Barony

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700 and AMD Radeon RX 9060 combination delivers a remarkably smooth experience in Barony, with the data showing that even the most demanding preset leaves headroom for high-refresh-rate displays. The measured results indicate that the Ultra preset is the sweet spot for users with 1440p or 1080p monitors, while High settings provide the best balance at 4K.

Settings Recommendations

Benchmark results show that the Ultra preset is not only viable but often the optimal choice for this pairing. At 1920x1080, the Ultra preset produces an average of 144 FPS, which is perfectly aligned with standard 144Hz monitors. This is a significant achievement, as it demonstrates the combination has enough performance headroom to run the game at maximum graphical fidelity without sacrificing smoothness. The High preset at the same resolution pushes the average to 201 FPS, which benefits users with 165Hz or 240Hz panels, but the visual gains from Ultra are generally preferable for a roguelike where clarity of environmental details matters.

At 2560x1440, the Ultra preset maintains an average of 91 FPS, which is above the 60 FPS threshold but below the 100+ FPS that competitive players might prefer. For this resolution, the High preset is the recommended choice, delivering 127 FPS on average. This provides a substantial margin over refresh rate caps while still offering the enhanced lighting and texture quality that High settings bring. The Medium preset at 1440p yields 148 FPS, but the jump from Medium to High is typically more noticeable in Barony due to its dungeon-crawling visuals, where shadow quality and texture filtering impact readability.

For 3840x2160, the data paints a different picture. The Ultra preset drops to 48 FPS, which is below the smoothness threshold for most players. The High preset at 4K produces 66 FPS, which is playable but not ideal for a game that can have fast-paced action sequences. The Medium preset at 4K offers 77 FPS with a minimum of 66 FPS and a maximum of 89 FPS, making it the most balanced option for 4K displays. This setting strikes a compromise between visual fidelity and frame pacing, ensuring that the frame rate does not dip into uncomfortable territory during intense moments.

The Low preset is not recommended for any resolution, despite producing 315 FPS at 1080p and 199 FPS at 1440p. The visual degradation in Barony is severe at Low settings, often making it harder to discern traps and enemy projectiles, which are critical to survival. The data shows that the performance gains from Low over Medium are substantial—from 235 to 315 FPS at 1080p—but this does not translate into a better gameplay experience given the game's reliance on visual cues.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 9060 is built on the RDNA 4.0 architecture with a Navi 44 chip, fabricated on a 4 nm process at TSMC. The GPU features 1792 shading units, 112 texture mapping units, and 64 raster operation pipelines, along with 28 ray tracing cores. Its boost clock reaches 2990 MHz, with a game clock of 2400 MHz and a base clock of 1700 MHz. This configuration yields a pixel rate of 191.4 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 334.9 GTexel/s, with FP32 performance rated at 21.43 TFLOPS.

The memory subsystem is a critical factor in Barony's performance. The RX 9060 comes equipped with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus, providing a bandwidth of 288.0 GB/s. The memory clock runs at 2250 MHz, or 18 Gbps effective. For a game like Barony, which is not particularly VRAM-hungry due to its stylized roguelike visuals, the 8 GB capacity is sufficient even at 4K resolution. The data supports this, as the GPU does not appear to be bottlenecked by memory capacity in the measured scenarios.

The GPU's performance relative to its rivals is telling. The RX 9060 has an average benchmark score of 16014, placing it just 0.7% below the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which scores 16129. It is 1% ahead of the AMD Radeon R9 370X and the AMD Radeon RX 7700. This places the RX 9060 in a competitive tier where it can handle most modern titles at high settings, and Barony's results confirm this. The GPU's percentile ranking among all GPUs is 59, indicating it sits in the upper-middle tier of graphics cards.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals a clear pattern of GPU-bound behavior. At High settings, the average frame rate drops from 201 FPS at 1920x1080 to 127 FPS at 2560x1440, and then to 66 FPS at 3840x2160. This represents a 37% reduction in frame rate when moving from 1080p to 1440p, and a further 48% reduction from 1440p to 4K. The scaling is consistent with a GPU that is being progressively more taxed as pixel count increases.

The Low preset shows even more dramatic scaling. At 1080p, the RX 9060 produces 315 FPS, but this drops to 199 FPS at 1440p and 104 FPS at 4K. The 4K result at Low settings is nearly identical to the 1080p result at Ultra (104 vs 144 FPS), which suggests that at lower settings, the GPU's raw throughput is the limiting factor rather than any specific bottleneck. The gap between Low and High settings widens as resolution increases, going from a 36% difference at 1080p to a 37% difference at 1440p and a 37% difference at 4K.

This scaling behavior indicates that the CPU is not the primary bottleneck in this pairing for Barony. If the CPU were limiting performance, we would expect to see smaller frame rate differences between resolutions, particularly at lower settings where the GPU has less work to do. Instead, the data shows that frame rates scale consistently with pixel count, which is the hallmark of a GPU-limited scenario. The Ryzen 7 5700's 8 cores and 16 threads are evidently sufficient to feed the RX 9060 at all tested resolutions.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the full range of settings shows a clear hierarchy. The Low preset delivers an average of 315 FPS, which is the highest recorded in the dataset. The Medium preset produces 235 FPS, with a minimum of 199 FPS and a maximum of 270 FPS. The High preset drops to 201 FPS, while the Ultra preset brings the average down to 144 FPS. The spacing between settings is roughly uniform, with a 25% difference between Low and Medium, a 14% difference between Medium and High, and a 28% difference between High and Ultra.

At 2560x1440, the same pattern emerges but with lower absolute numbers. Low settings yield 199 FPS, Medium produces 148 FPS with a minimum of 126 and a maximum of 170, High drops to 127 FPS, and Ultra settles at 91 FPS. The Medium preset's frame time variance is notable, with a 44 FPS spread between minimum and maximum, which could cause occasional stutter in fast-moving scenes. The High preset, while lower in average, does not report a minimum value in the data, suggesting more consistent frame pacing.

At 3840x2160, the results are more constrained. Ultra settings produce 48 FPS, which is below the 60 FPS threshold for smooth play. High settings improve this to 66 FPS, and Medium brings it to 77 FPS with a minimum of 66 and a maximum of 89. Low settings jump to 104 FPS. The Medium preset at 4K is the only one that provides a minimum frame rate above 60 FPS, making it the only truly playable option for 4K displays without compromising on visual quality.

How This Combo Ranks

In the database of tested combinations, this pairing of the AMD Ryzen 7 5700 and AMD Radeon RX 9060 ranks 1704 out of 2935 total combos. This places it in the top 42% of all tested configurations, which is a respectable position given the mid-range nature of both components. The rank reflects the balance between the CPU's capabilities and the GPU's performance, with neither component being a clear weak link.

The CPU's performance relative to its peers provides context for this ranking. The Ryzen 7 5700 has an average benchmark score of 25517, placing it in the 78th percentile of all CPUs. Its nearest rivals include the Intel Xeon D-2752TER with a score of 25530 (0.1% higher), the AMD Ryzen 5 6600H with a score of 25550 (0.1% higher), and the AMD Ryzen 5 7640U with a score of 25485 (0.1% lower). This tight clustering indicates that the Ryzen 7 5700 is well within the performance envelope of its competition, offering no significant advantage or disadvantage in raw processing power.

The GPU's ranking is less impressive but still competitive. The RX 9060 sits in the 59th percentile of all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 16014. Its nearest rivals are the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at 16129 (0.7% higher), the AMD Radeon RX 7700 at 15852 (1% lower), and the AMD Radeon R9 370X at 15862 (1% lower). The fact that the RX 9060 performs within 1% of these cards in synthetic benchmarks, yet achieves strong frame rates in Barony, suggests that the game's workload aligns well with the GPU's architecture.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700 is a Zen 3 architecture processor based on the Cezanne codename, manufactured on a 7 nm process at TSMC. It features 8 cores and 16 threads, with a base clock of 3.70 GHz and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz. The CPU includes 64 KB of L1 cache per core, 512 KB of L2 cache per core, and a 16 MB L3 cache. It supports DDR4 memory with a dual-channel bus and a memory bandwidth of 51.2 GB/s, and it connects to the rest of the system via PCIe Gen 3 with 20 lanes.

In Barony, the CPU's role is to manage game logic, entity updates, and procedural generation, which are typically single-threaded or lightly threaded tasks. The Ryzen 7 5700's single-thread performance is strong, as evidenced by its Cinebench R23 single-core score of 2916 and its 3DMark single-thread score of 901. The boost clock of 4.60 GHz ensures that the CPU can handle the game's primary thread without becoming a bottleneck, which is confirmed by the resolution scaling analysis that showed consistent GPU-bound behavior.

The CPU's multi-threaded capabilities are also relevant for Barony, as the game can utilize additional cores for background tasks like world generation and AI pathfinding. The Ryzen 7 5700's Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 20655 and its 3DMark max-thread score of 6617 indicate that it has ample processing headroom. The PassMark multi-thread score of 24303 further supports this, showing that the CPU can handle concurrent workloads without impacting frame rates.

The 65W TDP of the Ryzen 7 5700 is noteworthy in the context of system thermals. This low power draw, combined with the RX 9060's 132W TDP, means that the entire system can be cooled with a capable air cooler without thermal throttling concerns. The CPU's production status is active, and it was released in April 2022 with a launch MSRP of $179. The CPU's benchmark scores show a 16-thread score of 6628 in 3DMark, which is nearly identical to its max-thread score of 6617, indicating that the processor's performance scales well with thread count up to its physical core limit.