Inside

Inside launched in July 2016 as a Puzzle Platformer, and the pairing of Intel's Core Ultra 9 290K Plus with NVIDIA's RTX 4090 turns out to be almost comical overkill for it — but the measured data makes for an interesting study in where a game this old stops caring about hardware. Benchmark results indicate that every tested resolution and preset clears the 60 FPS threshold by a wide margin, and the interesting question becomes not whether the game runs, but what the frame rate ceiling reveals about the engine's behavior.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the data shows remarkable flatness across presets. Low averages 442 FPS, Medium 408 FPS (with a minimum of 347 and a maximum of 469), High 325 FPS, and Ultra 309 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra is only about 133 FPS — a modest spread for a four-step quality ladder, which suggests the settings sliders in Inside touch relatively few expensive effects.

At 2560x1440, the numbers compress further: Low averages 396 FPS, Medium 365 FPS (minimum 310, maximum 420), High 234 FPS, and Ultra 222 FPS. Note the interesting cliff between Medium and High — a drop of 131 FPS — while Medium to Low only buys another 31 FPS. The demanding settings evidently live in that transition.

At 3840x2160, the pattern holds: Low averages 293 FPS, Medium 235 FPS (minimum 200, maximum 270), High 147 FPS, and Ultra 140 FPS. The Medium-to-High drop is 88 FPS here, and pushing past High to Ultra costs only 7 FPS. Once again, the minimum recorded frame rate — 200 FPS at 4K Medium — sits more than three times above the 60 FPS playability threshold.

Min/max figures are only recorded for the Medium preset at each resolution; the other rows carry average-only data.

Similar Performance Alternatives

On the CPU side, the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus sits in the 96th percentile of all tested processors with an average benchmark score of 84003. Its nearest rival, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, scores 83807 — just 0.2% behind — meaning that pairing would behave essentially identically in this game. The AMD EPYC 4584PX (83090, 1.1% behind), AMD EPYC 9135 (82980, 1.2% behind), and AMD EPYC 7F72 (85072, actually 1.3% ahead) round out the neighborhood. Any of these would deliver effectively the same experience.

On the GPU side, the RTX 4090 ranks in the 88th percentile with an average benchmark score of 60347. Curiously, its listed nearest rivals are professional cards: the Intel Arc Pro A60 (60326, 0% delta), AMD Radeon Pro Vega 48 (60140, 0.3% behind), AMD Radeon Pro W6600M (61896, 2.5% ahead), and AMD Radeon PRO V710 (58657, 2.9% behind). The data suggests these would produce broadly similar aggregate benchmark behavior, though whether a workstation card matches the 4090's 82.58 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput in a game context is a different question the database doesn't answer directly.

The practical takeaway: since Inside isn't stressing either component, many weaker combinations would also sustain high frame rates — but within this scoring neighborhood, substitutes are plentiful and cheap to find.

CPU and GPU Roles

The scaling data tells a clear story about which component bottlenecks Inside. Going from 1080p Ultra (309 FPS) to 4K Ultra (140 FPS) costs more than half the frame rate — a 55% decline driven purely by resolution. That kind of proportional scaling indicates the GPU is doing real work at the top preset, since CPU-bound scenarios tend to show flat frame rates as resolution rises.

Yet at the Low preset, the spread narrows dramatically: 442 FPS at 1080p versus 293 FPS at 4K. The fact that frame rates never exceed the 442 FPS mark at 1080p Low — despite the RTX 4090's 38194 PassMark G3D score suggesting far more headroom — hints at a CPU or engine ceiling. The Core Ultra 9 290K Plus posts a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 7303 and a PassMark single-thread score of 4823, both elite figures, but Inside's 2016-era engine likely runs its simulation and physics logic in ways that cap out well below modern hardware limits.

The preset scaling reinforces this. At 1080p, dropping from Ultra to Low recovers 133 FPS; at 4K, the same drop recovers 153 FPS. The relatively uniform preset cost across resolutions suggests the quality settings primarily affect GPU rendering load, while a fixed per-frame CPU cost sets the ceiling.

FAQ

Q: Can this combo run Inside at 4K with Ultra settings above 60 FPS?

A: Yes. The measured average at 3840x2160 Ultra is 140 FPS — more than double the 60 FPS playability threshold.

Q: What is the highest frame rate recorded for this combination?

A: 442 FPS average, at 1920x1080 on the Low preset.

Q: What is the lowest average frame rate in the dataset?

A: 140 FPS, at 3840x2160 on Ultra. Even this worst-case result clears 60 FPS comfortably.

Q: Are minimum frame rates ever a concern?

A: No. The only recorded minimum is 200 FPS at 4K Medium. All other rows carry average-only data, but every average sits far above the threshold.

Q: Which CPU would perform nearly identically to the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus here?

A: The Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, whose average benchmark score of 83807 is just 0.2% below the 290K Plus's 84003.

Q: How much does raising the preset from Medium to High cost at 1440p?

A: The average drops from 365 FPS to 234 FPS — a loss of 131 FPS, the single largest preset-to-preset drop in the dataset.

How This Combo Ranks

This pairing ranks 26th out of 3716 tested combinations for Inside. That placement — inside the top one percent of combos — reflects the sheer brute force of the hardware relative to a 2016 puzzle platformer. The Core Ultra 9 290K Plus brings 24 cores and 24 threads on a 3 nm TSMC process with 17,800 million transistors, while the RTX 4090 contributes 16384 shading units and 24 GB of GDDR6X on a 384-bit bus with 1.01 TB/s of bandwidth.

The curious question the rank raises: what do the 25 combinations above it look like? Given that Inside's frame rates appear partly engine-limited, the ranking likely rewards combinations that push the CPU-side ceiling higher rather than ones with more GPU muscle. A stronger graphics card than the 4090 may simply have nothing left to render at these frame rates.

Best Settings per Resolution

Because every preset at every resolution clears 60 FPS, the answer is simply the top preset everywhere:

• 1920x1080: Ultra, at an average of 309 FPS.
• 2560x1440: Ultra, at an average of 222 FPS.
• 3840x2160: Ultra, at an average of 140 FPS.

There is no scenario in the measured data where dropping to High, Medium, or Low is necessary for playability. Lower presets only make sense for chasing maximum frame rates for high-refresh displays — Low at 1080p averages 442 FPS.

The Verdict

Yes — emphatically. The verdict data confirms that all four presets (Low, Medium, High, Ultra) are playable at all three tested resolutions, with Ultra identified as the best setting everywhere: 309 FPS at 1080p, 222 FPS at 1440p, and 140 FPS at 4K. Even the single weakest data point in the entire dataset — 140 FPS at 4K Ultra — sits at more than twice the 60 FPS threshold.

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus and RTX 4090 combination doesn't just run Inside; it saturates it. The measured data indicates the game becomes engine-limited long before either component breaks a sweat, and the 26th-of-3716 combo rank confirms this is among the fastest ways to experience Playdead's puzzle platformer that the database has ever recorded.