at the most forgiving settings, the system struggles to maintain playable frame rates, placing it in the bottom percentile of tested configurations. The experience is uniformly poor, with the only question being how low the user is willing to go on visual fidelity to approach something resembling smooth motion.

Settings Recommendations

Given the data, the Low preset is the only viable option for any playable session, and even then, it is marginal. At 1920x1080, the Low preset yields an average of 43.6 FPS, which is the sole measured configuration that breaks the 40 FPS threshold. This is a significant jump from the Medium preset, which delivers only 26.6 FPS at the same resolution. The difference between Low and Medium represents a 64% performance increase, a delta that far outweighs the visual cost in a game where atmosphere is paramount but motion fluidity is necessary.

The High preset at 1080p drops to 22 FPS, rendering it effectively unplayable for any dynamic scene. The Ultra preset, with a paltry 18.8 FPS at 1080p, is a non-option. Therefore, the recommendation is clear: select Low at 1080p. While 43.6 FPS is not ideal for a smooth 60 FPS experience, it is the only setting that provides a functional frame rate. Attempting Medium or higher will result in a slideshow-like presentation that undermines the game's tension and pacing. The data shows a steep cliff between Low and Medium, suggesting that the RX 570's 4 GB VRAM and 256-bit memory bus are overwhelmed by the intermediate settings' texture and shading demands.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination ranks 1646th out of 1689 tested combos in The Medium, placing it in the bottom 2.5% of all configurations. This is a catastrophic result, confirming that this pairing is fundamentally mismatched for this specific title. The rank is not a reflection of the CPU, which is a high-end desktop part, but rather a clear indictment of the GPU's inability to handle the game's rendering engine.

Benchmark results indicate that the CPU is a top-tier performer, with an average benchmark score of 49367 and a percentile ranking of 93 among all CPUs. In contrast, the GPU's average benchmark score is 30158, with a percentile of 74. However, these aggregate scores are misleading in this context. The CPU's nearest rivals, such as the Intel Core i5-14600K (0.4% delta) and AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (0.6% delta), show that the processor is not a bottleneck. The GPU's nearest rivals, including the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 (0.2% delta) and AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT (0.2% delta), are modern cards that perform similarly in synthetic benchmarks but are vastly more capable in real-world gaming due to architectural advantages. The rank in The Medium is a direct consequence of the GPU's age and limited VRAM, not its raw compute potential.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 570 is the primary limiting factor in this configuration. Its specifications reveal why it fails so spectacularly in The Medium. The card features 4 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus, providing 224.0 GB/s of bandwidth. This is a modest amount by modern standards, and the game's high-resolution textures likely exceed this capacity, forcing constant swapping to system memory.

The GPU's clock speeds are equally telling. With a base clock of 1168 MHz and a boost clock of 1244 MHz, the Polaris 20 chip is running at its limits, yet it only manages to produce 5.095 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. The memory clock is 1750 MHz, translating to 7 Gbps effective, which is not sufficient for the data throughput required by a 2021 horror title. The data shows a clear correlation: as resolution increases, the FPS drops precipitously, indicating that the GPU's memory bandwidth and fill rate are being saturated. The 4 GB VRAM is likely the single biggest culprit, as the difference between Low (43.6 FPS) and Medium (26.6 FPS) at 1080p points to a memory capacity or bandwidth wall being hit, not a raw shader compute limit.

FAQ

Q: What is the best average FPS achievable with this combo?

A: The highest measured average FPS is 43.6, which occurs at 1920x1080 resolution with the Low settings preset.

Q: How does the CPU compare to its closest rivals?

A: The Intel Core i5-14600KF has an average benchmark score of 49367, making it 0.4% faster than the Intel Core i5-14600K and 0.6% faster than the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X.

Q: What is the GPU's memory bandwidth and clock speed?

A: The AMD Radeon RX 570 has a memory clock of 1750 MHz (7 Gbps effective) and a bandwidth of 224.0 GB/s.

Q: Is the 4K resolution playable at any setting?

A: No. The highest average FPS at 3840x2160 is 26.6 on Low settings, which is still below a playable threshold, while Ultra yields only 7.9 FPS.

Q: What is the rank of this combo among all tested systems?

A: The combination ranks 1646th out of 1689 tested combos in The Medium.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS scaling from 1080p to 4K is brutal and reveals a GPU-bound system. At Low settings, the average FPS drops from 43.6 at 1920x1080 to 38.2 at 2560x1440, a modest 12% reduction. However, moving to 3840x2160 sees a catastrophic fall to 26.6 FPS, a 39% drop from 1440p and a 39% drop from 1080p. This non-linear scaling is a hallmark of VRAM exhaustion or memory bandwidth saturation.

At Medium settings, the pattern is even more stark: 26.6 FPS at 1080p, 25.3 FPS at 1440p, and 17.2 FPS at 4K. The 1440p result is nearly identical to 1080p, suggesting that the GPU is already hitting a hard limit at 1080p and the resolution increase has minimal impact until the memory subsystem is completely overwhelmed at 4K. The data implies that the limiting component is unambiguously the GPU, as the CPU's performance is far more than sufficient for this workload. The i5-14600KF's high single-core performance (Cinebench R23 single-core score of 4643) ensures that it is not the source of these frame rate collapses; the RX 570's 4 GB frame buffer is the wall.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-14600KF is a powerful 14-core, 20-thread processor with a base clock of 3.50 GHz and a boost clock of 5.30 GHz. Its architecture, Raptor Lake-R, built on a 10 nm process, provides excellent computational throughput. In synthetic benchmarks, it scores 32889 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 4643 in single-core, placing it in the 93rd percentile of all CPUs. Its nearest rivals are all within 1.4% of its average score, confirming its position as a high-end desktop part.

In The Medium, however, the CPU's role is almost entirely passive. The game's engine is not CPU-intensive at the settings tested, as evidenced by the massive FPS differences between Low and High presets that are purely GPU-driven. The CPU's 24 MB of shared L3 cache and dual-channel memory support (DDR4/DDR5) are more than adequate to feed the GPU. The data shows that the CPU is not a bottleneck; if it were, the FPS would remain relatively constant across settings changes. Instead, the FPS scales directly with GPU load, proving that the i5-14600KF is waiting idly for the RX 570 to complete its rendering tasks.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a complete picture of the system's performance across resolutions and settings.

At 1920x1080:

• Low: 43.6 FPS (best case)
• Medium: 26.6 FPS
• High: 22 FPS
• Ultra: 18.8 FPS

At 2560x1440:

• Low: 38.2 FPS
• Medium: 25.3 FPS
• High: 16.3 FPS
• Ultra: 11.4 FPS

At 3840x2160:

• Low: 26.6 FPS
• Medium: 17.2 FPS
• High: 11.2 FPS
• Ultra: 7.9 FPS

The breakdown shows that the gap between Low and Medium is substantial at every resolution, while the gap between High and Ultra is smaller, indicating diminishing returns and a hard performance ceiling. The 1080p Low result is the only data point above 40 FPS, and the 1440p Low result is the only other point above 30 FPS. Every other configuration falls below 30 FPS, with 4K Ultra being an unplayable 7.9 FPS. These numbers confirm that the RX 570 is operating far outside its comfort zone, and the i5-14600KF's capabilities are completely wasted in this pairing for this particular game.