Barony

The Intel Core i5-9400 paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 delivers a robust experience in Barony, a roguelike where frame rates scale dramatically with resolution and preset choices. The measured data shows that the most balanced experience is found at the Medium preset across all tested resolutions. At 1920x1080, Medium yields 286.9 FPS, which is only 25.7% below the Low preset’s 386 FPS but 18.1% above High’s 245.5 FPS. At 2560x1440, Medium produces 181.9 FPS, while at 3840x2160, it drops to 96.1 FPS. This preset provides a substantial frame rate buffer above the 60 FPS threshold without sacrificing the visual fidelity that Low mode removes.

For users prioritizing maximum smoothness, the Low preset is demonstrably the best choice at 3840x2160, where it achieves 129.3 FPS—a 26.2% improvement over Medium. However, at lower resolutions, the gap narrows; Low at 2560x1440 hits 243.6 FPS versus Medium’s 181.9 FPS. The Ultra preset is only advisable at 1920x1080, where it maintains 176.3 FPS. At 2560x1440, Ultra drops to 110.5 FPS, and at 3840x2160, it falls to 57.2 FPS, which is below the commonly accepted 60 FPS standard for smooth gameplay. The data suggests that High settings are a middle ground, offering 245.5 FPS at 1080p and 155.6 FPS at 1440p, but Medium consistently provides a better performance-per-visual-step ratio.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 is the dominant component in this pairing, and its specifications directly explain the measured frame rates. The GPU features 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, yielding a bandwidth of 448.0 GB/s. This memory configuration is sufficient for Barony’s roguelike environments, as evidenced by the high average FPS even at 4K resolution. The GPU’s boost clock of 1725 MHz, combined with its 5888 shading units, allows it to push 20.31 TFLOPS of FP32 compute power. This raw throughput is why the card can deliver 386 FPS at 1080p Low, a scenario where the CPU is unlikely to bottleneck.

The RTX 3070’s performance relative to its peers is telling. Its average benchmark score of 28238 places it in the 72nd percentile of all GPUs. When compared to its nearest rivals, it trails the AMD FirePro S7150 by 0.6% (28409 vs. 28238) but leads the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT by 0.9% (27985). The delta is even more pronounced against the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti, where the RTX 3070 is 1% faster (27956). This mid-pack positioning explains why the GPU can handle Barony’s High preset at 155.6 FPS at 1440p but struggles to maintain 60 FPS at 4K Ultra, where the 57.2 FPS result indicates the card’s limits under maximum load.

The memory clock runs at 1750 MHz, translating to 14 Gbps effective, which is a modest speed for the Ampere architecture. Yet, the measured results show that this does not hinder the card in Barony, as even at 4K High, the 83.3 FPS average demonstrates ample memory bandwidth for the game’s texture streaming. The GPU’s 46 ray tracing cores and 184 tensor cores are present but underutilized in this title, which is a rasterization-focused roguelike. Consequently, the data indicates that the RTX 3070’s raw shading power, not its specialized cores, drives the performance in this benchmark.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution for maintaining 60 FPS with this combo?

A: All tested resolutions can maintain 60 FPS at Medium settings. At 3840x2160, Medium achieves 96.1 FPS; at 2560x1440, it hits 181.9 FPS; and at 1920x1080, it reaches 286.9 FPS. Even Ultra at 1080p (176.3 FPS) and 1440p (110.5 FPS) stays above 60 FPS.

Q: How does the RTX 3070 compare to the RX 6600 XT in this pairing?

A: The RTX 3070’s average benchmark score is 28238, which is 0.9% higher than the RX 6600 XT’s 27985. In Barony, this translates to a slight edge, though the measured FPS differences are more influenced by the CPU pairing.

Q: Is the 8 GB VRAM sufficient for Barony at 4K?

A: Yes. The 8 GB GDDR6 memory, with 448.0 GB/s bandwidth, supports 4K High at 83.3 FPS and 4K Medium at 96.1 FPS. The card does not appear memory-limited in this game, as the frame rates scale logically with compute load rather than dropping due to VRAM exhaustion.

Q: Why does Ultra preset cause such a large FPS drop at 4K?

A: The Ultra preset at 3840x2160 yields 57.2 FPS, a 40.4% reduction from High’s 83.3 FPS. This is consistent with the GPU’s pixel rate of 165.6 GPixel/s, which becomes the limiting factor under the highest shading and texture loads at 4K resolution.

Q: What is the CPU’s contribution to the 1080p Low result of 386 FPS?

A: The i5-9400’s six cores clocked at 4.10 GHz boost provide enough single-thread throughput to avoid bottlenecking the RTX 3070 at low settings. The Cinebench R23 single-core score of 1125 indicates adequate per-core performance for high-refresh scenarios.

Q: Does the combo rank in the top half of tested systems?

A: Yes, the combo ranks 789th out of 1702 tested combinations, placing it in the upper half of the database. This rank reflects the balanced performance of the i5-9400 and RTX 3070 for this title.

How This Combo Ranks

The Intel Core i5-9400 and RTX 3070 combination holds the 789th position out of 1702 tested combos in Barony. This placement, near the middle of the distribution, indicates that while the GPU is capable (72nd percentile), the CPU holds the system back in certain scenarios. The i5-9400’s average benchmark score is 2305, which places it in the 50th percentile of all CPUs—exactly average. This parity between the CPU’s middling compute and the GPU’s upper-tier performance creates a system that excels in GPU-bound scenarios but struggles to push frame rates in CPU-limited situations.

The rank becomes more meaningful when considering the measured FPS data. At 1080p Low, the system achieves 386 FPS, which is a score that would likely place it near the top of the database for that specific preset. However, at 4K Ultra, the 57.2 FPS result aligns with the combo’s mid-pack overall rank. The data suggests that the 789th rank is a compromise: the system can outperform many higher-ranked combos at low resolutions but falls behind at 4K Ultra where the GPU’s limitations become apparent. Notably, the GPU’s nearest rival, the RX 6600 XT, would likely produce similar results, given the 0.9% performance delta, meaning the rank is not unique to this specific GPU pairing.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-9400 is a six-core, six-thread processor from the Coffee Lake Refresh generation, built on a 14 nm process. Its base clock of 2.90 GHz and boost clock of 4.10 GHz provide the computational foundation for this system. In Barony, a roguelike that relies on procedural generation and physics calculations, the CPU’s role is to maintain frame pacing and handle game logic. The measured data shows that at 1080p Low, the system reaches 386 FPS, which is a strong indicator that the CPU can feed the GPU adequately at lower settings. However, the CPU’s average benchmark score of 2305—with a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 7969—places it exactly at the 50th percentile, meaning half of all tested CPUs are faster.

The CPU’s performance relative to its nearest rivals is narrow but consistent. The i5-9400’s 2305 average score is 0.2% ahead of both the Intel Core i3-10305 (2300) and the Intel Core i3-1125G4 (2299), and 0.4% ahead of the Intel Xeon E-2134 (2295). It trails the Intel Core i7-8809G (2319) by 0.6%. This clustering in the 2295–2319 range suggests that the i5-9400 is not a performance outlier; it delivers baseline desktop performance. In Barony, this means the CPU rarely becomes the primary bottleneck at 4K resolutions, where the GPU’s 57.2 FPS at Ultra is clearly the limiting factor. At 1080p, however, the CPU’s six threads cannot provide the same headroom as more modern processors, which explains why the 386 FPS Low result, while high, does not reach the extremes seen with higher-end CPUs.

The CPU’s memory bandwidth of 42.7 GB/s, paired with dual-channel DDR4 support, is sufficient for this game’s data flow. The 9 MB of shared L3 cache helps maintain low latency for the procedural generation tasks. The lack of hyper-threading means only six threads are available, which is adequate for Barony’s single-threaded engine but limits multi-threaded performance in other scenarios. The data indicates that the i5-9400’s role in this combo is to provide stable, mid-range performance that allows the RTX 3070 to shine at higher resolutions, while at lower resolutions, the CPU’s limits are the primary constraint on achieving even higher frame rates. The Cinebench R15 single-core score of 113 and R20 single-core score of 472 confirm that per-core performance is modest, aligning with the 50th percentile ranking and the overall combo rank of 789.