The Medium

The Medium presents a demanding workload for the Intel Core i7-12700K and AMD Radeon RX 7600 combination, with benchmark data revealing a system that is consistently GPU-bound across most settings, yet surprisingly capable at lower presets. The measured results show a clear hierarchy where the graphics card becomes the primary constraint as resolution and quality increase, while the processor’s strong multi-threaded performance ensures it is rarely the bottleneck. This analysis examines the scaling behavior, component roles, and final ranking of this pairing within the broader test database.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS progression from 1080p to 4K clearly demonstrates where the performance ceiling lies. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo achieves 92.6 FPS, but dropping to 1440p Low reduces that to 79.1 FPS, and at 4K Low it settles at 61.3 FPS. This scaling pattern—a 14.6% reduction from 1080p to 1440p and a further 22.5% reduction to 4K—indicates that even at the lowest quality preset, the GPU is already the limiting factor. The 8 GB frame buffer and 128-bit memory interface of the RX 7600 begin to show strain as pixel count rises, though the game remains playable at 4K Low.

The situation becomes more pronounced at higher quality settings. With High settings, the frame rate drops from 42.9 FPS at 1080p to 36.9 FPS at 1440p (a 14% decrease), then to 29.7 FPS at 4K (a 19.5% further decrease). This relatively gentle scaling curve suggests that the game’s visual effects at High are not overwhelmingly demanding, but the GPU’s raw compute limits are being approached. The Ultra preset tells a different story: 35.4 FPS at 1080p, 28.1 FPS at 1440p, and 22.4 FPS at 4K. The consistent ~20% drop between each resolution step at Ultra indicates the card is fully saturated, with no headroom left for additional pixels.

The most telling data point comes from the Medium settings, which surprisingly produce higher frame rates at 1080p (60.4 FPS) than High does at 1440p (36.9 FPS). This suggests that the Medium preset’s rendering features are less dependent on the memory bandwidth and shading units, allowing the GPU to maintain better efficiency at lower resolutions. However, at 4K Medium, the frame rate collapses to 36.6 FPS, which is nearly identical to the 1440p High result—confirming that resolution scaling has a more significant impact than settings scaling once the GPU is under heavy load.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 7600, built on the RDNA 3.0 architecture with a Navi 33 chip, provides the graphical foundation for this combo. Its 2048 shading units and 128 texture mapping units, coupled with 64 ROPs, deliver a raw compute capability of 21.75 TFLOPS FP32. The boost clock of 2655 MHz and game clock of 2250 MHz are relatively high, but the 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus—providing 288.0 GB/s bandwidth—becomes the critical limitation in The Medium’s higher presets. The game’s horror aesthetic relies on detailed textures and lighting effects, which consume memory bandwidth aggressively.

At Ultra settings, the frame rates across all resolutions (35.4 FPS at 1080p, 28.1 FPS at 1440p, 22.4 FPS at 4K) suggest the card’s pixel fill rate of 169.9 GPixel/s is being overwhelmed. The texture rate of 339.8 GTexel/s is sufficient for moderate loads, but the fixed 64 ROPs cannot keep pace with the game’s post-processing effects at higher resolutions. The 32 ray tracing cores are present, but their impact on The Medium’s frame rates is not separately measured; the data indicates that traditional rasterization performance dominates the results.

Comparing to its nearest rivals, the RX 7600’s average benchmark score of 20258 places it just 0.6% below the RX 7600 XT (20146) and 0.8% below the RX 460 (20088), while it sits 1.3% above the RTX 3070 Mobile (20534) and 1.5% above the Intel Arc B570 (20556). This tight clustering means the GPU is competitive within its class, but the measured FPS in The Medium shows that real-world game performance can deviate significantly from synthetic benchmarks. The card’s 63rd percentile ranking among all GPUs reflects its mid-range positioning, and the game’s results confirm that it is best suited for 1080p and modest 1440p gaming.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i7-12700K, with its 12 cores and 20 threads from the Alder Lake architecture, provides ample processing headroom for The Medium. Its base clock of 3.60 GHz and boost clock of 5.00 GHz, combined with a 25 MB shared L3 cache, ensure that the game’s CPU-bound tasks—such as AI pathfinding and scene logic—are handled without introducing frame rate bottlenecks. The processor’s benchmark scores support this: a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 29241 and a single-core score of 4128 demonstrate strong throughput, while the 3DMark max threads score of 9979 indicates excellent scaling across all cores.

In this game, the CPU’s role is secondary to the GPU, as evidenced by the FPS scaling patterns. At 1080p Low, the 92.6 FPS result is likely near the CPU’s frame generation limit, but even at 4K Ultra (22.4 FPS), the processor is not causing any additional frame drops. The 12 cores and 20 threads are more than sufficient for The Medium’s requirements, which was released in early 2021 and does not utilize the latest multi-threading techniques. The processor’s 89th percentile ranking among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 35684, places it just 0.3% above the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5845 and 0.7% above the Intel Core i5-14500HX, confirming its strong mid-range performance.

The CPU’s 125 W TDP and Intel Socket 1700 platform provide stable operation, though the game’s performance is never constrained by the processor. Even in the most CPU-intensive scenarios at 1080p Low, the data shows no evidence of a CPU bottleneck—the frame rates scale predictably with resolution changes, which is the hallmark of a GPU-limited system. The integrated UHD Graphics 770 is irrelevant for gaming with a discrete GPU, but its presence allows for basic display output without the discrete card.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete dataset reveals a consistent pattern across all resolutions and settings. At 1080p, the combo delivers 92.6 FPS on Low, 60.4 FPS on Medium, 42.9 FPS on High, and 35.4 FPS on Ultra. The jump from Low to Medium represents a 34.8% reduction in frame rate, while Medium to High costs another 29%, and High to Ultra costs 17.5%. This diminishing impact of higher settings suggests that the GPU’s compute resources are being consumed by specific effects rather than proportional increases in workload.

At 1440p, the results are 79.1 FPS on Low, 51.7 FPS on Medium, 36.9 FPS on High, and 28.1 FPS on Ultra. The Low to Medium drop is 34.6%, nearly identical to 1080p, but the Medium to High drop is 28.6%, and High to Ultra is 23.8%. The larger percentage loss at Ultra compared to 1080p indicates that the memory bandwidth is becoming a more significant constraint as pixel count increases. The 4K results—61.3 FPS on Low, 36.6 FPS on Medium, 29.7 FPS on High, and 22.4 FPS on Ultra—show that only the Low preset remains above 60 FPS, while Ultra dips below 30 FPS.

The most striking observation is the relationship between 1080p Ultra (35.4 FPS) and 4K Low (61.3 FPS). The Low preset at 4K is 73% faster than Ultra at 1080p, despite rendering four times the pixels. This indicates that the Ultra preset’s effects—likely including advanced shadows and reflections—are far more demanding than the raw pixel count. For players seeking smooth gameplay, the data suggests that reducing settings has a more significant impact than reducing resolution, making this combo viable for 4K gaming only at Low settings.

How This Combo Ranks

Among the 1689 tested combinations in the database, this pairing of the Intel Core i7-12700K and AMD Radeon RX 7600 achieves a rank of 1108. This places it in the 65.6th percentile of all tested combos, meaning that approximately 65% of the other system configurations perform better in The Medium. Given that the GPU ranks in the 63rd percentile and the CPU in the 89th percentile, the combo’s ranking is heavily weighted by the graphics card’s performance—the processor is capable of supporting far more powerful GPUs.

The CPU’s nearest rivals show that the i7-12700K is well-positioned for this game. With a deltaPct of -0.3% against the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5845 and 0.6% against the Intel Core i7-13700T, the processor is effectively at parity with its closest competitors. The GPU’s nearest rivals are similarly close, with the RX 7600 being 0.6% slower than the RX 7600 XT and 0.8% slower than the RX 460, while being 1.3% faster than the RTX 3070 Mobile and 1.5% faster than the Intel Arc B570. These small deltas suggest that swapping to any of these alternatives would produce negligible changes in The Medium’s frame rates.

The rank of 1108 out of 1689 indicates that this combo is below average for The Medium, which is a demanding title at higher settings. However, the data shows that at 1080p Low and Medium, the system provides playable frame rates above 60 FPS, and even 1440p Low exceeds 75 FPS. The bottleneck is clearly the GPU, and users seeking higher performance in this game would benefit more from upgrading the graphics card than the processor. The combination’s ranking reflects the GPU’s mid-range positioning, and the measured FPS data confirms that it is best suited for 1080p gaming at medium-to-high settings, or 1440p at low-to-medium settings, with 4K reserved for low presets only.