Inside

The Intel Core i5-9400 paired with the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT makes for a distinctly lopsided combination: a six-core, six-thread Coffee Lake processor from 2018 sitting next to an active RDNA 3 card with 12 GB of GDDR6. The question here is not whether that imbalance matters, because for Inside, a puzzle platformer released in 2016, it demonstrably does not. The recorded data shows this pairing clearing 60 FPS at every resolution and every preset tested, including 4K Ultra. This is about as easy as modern gaming workloads get, and the numbers below back that up.

Measured FPS Breakdown

Starting at 1920x1080, the combo averages 221.3 FPS on Low, 205.8 on Medium, 168.6 on High, and 167.7 on Ultra. Note how small the gap between High and Ultra is: less than one frame separates them. That tells you the card is nowhere near its limit at this resolution, and the settings ladder has essentially collapsed into two tiers (one below and three above roughly 168 FPS).

At 2560x1440, the averages come in at 198.2 FPS on Low, 185.2 on Medium, 138.7 on High, and 130.3 on Ultra. The Low-to-Medium drop is under 13 FPS, which again indicates enormous headroom. Even the heaviest preset, Ultra, stays more than double the 60 FPS playability threshold.

At 3840x2160, the averages are 168 FPS on Low, 139.6 on Medium, 86.1 on High, and 84 on Ultra. This is where the RX 7700 XT finally starts doing real work: High costs over 53 FPS versus Medium at 4K, and Ultra only sheds another 2.1 FPS on top of that. The High-to-Ultra difference is negligible, so there is no practical reason to drop below Ultra at any resolution. Minimum and maximum frame rates were not captured in this dataset, only averages, so the analysis below sticks to those.

How This Combo Ranks

Against the full field of tested combinations in the database for this game, the i5-9400 plus RX 7700 XT ranks 2051 out of 3716 combos. That places it just past the midpoint, in the 55th percentile territory. That mid-table position is worth unpacking. Inside is a lightweight game, so plenty of weaker pairings still hit playable frame rates, and the ranking reflects raw throughput rather than playability. A rank in the middle of a 3716-combo field for a title this undemanding still translates to triple-digit averages at 1440p and an 84 FPS average at 4K Ultra.

The rank also tells you something about the CPU's drag on the pairing. The i5-9400 sits at the 47th percentile versus all CPUs in the database, with an average benchmark score of 2254. Its RX 7700 XT partner sits at the 67th percentile versus all GPUs. The GPU is the stronger half of this duo, and the overall combo rank lands closer to the CPU's percentile than the GPU's, which is the expected pattern when one component is clearly older.

FAQ

Q: Can this PC run Inside at 4K?

A: Yes, comfortably. At 3840x2160 the combo averages 84 FPS on Ultra, and every preset tested (Low through Ultra) clears the 60 FPS playability threshold.

Q: What is the best settings choice at 1080p?

A: Ultra, at an average of 167.7 FPS. High is essentially identical at 168.6 FPS, so there is no meaningful cost to running the maximum preset.

Q: Is the Intel Core i5-9400 a bottleneck for this game?

A: Not for Inside. The game is a 2016 puzzle platformer, and the recorded data shows the full combo delivering 221.3 FPS at 1080p Low. The i5-9400 is a 47th-percentile CPU with six cores and six threads, but this workload does not stress it in a way that shows up as unplayable frame rates at any tested setting.

Q: How much FPS do you lose going from 1440p to 4K on Ultra?

A: The average drops from 130.3 FPS to 84 FPS, a loss of 46.3 FPS, still well above 60.

Q: How does the RX 7700 XT compare to rival GPUs in the database?

A: Its average benchmark score of 22549 is within roughly half a percent of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Mobile (22435), 0.8 percent behind the RTX 4060 Mobile (22729), 1.5 percent behind the RTX 2080 (22895), and 1.7 percent ahead of the Radeon RX 5700 (22170).

Q: Does lowering settings help much at 4K?

A: Yes, more than at lower resolutions. Dropping from Ultra to Low at 3840x2160 roughly doubles the average, from 84 to 168 FPS, while at 1080p the same drop only gains about 54 FPS.

Similar Performance Alternatives

On the GPU side, the database lists the RX 7700 XT's nearest rivals as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Mobile, RTX 4060 Mobile, RTX 2080, and Radeon RX 5700, all clustered within 1.7 percent of its average score. Any of those cards would behave essentially the same in this game, meaning triple-digit averages at 1440p and an Ultra average in the mid-80s at 4K. Given the enormous headroom shown in the measurements, even the RX 5700, the weakest of that group at 1.7 percent behind, would deliver an experience indistinguishable in practice for this title.

On the CPU side, the i5-9400's rivals are the Intel Core i7-1068NG7 (0.2 percent ahead), Intel Core i7-10710U (0.3 percent behind), AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 1500 (0.4 percent behind), and Intel Core i3-10305 (0.4 percent ahead). Those deltas are small enough that swapping any of them in would leave the frame-rate picture effectively unchanged. For a game like Inside, CPU choice in this performance band is close to irrelevant, since the recorded results already show the frame rates saturating at settings far beyond what the game needs to look good and play smoothly.

CPU and GPU Roles

The scaling data points to a GPU-bound picture at the higher resolutions and a largely indifferent one at 1080p. At 1920x1080, moving from Low (221.3 FPS) to Ultra (167.7 FPS) costs only 53.6 FPS, a modest spread that suggests neither component is being pushed hard. At 2560x1440 the spread narrows further to 67.9 FPS between Low and Ultra. At 3840x2160 the spread widens sharply to 84 FPS between Low and Ultra, the classic signature of GPU limitation: as pixel count quadruples from 1080p to 4K, the Ultra average falls from 167.7 to 84 FPS, slightly more than halving.

That halving matters. A CPU-bound system would show roughly flat frame rates across resolutions, and that is not what the data shows. Instead, resolution is the dominant variable at the top end, which means the RX 7700 XT is the component doing the deciding work at 1440p and 4K. At 1080p, the i5-9400 with its 2.90 base and 4.10 boost clocks and DDR4 dual-channel memory bandwidth of 42.7 GB/s may set the ceiling, but with a 221.3 FPS average on Low, that ceiling is far above anything relevant to playability.

For practical purposes: if you want maximum frame rates, drop the resolution. If you want the game to look its best, the data shows Ultra costs almost nothing relative to High at every resolution, including 4K where the difference is 2.1 FPS.

The Verdict

Yes, this PC runs Inside without compromise. The verdict by resolution is unanimous: at 1920x1080, 2560x1440, and 3840x2160, all four presets (Low, Medium, High, Ultra) clear the 60 FPS playability threshold, and Ultra is the best-settings choice at every resolution. The headline numbers are 167.7 FPS average at 1080p Ultra, 130.3 at 1440p Ultra, and 84 at 4K Ultra.

The straightforward recommendation is to run the game at your monitor's native resolution with Ultra settings enabled. There is no configuration in the recorded data where this combo falls below the threshold, and the near-identical High and Ultra results mean there is nothing to gain from compromise. The aging i5-9400 and the modern RX 7700 XT may be an odd couple on paper, but for this game the recorded data shows the pairing is simply more than enough.