Barony

The Intel Core i5-9400 paired with the AMD Radeon RX 580 delivers a playable experience in Barony across most settings, but the data reveals a sharp performance cliff at higher resolutions. The measured results show that the most balanced experience is achieved with the Medium preset, which provides a substantial frame rate increase over High while avoiding the steep cost of Ultra. At 1080p, Medium delivers 115 FPS, which is a 13.8% improvement over High’s 101.1 FPS, while Ultra drops to 68.4 FPS. The Low preset offers the highest frame rates—154.9 FPS at 1080p—but the jump from Low to Medium is only a 25.7% reduction in FPS, which is a reasonable trade for better visual fidelity. At 1440p, Medium holds at 70.9 FPS, which is still comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold, while High manages 63.9 FPS. Given the data, Medium is the recommended preset for most users, as it maintains a strong frame rate at both 1080p and 1440p without the significant performance penalty seen at Ultra. For 4K gaming, only the Low preset (51.4 FPS) approaches playability; all other presets fall below 40 FPS, making High and Ultra impractical at that resolution.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Intel Core i5-9400 and AMD Radeon RX 580 occupies a position near the bottom of the tested field in Barony, ranking 1582nd out of 1702 tested combos. This places the setup in the bottom 7% of all combinations, indicating that while it can run the game, it does so with less headroom than most competing hardware pairings. The CPU itself sits at the 50th percentile among all processors, with an average benchmark score of 2305. Its nearest rivals—the Intel Core i3-10305 and Intel Core i3-1125G4—both score 2300, showing a delta of only 0.2%, meaning the i5-9400 is effectively tied with those parts in synthetic CPU tests. The GPU is similarly positioned, at the 53rd percentile among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 13559. Its closest competitor, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570, scores 13564, a delta of 0%, confirming that the RX 580’s raw compute performance is essentially identical to that older card. The data shows that despite the low overall combo rank, the individual components are not outliers; rather, the pairing simply does not scale as well in Barony as higher-tier configurations. The 0.2% delta between the i5-9400 and the i3-10305 in CPU benchmarks suggests that the processor is not the primary bottleneck, but the combo’s low rank implies that the GPU’s performance ceiling is reached quickly in this title.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 580’s specifications directly explain the frame rate patterns observed in the measured data. The GPU features 8 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus, providing a bandwidth of 256.0 GB/s. This memory configuration is sufficient for 1080p and 1440p gaming, but at 4K, the demand on memory bandwidth increases, contributing to the significant drop in FPS. The GPU’s clock speeds are modest, with a base clock of 1257 MHz and a boost clock of 1340 MHz, which limits its raw throughput. The texture rate of 193.0 GTexel/s and pixel rate of 42.88 GPixel/s are indicative of a mid-range part from the GCN 4.0 architecture, which is reflected in the benchmark scores: the PassMark G3D score of 8813 and the 3DMark Steel Nomad score of 1005. In Barony, the GPU’s role becomes more pronounced at higher settings. At 1080p, the frame rate scales from 154.9 FPS on Low to 68.4 FPS on Ultra, a 55.8% reduction, indicating that the GPU is handling the increased shading and texture loads. At 4K, the Ultra preset collapses to 21.9 FPS, while Low still manages 51.4 FPS. This suggests that the RX 580’s 8 GB frame buffer is not the limiting factor at 4K—since Low uses less memory—but rather the GPU’s compute capacity (6.175 TFLOPS FP32) is insufficient for high-detail 4K rendering. The data also shows that the GPU’s performance is closely matched with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 (delta 0%), confirming that it operates in a performance tier that is now several generations old.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a clear picture of how the i5-9400 and RX 580 handle Barony across different resolutions and settings. At 1920x1080, the results are as follows: Low settings achieve an average of 154.9 FPS, Medium 115 FPS, High 101.1 FPS, and Ultra 68.4 FPS. This shows a linear degradation from Low to Ultra, with the largest single-step drop occurring between High and Ultra, a 32.3% decrease. At 2560x1440, the averages are: Low 97.4 FPS, Medium 70.9 FPS, High 63.9 FPS, and Ultra 47.1 FPS. The gap between Low and Medium narrows at 1440p, with a 27.2% reduction, while the High-to-Ultra drop remains steep at 26.3%. At 3840x2160, the performance falls off dramatically: Low 51.4 FPS, Medium 36.6 FPS, High 30.6 FPS, and Ultra 21.9 FPS. The data indicates that the Low preset is the only viable option for 4K, and even then, it barely crosses the 50 FPS mark. The scaling from 1080p to 1440p is consistent across settings, with an average FPS drop of approximately 37% (e.g., High drops from 101.1 to 63.9, a 36.8% reduction). However, the jump from 1440p to 4K is more severe, with High dropping from 63.9 to 30.6, a 52.1% reduction. This non-linear scaling points to the GPU hitting a memory bandwidth or compute wall at 4K, as the CPU is less likely to be the constraint given its 6 cores and 6 threads.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K reveals a system that is consistently GPU-limited, but the degree of limitation shifts with resolution. Moving from 1080p to 1440p, the average FPS across all settings drops by roughly 37%, which is proportional to the increase in pixel count (from 2.07 million to 3.69 million pixels, a 78% increase). The fact that the FPS does not drop by the same proportion as the pixel count suggests that the CPU is still contributing to frame pacing at these resolutions. However, the transition from 1440p to 4K (a 2.25x pixel increase) results in a 52% FPS drop for High settings, indicating that the GPU’s fill rate and bandwidth are now the dominant constraints. The RX 580’s 256.0 GB/s bandwidth is likely the bottleneck at 4K, as the texture and shading loads exceed what the memory subsystem can sustain. The data shows that at 1080p, the CPU has enough headroom to push the GPU to its limits, as evidenced by the 154.9 FPS on Low settings. At 4K, even the Low preset (51.4 FPS) is nearly half the 1080p Low score, confirming that the GPU is the limiting component. The i5-9400, with a base clock of 2.90 GHz and boost of 4.10 GHz, is not the primary constraint; its Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 7969 places it in the mid-range, but Barony is not a heavily threaded title. The data indicates that for users targeting 4K, the RX 580 is insufficient for anything beyond Low settings, and even then, the experience is marginal. For 1440p, the Medium preset offers a good balance, while 1080p users can comfortably use High settings without sacrificing playability.