Barony

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT paired with the Intel Core i5-9400 delivers exceptional performance in Barony, a roguelike title that scales dramatically with resolution and settings. The measured data reveals a combination that is heavily GPU-bound at high resolutions but shows clear CPU limitations at 1080p, where frame rates exceed 450 FPS. This analysis breaks down the scaling behavior, component roles, and exact performance metrics from the benchmark results, placing the combo in the 504th rank out of 1702 tested combinations.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate drop from 1080p to 4K is steep and consistent across all settings, indicating the graphics card becomes the primary limiting factor as pixel count rises. At High settings, the average FPS falls from 299.7 at 1920x1080 to 186.9 at 2560x1440, a 37.6% reduction, and then to 100.6 at 3840x2160, a further 46.2% drop from the 1440p figure. This pattern of roughly halving performance at each resolution step is classic GPU-bound behavior, where the rendering workload scales nearly linearly with the number of pixels.

The scaling curve is even more pronounced at lower settings. At Low settings, the 1080p result of 453.4 FPS drops to 296.1 at 1440p and then to 154.2 at 4K. The 4K Low result is only 34% of the 1080p Low score, showing that the RX 9070 XT’s compute resources are saturated by the 4K pixel throughput even when graphical features are minimized. In contrast, at Ultra settings, the drop from 1080p (213.0 FPS) to 1440p (134.5 FPS) is 36.9%, and the further drop to 4K (72.3 FPS) is 46.2% — a similar proportional decline.

Interestingly, the gap between Low and Ultra settings widens as resolution decreases. At 4K, the difference between Low (154.2 FPS) and Ultra (72.3 FPS) is 81.9 FPS, but at 1080p that same difference expands to 240.4 FPS (453.4 vs 213.0). This suggests that at lower resolutions, the CPU can feed frames fast enough for the GPU to fully express its graphical capabilities, while at 4K the GPU’s raw pixel-pushing power becomes the bottleneck, compressing the performance spread between settings.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is built on the RDNA 4.0 architecture with a Navi 48 chip, fabricated on a 4 nm process from TSMC. It carries 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, yielding a bandwidth of 644.6 GB/s — a figure that is critical for high-resolution textures and explains why the card maintains playable frame rates at 4K Ultra. The GPU’s boost clock reaches 2970 MHz, while the game clock is specified at 2400 MHz and the base clock at 1660 MHz, indicating a wide dynamic range that allows the card to throttle up when thermal headroom permits.

The GPU’s benchmark profile positions it in the 82nd percentile among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 39647. Its nearest rivals in the database are the AMD Radeon Pro 575 (39703, 0.1% faster), NVIDIA RTX A500 Mobile (39568, 0.2% slower), AMD Radeon Pro 575X (39836, 0.5% faster), and AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (39879, 0.6% faster). The delta percentages are tiny, meaning the RX 9070 XT trades blows with these cards in synthetic tests, but the measured Barony results show much higher real-world performance than those rival scores might suggest.

The 16 GB VRAM capacity is ample for Barony at any resolution, as the game’s roguelike nature typically uses modest texture budgets. The memory clock runs at 2518 MHz (20.1 Gbps effective), which, combined with the 256-bit bus, delivers that 644.6 GB/s bandwidth. The GPU also features 4096 shading units, 256 texture mapping units, and 128 raster output units, producing a pixel rate of 380.2 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 760.3 GTexel/s. These figures support the observed 4K performance, where the card sustains 100.6 FPS at High settings without dipping below the 60 FPS threshold at Ultra (72.3 FPS).

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-9400 is a Coffee Lake Refresh part with 6 cores and 6 threads, running at a base clock of 2.90 GHz and a boost clock of 4.10 GHz. It has a 9 MB shared L3 cache, with 64 KB L1 and 256 KB L2 per core. The CPU’s memory support is DDR4 in dual-channel mode, providing 42.7 GB/s of bandwidth — a figure that could theoretically constrain the GPU in memory-intensive scenes, though the benchmark data does not show such stalls.

In synthetic benchmarks, the i5-9400 scores 7969 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 1125 in single-core, with a percentile rank of 50 among all CPUs. Its average benchmark score is 2305, placing it near the Intel Core i3-10305 (2300, 0.2% slower), Intel Core i3-1125G4 (2299, 0.2% slower), Intel Xeon E-2134 (2295, 0.4% slower), and Intel Core i7-8809G (2319, 0.6% faster). These rivals are all within 0.6% of the i5-9400’s average score, indicating that this CPU is mid-pack in general compute performance.

The CPU’s impact on Barony becomes evident at 1080p, where the Low setting produces 453.4 FPS. This figure is likely near the ceiling of what the i5-9400 can feed to the GPU, as the single-core performance (1125 in R23 single-core) becomes the limiting factor for game logic updates. The boost clock of 4.10 GHz is modest by modern standards, but Barony as a roguelike does not demand extreme single-thread throughput. The 6-core/6-thread configuration is sufficient to avoid multi-threaded bottlenecks, but the lack of hyper-threading means the CPU cannot offload background tasks as efficiently as a comparable 12-thread part.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the RX 9070 XT delivers exceptional frame rates across all settings. Low settings produce 453.4 FPS average, Medium drops to 349.9 FPS, High yields 299.7 FPS, and Ultra settles at 213.0 FPS. The scaling from Low to Ultra is a 53.0% reduction, showing that even the most demanding settings at 1080p leave substantial GPU headroom. The 1080p results are so high that they exceed the refresh rates of most displays, suggesting the i5-9400 is the practical ceiling here.

At 2560x1440, the performance remains robust but begins to show the GPU’s workload. Low settings average 296.1 FPS, Medium reaches 217.4 FPS, High drops to 186.9 FPS, and Ultra falls to 134.5 FPS. The transition from 1080p to 1440p reduces FPS by 34.7% at Low, 37.9% at Medium, 37.6% at High, and 36.9% at Ultra — a remarkably consistent pattern that confirms the GPU is the dominant factor at this resolution.

At 3840x2160, the GPU is fully engaged. Low settings maintain 154.2 FPS, Medium produces 115.7 FPS, High drops to 100.6 FPS, and Ultra falls to 72.3 FPS. The 4K Ultra result is the only configuration below 100 FPS, but at 72.3 FPS it remains comfortably playable. The gap between Low and Ultra at 4K is 81.9 FPS, much narrower than the 240.4 FPS gap at 1080p, reinforcing that the pixel workload at 4K compresses the performance envelope. The data shows that this combo is viable for 4K gaming at High settings (100.6 FPS) and even Ultra, where the frame rate stays above 70 FPS.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution for this CPU-GPU combo in Barony?

A: The data indicates 2560x1440 is the sweet spot, as it delivers 186.9 FPS at High settings and 134.5 FPS at Ultra, comfortably exceeding 60 FPS while maintaining high graphical fidelity. The 1920x1080 results exceed 200 FPS at all settings, but the 4K results show the GPU struggling relative to lower resolutions.

Q: How does the RX 9070 XT compare to its nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The GPU’s average benchmark score is 39647, putting it within 0.6% of the AMD Radeon Pro 575 (39703), NVIDIA RTX A500 Mobile (39568), AMD Radeon Pro 575X (39836), and AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (39879). These deltas are negligible, indicating near-identical synthetic performance.

Q: Is the i5-9400 a bottleneck at any resolution?

A: At 1080p Low, the 453.4 FPS result suggests the CPU is the limiting factor, as the GPU is likely capable of higher frame rates. At 4K, the GPU becomes the bottleneck, as evidenced by the steep FPS drops with increasing resolution. The CPU’s 50th percentile ranking supports its mid-range status.

Q: What is the performance difference between Low and Ultra settings at 4K?

A: At 3840x2160, Low settings produce 154.2 FPS while Ultra produces 72.3 FPS, a difference of 81.9 FPS or a 53.1% reduction. This shows that Ultra settings at 4K nearly halve the frame rate compared to Low.

Q: How much faster is 1080p compared to 4K at High settings?

A: At High settings, 1920x1080 yields 299.7 FPS, which is 199.1 FPS higher than the 100.6 FPS at 3840x2160. This represents a 198% increase in frame rate when dropping from 4K to 1080p.

Q: Does the GPU’s 16 GB VRAM matter for this game?

A: The 16 GB GDDR6 memory with 644.6 GB/s bandwidth ensures that Barony can load all textures at any resolution without memory pressure. The 4K Ultra result of 72.3 FPS indicates the memory subsystem is not a limiting factor, as the GPU’s compute performance is the primary constraint.