Barony

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data for Barony with the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D reveals a straightforward scaling pattern across the three tested resolutions. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo produces 724 FPS average. Moving to 1440p Low drops that to 457 FPS, a reduction of roughly 37%, and at 4K Low the average falls further to 239 FPS, which is about 48% lower than the 1440p figure. This steep decline as resolution increases indicates that the GPU is the primary limiting factor at higher pixel counts, even with a card as powerful as the RTX 5090 D.

The scaling behavior is consistent across all four settings presets. For High settings, the averages are 462 FPS at 1080p, 292 FPS at 1440p, and 152 FPS at 4K. Medium settings show 538 FPS, 340 FPS, and 178 FPS respectively. Ultra settings yield 331 FPS at 1080p, 209 FPS at 1440p, and 109 FPS at 4K. In every case, the step from 1080p to 1440p costs between 35% and 37% of the frame rate, while the step from 1440p to 4K costs between 47% and 48%. This uniformity suggests the rendering pipeline is well-balanced for resolution scaling, with no unexpected bottlenecks appearing at any particular setting level.

The fact that 4K Ultra still manages 109 FPS average is notable. This is not a game that stresses the RTX 5090 D to its limits at lower resolutions, but the 4K results show the GPU is doing substantial work. The delta between 1080p Low and 4K Ultra is 615 FPS, which represents a massive 85% drop. Such a large spread confirms that Barony's engine scales its workload heavily with pixel count, and the RTX 5090 D's 32 GB of GDDR7 memory and 1.79 TB/s bandwidth are being utilized more fully at 4K. The data does not include minimum FPS values for most rows, but the Medium preset at 4K shows a min of 151 FPS against an average of 178 FPS, indicating reasonable frame pacing with only a 15% deviation from the average.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D ranks first overall in Barony, according to the comboRankInGame field, which places it at position 1 out of 3,717 tested combos. This is a top-tier result, and the measured FPS data supports such a ranking. The CPU alone sits at the 94th percentile among all CPUs in general benchmarks, with an average benchmark score of 70,879. Its nearest rival, the Intel Xeon 6511P, scores 71,051, a delta of -0.2%, meaning the 265K is essentially tied with that Xeon in raw CPU performance. Against the Intel Core i7-14700KF, the 265K is 1% ahead, and it leads the AMD Ryzen 7 9700F by 1.3%.

On the GPU side, the RTX 5090 D ranks at the 92nd percentile among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 77,712. Its nearest rivals show a mixed picture: the AMD Radeon RX 6650M XT scores 76,904, putting it 1.1% ahead of the 5090 D in that particular aggregate benchmark, while the AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT trails by 1.6% and the NVIDIA Tesla P100 PCIe 12 GB trails by 2.1%. These small deltas in synthetic benchmarks do not translate into similar closeness in Barony, where the 5090 D's measured frame rates at 4K Ultra (109 FPS) demonstrate that the card's real-world gaming performance is far beyond what those aggregate scores might suggest.

The rank of 1 out of 3,717 combos means that no other tested pairing of CPU and GPU achieves higher frame rates in this game. This is significant because Barony is a roguelike title with a release date of 2015, and the data shows that modern high-end hardware can push it to extreme frame rates. The combination of the 265K's 20 cores and 20 threads with the 5090 D's 21,760 shading units appears to be exceptionally well-matched for this workload. The fact that the combo achieves 724 FPS at 1080p Low indicates that the CPU is capable of feeding the GPU at very high rates, and the GPU is able to process those frames without becoming a bottleneck until resolution increases.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS data provides clear guidance on which settings preset offers the best experience for this hardware combination in Barony. At 1080p, all four presets deliver frame rates well above 300 FPS, with Low at 724 FPS, Medium at 538 FPS, High at 462 FPS, and Ultra at 331 FPS. Since even the Ultra preset exceeds 300 FPS, there is no practical reason to drop below High or Ultra at this resolution for most displays, which typically cap at 240 Hz or 360 Hz. The 331 FPS at Ultra is more than sufficient to saturate any consumer monitor.

At 1440p, the situation remains comfortable. Ultra delivers 209 FPS, High delivers 292 FPS, Medium delivers 340 FPS, and Low delivers 457 FPS. All of these are above 200 FPS, so a 1440p 240 Hz display would be fully utilized with the Ultra preset. The gap between Ultra and High at 1440p is 83 FPS, which is noticeable, but the Ultra preset's 209 FPS is still high enough that the visual quality gains from Ultra settings likely outweigh the marginal frame rate advantage of High.

At 4K, the recommendations shift. Ultra drops to 109 FPS, High to 152 FPS, Medium to 178 FPS, and Low to 239 FPS. For a 4K 120 Hz display, High is the optimal choice, as it provides 152 FPS and comfortably exceeds the 120 FPS threshold. Medium at 178 FPS would also work well, but High offers better visual fidelity for only a 26 FPS penalty. Ultra at 109 FPS nearly hits 120 FPS but falls short, which could cause judder on a fixed 120 Hz panel. Low at 239 FPS is unnecessary at 4K unless the display supports 240 Hz, which is rare at this resolution. The data shows that High at 4K strikes the best balance between visual quality and frame rate, with the 152 FPS average being well above the 144 Hz standard for high-refresh 4K monitors.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete measured FPS dataset for this combo spans three resolutions and four settings levels. At 1920x1080, the Low preset achieves an average of 724 FPS. Medium reaches 538 FPS with a minimum of 458 and a maximum of 619. High produces 462 FPS, and Ultra delivers 331 FPS. The min and max values are only recorded for the Medium preset in this dataset, which shows a spread of 161 FPS between the lowest and highest frames.

Moving to 2560x1440, Low yields 457 FPS average. Medium comes in at 340 FPS, with a minimum of 289 and a maximum of 391, a spread of 102 FPS. High averages 292 FPS, and Ultra averages 209 FPS. The reduction from 1080p to 1440p is consistent across all settings, with each preset losing roughly 35-37% of its frame rate.

At 3840x2160, Low produces 239 FPS. Medium averages 178 FPS, with a minimum of 151 and a maximum of 204, a spread of 53 FPS. High averages 152 FPS, and Ultra drops to 109 FPS. The step from 1440p to 4K costs about 47-48% of the frame rate for each preset. The Medium preset at 4K shows the tightest frame pacing of all recorded min/max data, with the minimum being 15% below the average and the maximum 15% above.

Across all twelve measured rows, the highest average FPS is 724 at 1080p Low, and the lowest is 109 at 4K Ultra. The scaling is monotonic: within each resolution, FPS decreases as settings increase, and within each setting, FPS decreases as resolution increases. There are no anomalies or inversions in the data, which suggests the game's engine handles settings changes predictably and that neither the CPU nor the GPU exhibits unexpected behavior at any configuration.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D is built on the Blackwell 2.0 architecture with a GB202 chip manufactured on a 5 nm process at TSMC. It contains 92,200 million transistors on a 750 mm² die, giving it a transistor density of 122.9 million per square millimeter. The GPU has 21,760 shading units, 680 texture mapping units, and 176 raster operation units. It also includes 170 ray tracing cores and 680 tensor cores. The clock speeds are a base of 2017 MHz and a boost of 2407 MHz, with memory running at 1750 MHz for 28 Gbps effective.

Memory configuration is a key differentiator for this card. It has 32 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 512-bit bus, yielding a bandwidth of 1.79 TB/s. This massive memory pool is more than sufficient for Barony, even at 4K Ultra, and the bandwidth ensures that texture streaming and geometry processing are not constrained by memory throughput. The pixel rate is 423.6 GPixel/s and the texture rate is 1,636.8 GTexel/s, which explains why the card can sustain such high frame rates at 1080p and 1440p.

The GPU's FP32 performance is 104.8 TFLOPS, with FP16 at the same 104.8 TFLOPS (1:1 ratio). These compute capabilities are far beyond what a roguelike title from 2015 requires, which is why the card is able to deliver 724 FPS at 1080p Low. The RTX 5090 D's percentile rank of 92 among all GPUs places it in the upper echelon, and its measured performance in Barony confirms that it is not a bottleneck at lower resolutions. At 4K, the GPU becomes the limiting factor, as evidenced by the 109 FPS at Ultra, but this is still a very playable frame rate for a game that does not require rapid reflex-based input.

The GPU's nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks include the AMD Radeon RX 6650M XT, which is 1.1% ahead in average score, and the AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT, which is 1.6% behind. These deltas are tiny and do not reflect the actual gaming performance difference, as the 5090 D's 32 GB memory and 1.79 TB/s bandwidth provide substantial headroom for high-resolution gaming that those mobile GPUs lack.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 7 265K is a 20-core, 20-thread processor based on the Arrow Lake-S architecture, part of the Core Ultra Series 2. It has a base clock of 3.90 GHz and a boost clock of 5.50 GHz, with a TDP of 125 W. The CPU is manufactured on a 3 nm process at TSMC, containing 17,800 million transistors on a 243 mm² die. It supports DDR5 memory on a dual-channel bus with a bandwidth of 102.4 GB/s, and it uses the Intel Socket 1851.

Cache configuration includes 192 KB of L1 per core, 3 MB of L2 per core, and 30 MB of shared L3 cache. The CPU does not have any 3D V-Cache. It also includes integrated Arc Xe-LPG Graphics with 64 execution units, though this is not relevant for gaming with a discrete GPU. The processor supports PCIe Gen 5 with 20 lanes from the CPU, which is sufficient for the RTX 5090 D's PCIe 5.0 x16 interface.

In synthetic benchmarks, the 265K scores 35,850 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 2,020 in single-core. Geekbench scores are 23,085 multi-core and 2,713 single-core. PassMark tests show a multi-thread score of 58,594 and a single-thread score of 4,928. The CPU's percentile rank is 94 among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 70,879. Its nearest rival, the Intel Xeon 6511P, scores 71,051, a delta of -0.2%, meaning the 265K is essentially tied. The Intel Core i7-14700KF is 1% behind, and the AMD Ryzen 7 9700F is 1.3% behind.

In Barony, the CPU's role is to feed the GPU with enough draw calls and game logic updates to maintain high frame rates. At 1080p Low, the 724 FPS average indicates that the CPU is not a bottleneck, as this frame rate is far above what most games achieve. The 20 cores and 20 threads are more than adequate for a roguelike title, which typically has simpler simulation logic than large open-world games. The boost clock of 5.50 GHz provides strong single-thread performance, which is important for game logic that is often not fully parallelized. The CPU's launch MSRP is $394, and it is an unlocked multiplier processor, though pricing is not a factor in the performance analysis.

FAQ

Q: What is the highest average FPS this combo achieves in Barony?

A: The highest average FPS is 724, achieved at 1920x1080 resolution with Low settings.

Q: How does this combo rank among all tested combinations in Barony?

A: It ranks first out of 3,717 tested combos, according to the comboRankInGame field.

Q: What is the lowest average FPS measured for this combo?

A: The lowest average FPS is 109, achieved at 3840x2160 resolution with Ultra settings.

Q: How much FPS is lost when moving from 1080p to 4K on Ultra settings?

A: The average FPS drops from 331 at 1080p Ultra to 109 at 4K Ultra, a reduction of 222 FPS or approximately 67%.

Q: What settings preset provides the best 4K experience for this combo?

A: High settings at 4K deliver 152 FPS average, which is above the 120 FPS threshold for 4K high-refresh displays, making it the recommended preset.

Q: What is the GPU's memory configuration and bandwidth?

A: The GPU has 32 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 512-bit bus, providing a bandwidth of 1.79 TB/s.