Barony

Barony, a roguelike title from 2015, exhibits unusual scaling characteristics when paired with the Intel Core i5-10400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER. The benchmark data reveals a configuration that is heavily front-loaded toward CPU performance at lower resolutions, with the GPU only beginning to assert dominance as pixel count and graphical fidelity increase. This analysis breaks down the measured frame rates to identify where the bottleneck shifts and what that implies for the system's overall capability in this specific game.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate progression from 1080p to 4K demonstrates a classic transition from a CPU-limited state to a GPU-limited one, but with an unusually steep curve. At 1920x1080 with High settings, the combo produces 382.6 FPS, which drops to 242.4 FPS at 2560x1440, and further to 124.5 FPS at 3840x2160. This represents a 67.5% reduction in frame rate from 1080p to 4K at High settings, indicating that the GPU is becoming the primary constraint at higher resolutions.

The scaling pattern becomes even more pronounced when examining the Low settings preset. The jump from 475.7 FPS at 1080p to 374.7 FPS at 1440p is a 21.2% decrease, while moving to 4K yields 195.7 FPS—a 58.9% drop from the 1440p figure. This suggests that at Low settings, the CPU is still able to feed frames efficiently up to 1440p, but the 4K pixel workload overwhelms the GPU's capabilities relative to the lower settings.

Interestingly, the Medium preset shows the most linear scaling: 422.2 FPS at 1080p, 280.8 FPS at 1440p (a 33.5% drop), and 149.0 FPS at 4K (a 46.9% drop from 1440p). This consistency implies that Medium settings strike a balance where neither component is completely saturated, allowing for more predictable scaling behavior across resolution changes.

The Ultra preset exhibits the most dramatic resolution sensitivity, with 276.0 FPS at 1080p falling to 173.1 FPS at 1440p (a 37.3% drop) and then to 88.8 FPS at 4K (a 48.7% drop from 1440p). The fact that Ultra at 4K achieves less than one-third of the 1080p Low frame rate (88.8 vs. 475.7 FPS) underscores the GPU's dominant role at maximum settings, where the RTX 4080 SUPER's 16 GB of GDDR6X memory and 736.3 GB/s bandwidth are pushed to their limits.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-10400F, a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on the Comet Lake architecture, provides the computational foundation for this combo. Its base clock of 2.90 GHz and boost clock of 4.30 GHz, combined with a 12 MB shared L3 cache, deliver solid single-threaded performance that is critical for Barony's roguelike simulation logic. The CPU's benchmark scores reinforce this: a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 1453 and a Geekbench single-core score of 1454 indicate robust per-thread capability.

At 1080p Low settings, the system achieves 475.7 FPS, which is remarkably high and suggests that the CPU is the limiting factor at this resolution. The fact that increasing resolution to 1440p only drops the frame rate to 374.7 FPS (a 21.2% decrease) while the pixel count increases by 78% indicates that the CPU is still able to keep pace with the GPU's output at this lower fidelity level. However, the 4K Low result of 195.7 FPS shows that even with minimal graphical load, the GPU's pixel throughput becomes the bottleneck.

The CPU's multi-threaded performance, evidenced by a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 10297 and a PassMark multithread score of 12115, suggests that Barony can utilize multiple threads effectively. The 3DMark 16-thread score of 4748 and 8-thread score of 3929 indicate that scaling beyond 8 threads provides diminishing returns, which aligns with the 6-core/12-thread configuration of this processor. This explains why the frame rates at 1080p High (382.6 FPS) and Medium (422.2 FPS) remain high—the CPU has sufficient headroom to handle the game's logic while the GPU processes frames.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the benchmark database, this specific combination of the Intel Core i5-10400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER ranks 184th out of 1702 tested combos for Barony. This places the configuration in the top 10.8% of all tested systems, which is a strong showing given the CPU's mid-range positioning relative to the high-end GPU.

The CPU itself sits at the 73rd percentile among all processors, with an average benchmark score of 14168. Its nearest rivals include the AMD EPYC 7552 (0.4% higher score), AMD Ryzen 3 7320C (0.8% lower), Intel Core i5-8500 (1.1% lower), and AMD Ryzen Embedded V2546 (1.2% lower). This clustering indicates that the i5-10400F is competitive with a range of server and embedded processors in synthetic benchmarks, but its real-world gaming performance is more dependent on clock speed and IPC.

Similarly, the RTX 4080 SUPER ranks at the 88th percentile among GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 53610. Its nearest rivals include the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (0.2% higher), AMD Radeon Pro W6600M (0.4% higher), AMD Radeon RX 7700S (2.1% lower), and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti (2.9% lower). The close margins between the top GPUs highlight the competitive nature of this performance tier, though the RTX 4080 SUPER's Ada Lovelace architecture provides modern feature support.

The combo rank of 184 suggests that while the GPU is powerful enough to drive high frame rates, the CPU's 6-core/12-thread configuration may be holding back performance in certain scenarios, particularly at lower resolutions where CPU-bound frame rates are more achievable. This is consistent with the observed scaling data, where the system excels at 1080p and 1440p but sees more significant drops at 4K.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the system delivers exceptional performance across all settings. Low settings produce 475.7 FPS, Medium 422.2 FPS, High 382.6 FPS, and Ultra 276.0 FPS. The spread of 199.7 FPS between Low and Ultra indicates that graphical settings have a moderate impact at this resolution, with the CPU able to maintain high frame rates even at maximum quality. The 38.5% reduction from Low to Ultra suggests that the GPU's shading units (10240) and texture units (320) are being increasingly utilized as settings rise.

Moving to 2560x1440, the frame rates remain impressive but show more sensitivity to settings. Low produces 374.7 FPS, Medium 280.8 FPS, High 242.4 FPS, and Ultra 173.1 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra widens to 201.6 FPS, and the percentage reduction from Low to Ultra increases to 53.8%. This indicates that the GPU is becoming more of a limiting factor at this resolution, though the CPU is still able to feed frames efficiently at lower settings.

At 3840x2160, the GPU's dominance is clear. Low settings yield 195.7 FPS, Medium 149.0 FPS, High 124.5 FPS, and Ultra 88.8 FPS. The reduction from Low to Ultra is 54.6%, and the absolute frame rates are more than halved compared to 1080p for each setting. The 4K Ultra result of 88.8 FPS is still playable, but it represents a 67.8% drop from the 1080p Ultra figure, demonstrating the significant computational demands of 4K rendering.

The data shows a consistent pattern: at each resolution, the difference between Medium and High settings is smaller than the difference between Low and Medium or High and Ultra. For example, at 1440p, the gap between Medium (280.8) and High (242.4) is 38.4 FPS, while the gap between High and Ultra (173.1) is 69.3 FPS. This suggests that the High preset represents a sweet spot where the balance between visual quality and performance is optimal.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER, built on the Ada Lovelace architecture with a 5 nm process node, brings substantial computational resources to this pairing. Its 10240 shading units, 320 texture mapping units, and 112 raster output pipelines provide a theoretical FP32 performance of 52.22 TFLOPS. The GPU's boost clock of 2550 MHz and base clock of 2295 MHz, combined with 16 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 256-bit bus, deliver a memory bandwidth of 736.3 GB/s.

In Barony, the GPU's role becomes increasingly prominent as resolution and settings scale. The measured performance at 4K Ultra (88.8 FPS) versus 1080p Low (475.7 FPS) shows a 5.4x difference, which aligns with the 4x pixel count increase from 1080p to 4K compounded by the settings impact. The GPU's pixel rate of 285.6 GPixel/s and texture rate of 816.0 GTexel/s are sufficient to handle the game's rendering demands, but the data indicates that at 4K Ultra, the GPU is operating near its limits.

The RTX 4080 SUPER's benchmark scores provide context: a 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 6600 and a PassMark G3D score of 34245 place it in the upper tier of GPUs. The Geekbench OpenCL score of 246994 and Vulkan score of 226163 suggest strong compute capabilities, though Barony's roguelike nature likely doesn't heavily utilize these features. The GPU's 80 ray tracing cores and 320 tensor cores are present but may not be significantly leveraged by this older title.

The transition from Low to Ultra settings at each resolution shows the GPU's workload scaling. At 1080p, the frame rate drops by 42.0% from Low to Ultra; at 1440p, the drop is 53.8%; at 4K, it's 54.6%. This increasing percentage reduction with resolution indicates that the GPU is becoming more saturated as the pixel count grows, with the 16 GB VRAM and 736.3 GB/s bandwidth being adequate for the game's texture and geometry demands. The 4K results, while lower than the lower resolutions, remain robust enough for smooth gameplay, confirming that this GPU is well-suited for the task despite the CPU's more modest specifications.