Barony

Barony is a roguelike that places surprisingly heavy demands on the GPU at high settings, but the AMD Ryzen 5 7400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti combo demonstrates that it can handle the game with authority across all resolution tiers. The measured data shows a system that provides exceptional headroom for high-refresh-rate monitors, though the settings ladder reveals a clear trade-off between visual fidelity and raw frame rates that favors specific presets depending on your target resolution.

Settings Recommendations

The measured frames per second across the four presets (Low, Medium, High, Ultra) at each resolution tell a clear story about where this combo performs best. At 1080p, the High preset delivers 298 FPS average, which is a massive 85 FPS jump over the Ultra preset’s 213 FPS. The Medium preset sits at 347 FPS, which is the sweet spot if you want to push a 360Hz monitor, but High at 298 FPS remains the most balanced choice for competitive play on standard 240Hz panels. The Low preset’s 466 FPS is functionally irrelevant for most displays, and the visual degradation in a game where you need to spot enemy projectiles makes it a poor trade for the extra frames.

At 1440p, the High preset yields 188 FPS, which is 53 FPS above the Ultra preset’s 135 FPS. This makes High the recommended preset for 1440p gaming on this hardware, as it comfortably exceeds 144Hz refresh rates while maintaining enough visual quality to distinguish critical game elements. The Medium preset at 219 FPS offers a 31 FPS advantage over High, but the jump from Medium to High is visually significant in Barony’s lighting and texture detail, so the High preset is the better value for the performance cost. At 4K, the High preset drops to 98 FPS, which is still playable but starts to approach the threshold where frame pacing becomes noticeable. The Medium preset at 114 FPS is the better 4K choice, as it provides a 16 FPS boost over High while the visual difference between Medium and High is less pronounced at this pixel density. The Ultra preset at 4K drops to 70 FPS, which is below the 75 FPS minimum most gamers accept for smooth play, and the Low preset at 154 FPS sacrifices too much detail for a game that relies on visual cues. The optimal strategy here is to run High at 1080p and 1440p, and drop to Medium at 4K to maintain a stable 114 FPS average with minimum FPS of 97.

GPU Role

The RTX 3080 Ti’s 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus provides 912.4 GB/s of bandwidth, which is a critical factor for Barony’s performance at higher resolutions. The data shows that the GPU is the primary scaling factor when moving from Low to Ultra settings, with the 4K Ultra preset dropping to 70 FPS average compared to the 4K Low preset’s 154 FPS. This 84 FPS difference represents a 120% performance swing purely from settings changes, indicating that Barony’s rendering pipeline is heavily dependent on the GPU’s shading units, TMUs, and ROPs. The RTX 3080 Ti has 10,240 shading units, 320 TMUs, and 112 ROPs, which are all being exercised by the game’s particle effects and procedural generation.

The boost clock of 1665 MHz and base clock of 1365 MHz are modest for a high-end card, but the 34.10 TFLOPS of FP32 performance compensates for the relatively conservative clock speeds. The measured data shows that the GPU maintains consistent performance headroom at 1080p and 1440p, with the High preset at 1080p hitting 298 FPS and 1440p High hitting 188 FPS. The 4K results show the GPU hitting its practical limits, with the High preset dropping to 98 FPS and Ultra to 70 FPS. This indicates that Barony’s visual effects, particularly the dynamic lighting and shadow rendering, are saturating the GPU’s compute capabilities at 4K Ultra settings. The 80 RT cores and 320 tensor cores are not directly measured in this data, but the rasterization performance suggests that Barony does not leverage ray tracing or DLSS in a way that would alter these results.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals a consistent pattern of GPU-bound performance. At the High preset, the combo delivers 298 FPS at 1080p, 188 FPS at 1440p, and 98 FPS at 4K. This represents a 37% drop from 1080p to 1440p, and a 48% drop from 1440p to 4K. The scaling is not perfectly linear, which suggests that memory bandwidth and pixel fill rate are becoming limiting factors as resolution increases. The RTX 3080 Ti’s 912.4 GB/s bandwidth and 186.5 GPixel/s pixel rate are substantial, but Barony’s rendering at 4K clearly demands more than what these specifications can deliver at the High preset.

At the Low preset, the scaling is even more pronounced: 466 FPS at 1080p, 294 FPS at 1440p, and 154 FPS at 4K. The 1080p to 1440p drop is 37%, and the 1440p to 4K drop is 48%, which mirrors the High preset’s scaling almost exactly. This consistency indicates that the CPU is not the bottleneck at any resolution, as the frame rate drops are purely proportional to pixel count. If the CPU were limiting performance, we would expect the 1080p frame rates to plateau and the 4K frame rates to show less severe scaling. The Ultra preset shows slightly different scaling: 213 FPS at 1080p, 135 FPS at 1440p, and 70 FPS at 4K, with the 4K drop being more severe at 48% versus the 37% drop from 1080p to 1440p. This suggests that the Ultra preset’s additional effects are more demanding on the GPU’s memory subsystem at 4K, causing a disproportionate performance hit.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combo ranks 744th out of 2,935 tested combinations in Barony, placing it in the top 25% of all systems tested. The rank reflects the overall performance across all settings and resolutions, and it indicates that this hardware pairing is well above average for this game. The CPU’s percentile ranking of 83 versus all CPUs and the GPU’s percentile ranking of 83 versus all GPUs suggest that both components are performing at a similar level of capability, with neither component dragging down the overall combo rank. The nearest rivals for the CPU include the Intel Core i5-14600T with an average score of 32,707 (0.1% delta) and the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H with an average score of 32,812 (-0.2% delta), indicating that the Ryzen 5 7400F is squarely in the mid-range performance tier.

The GPU’s nearest rivals include the AMD Radeon Pro 5300 with an average score of 40,870 (0.8% delta) and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 with an average score of 40,377 (2% delta). The RTX 3080 Ti’s average benchmark score of 41,187 puts it slightly ahead of the RTX 5070, which is notable given the architectural differences. The combo rank of 744 out of 2,935 means that there are 743 combinations that perform better, but the vast majority of tested systems (2,191) perform worse. This places the combo in a strong position for Barony, where the game’s roguelike nature means that consistent frame rates are more important than peak performance.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 7400F is a 6-core, 12-thread processor from the 7000 series, built on the Zen 4 architecture with a 5 nm process node. Its base clock of 3.70 GHz and boost clock of 4.70 GHz are well-suited for Barony’s single-threaded game logic, which is typical of roguelikes that rely on procedural generation and physics calculations. The CPU’s benchmark scores show strong single-thread performance, with a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 3,072 and a Passmark single-thread score of 3,689. The multi-threaded scores are equally impressive, with a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 21,765 and a Passmark multithread score of 25,645.

In Barony, the CPU’s role is to handle game state updates, pathfinding, and entity interactions, which are heavily dependent on single-thread performance. The measured FPS data shows that the CPU is not the bottleneck at any resolution or settings preset, as the frame rates scale predictably with GPU load. The Ryzen 5 7400F’s 32 MB of shared L3 cache and 64 KB of L1 cache per core provide adequate memory latency for the game’s procedural generation algorithms. The CPU’s 83rd percentile ranking versus all CPUs places it ahead of the Intel Core i5-14600T by a 0.1% margin in average benchmark score, confirming that it holds its own against comparable Intel offerings. The 65W TDP and dual-channel DDR5 memory support at 83.2 GB/s bandwidth ensure that the CPU does not starve the GPU for data, even at 4K resolutions.

FAQ

Q: What is the best settings preset for 1080p gaming on this combo?

A: The High preset at 1080p delivers 298 FPS average, which is the best balance between visual quality and performance. The Medium preset offers 347 FPS, but the visual downgrade is significant, while the Ultra preset drops to 213 FPS, which is below the threshold for 240Hz monitors.

Q: How does this combo perform at 4K Ultra settings?

A: The 4K Ultra preset produces an average of 70 FPS, which is below the 75 FPS minimum for smooth play. The Medium preset at 4K yields 114 FPS with a minimum of 97 FPS, making it the recommended choice for 4K gaming.

Q: Is the CPU or GPU the limiting factor in Barony?

A: The data shows that the GPU is the primary limiting factor. Frame rates scale proportionally with resolution across all presets, dropping by 37% from 1080p to 1440p and 48% from 1440p to 4K, which indicates no CPU bottleneck.

Q: How does this combo rank against other tested systems?

A: The combo ranks 744th out of 2,935 tested combinations, placing it in the top 25% of all systems. The CPU and GPU both rank in the 83rd percentile of their respective categories.

Q: What frame rates can I expect at 1440p High settings?

A: The 1440p High preset delivers 188 FPS average, which is 53 FPS above the Ultra preset’s 135 FPS. This makes High the best choice for 1440p gaming, as it comfortably exceeds 144Hz refresh rates.

Q: Does the RTX 3080 Ti’s 12 GB VRAM cause any issues?

A: The measured data does not show any VRAM-related performance drops. The 12 GB of GDDR6X memory with 912.4 GB/s bandwidth is sufficient for Barony’s texture and effect requirements at all tested resolutions and settings.