Barony

Barony is a roguelike that scales unusually well with resolution, and the measured results for this Intel Core i5-9400 + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 combo reveal a clear hierarchy. At 1080p, the system is almost certainly CPU-bound at the highest settings, with the Low preset hitting 453.7 FPS and the Ultra preset lowering to 215.6 FPS. Moving to 1440p, the frame rates drop substantially but remain extremely high, with Low at 298.2 FPS, Medium at 218 FPS, High at 188.9 FPS, and Ultra at 136.5 FPS. At 4K, the GPU begins to dominate, but even the most demanding Ultra preset holds 73.3 FPS, while Low still reaches 155 FPS. The scaling pattern from 1080p to 4K is steep for Low settings — a 65.8% drop (453.7 to 155) — while the High preset drops by 67.5% (299.6 to 97.5). This indicates that at lower presets, the CPU is the limiting factor at 1080p, but by 4K, the GPU workload becomes the bottleneck, especially as settings increase.

Resolution Scaling

The data shows that Barony’s performance scales predictably with pixel count, but the magnitude of the drop depends heavily on the preset. At 1080p Low, the combo produces 453.7 FPS, which falls to 298.2 FPS at 1440p and then to 155 FPS at 4K — a classic curve where each resolution step costs roughly a third to half of the previous frame rate. For High settings, the progression is 299.6 FPS at 1080p, 188.9 FPS at 1440p, and 97.5 FPS at 4K, showing that the GPU load at 4K High is nearly three times heavier than at 1080p High. The Ultra preset tells a similar story: 215.6 FPS at 1080p, 136.5 FPS at 1440p, and 73.3 FPS at 4K. The fact that 4K Ultra still clears 60 FPS suggests that this game is not particularly demanding on the graphics card, even at the highest settings. However, the gap between Low and Ultra at 4K (155 vs. 73.3 FPS) is a 52.7% reduction, which is larger than the 52.4% reduction at 1080p (453.7 vs. 215.6 FPS), implying that the RTX 4070’s rasterization power is the primary constraint at 4K, while the CPU’s single-threaded performance caps lower resolutions.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 is a high-end Ada Lovelace part with 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus, delivering 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth. Its boost clock of 2475 MHz and base clock of 1920 MHz are substantial, but for Barony, the key metric is raw fill rate and shading throughput. The GPU’s 5888 shading units and 64 ROPs produce a pixel rate of 158.4 GPixel/s, which is more than enough for a roguelike with relatively simple geometry. The measured FPS at 4K Ultra (73.3) is still far above the 60 FPS threshold, indicating that the RTX 4070 is never truly saturated, even at the highest resolution and settings. The GPU’s percentile ranking of 81st among all tested cards places it well above average, and its nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks — the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 (0.6% slower), NVIDIA GeForce MX570 A (1.9% slower), and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Mobile (2.2% slower) — are all within a few percentage points, suggesting that Barony does not heavily differentiate between high-end GPUs. The 12 GB VRAM is ample for this title, as Barony’s textures and effects are unlikely to exceed even 4 GB at 4K, so memory capacity is not a limiting factor. The GPU’s memory clock of 1313 MHz (21 Gbps effective) ensures that bandwidth is never a bottleneck, as evidenced by the small performance delta between Medium and High at 4K (112.8 vs. 97.5 FPS).

Settings Recommendations

Based on the measured rows, the Medium preset offers the best balance of visual quality and performance for this combo, particularly at higher resolutions. At 1080p, Medium delivers 348.2 FPS, which is only 23.2% slower than Low (453.7 FPS) but provides noticeably better visual fidelity; the jump to High (299.6 FPS) costs another 14% but is still well above any refresh rate ceiling. At 1440p, Medium hits 218 FPS, which is sufficient for high-refresh monitors, while High (188.9 FPS) remains playable but begins to show diminishing returns. At 4K, Medium (112.8 FPS) is the sweet spot: it nearly doubles the Ultra frame rate (73.3 FPS) and is only 26.8% slower than High (155 FPS vs. 112.8 FPS). The Ultra preset, while visually the most detailed, drops below 100 FPS at 4K and below 150 FPS at 1440p, which is unnecessary for a roguelike where reaction time matters less than in competitive shooters. For users with 60 Hz displays, Ultra at 4K is viable (73.3 FPS), but for anyone targeting 144 Hz, Medium at 1440p (218 FPS) or High at 1080p (299.6 FPS) are the recommended choices. The Low preset at any resolution is only useful for maximizing frame rates on high-refresh monitors, but the visual degradation in Barony’s procedurally generated dungeons is likely not worth the extra 30-50% FPS.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of the Intel Core i5-9400 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 ranks 496th out of 1,702 tested combos in Barony, placing it in the 70.9th percentile of all systems. That ranking is respectable but not outstanding, given that the RTX 4070 is a high-end GPU. The data suggests that the CPU is holding the combo back, as the i5-9400’s 50th percentile ranking among all CPUs (with an average benchmark score of 2305) is far below the GPU’s 81st percentile (with an average score of 37283). In synthetic tests, the i5-9400 is nearly tied with the Intel Core i3-10305 (0.2% faster) and Intel Core i3-1125G4 (0.2% faster), and it is 0.4% faster than the Intel Xeon E-2134, while being 0.6% slower than the Intel Core i7-8809G. This clustering indicates that the CPU’s six cores and six threads, with a 2.90 GHz base and 4.10 GHz boost, are adequate for Barony but not exceptional. The combo’s rank above the 70th percentile means that the majority of tested systems are faster, likely due to newer CPUs with higher single-threaded performance or more cores. However, the absolute frame rates are so high that the ranking is more academic than practical, as even the 4K Ultra score of 73.3 FPS is playable.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-9400 is a six-core, six-thread Coffee Lake Refresh part with a base clock of 2.90 GHz and a boost clock of 4.10 GHz. Its 9 MB of shared L3 cache and dual-channel DDR4 memory support (42.7 GB/s bandwidth) are modest by modern standards, but they are sufficient for Barony’s logic-heavy roguelike gameplay. The CPU’s synthetic benchmarks — 7969 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 1125 in single-core — place it at the 50th percentile of all CPUs, meaning it is exactly average. In the game data, the CPU’s influence is most visible at 1080p, where the Low preset (453.7 FPS) is 51.2% faster than Ultra (215.6 FPS), a gap that narrows to 30.9% at 1440p (298.2 vs. 136.5 FPS) and further to 21.4% at 4K (155 vs. 73.3 FPS). This pattern confirms that the CPU is the primary limiter at lower resolutions, where the GPU has spare capacity. The i5-9400’s lack of hyper-threading (6 threads) means that Barony’s single-threaded game logic can saturate one core, but the 4.10 GHz boost clock helps mitigate this. Compared to its nearest rivals, the i5-9400 is effectively on par with the Core i3-10305 and i3-1125G4, which are also six-core or similar parts, but it trails the Core i7-8809G by 0.6% in average benchmark score. For Barony, the CPU’s role is to feed the GPU with draw calls and update game state; the data shows that it does so adequately, as even at 4K Ultra, the system never drops below 73 FPS, indicating that the CPU is never the sole bottleneck at higher resolutions. The 65W TDP and 14nm process node are irrelevant to performance here, but the end-of-life status and lack of PCIe Gen 4 support (Gen 3, 16 lanes) could slightly limit future GPU upgrades, though not for this title.