Barony

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 delivers a high-refresh-rate experience in Barony, but the performance curve reveals a system that is heavily GPU-bound at higher resolutions while the CPU headroom is substantial. At 1080p, the combo produces frame rates well above 400 FPS on Low settings, which is a clear indication that the processor is not the limiting factor in most scenarios. The data shows a consistent pattern: as resolution increases from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160, average frame rates drop dramatically across all settings, confirming that the RTX 3080 is the primary bottleneck for this roguelike title. This is not a criticism of the GPU, as it still maintains playable frame rates at 4K, but rather a reflection of the CPU’s enormous headroom.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data shows a steep and predictable decline as resolution scales upward. At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo achieves 449 FPS average. Moving to 2560x1440 Low drops that to 284 FPS, a reduction of 165 FPS or roughly 37%. At 3840x2160 Low, the average falls to 148 FPS, which is a 67% decrease from the 1080p figure. This pattern is consistent across all settings presets. For High settings, the progression is 287 FPS at 1080p, 181 FPS at 1440p, and 95 FPS at 4K. The Medium preset shows 334 FPS, 211 FPS, and 110 FPS respectively, while Ultra goes from 206 FPS to 130 FPS to 68 FPS.

The scaling behavior suggests that the RTX 3080’s rendering workload scales nearly linearly with pixel count, which is typical for a GPU-bound scenario. The percentage drops between 1080p and 1440p are roughly 30-40% across all settings, while the drops between 1440p and 4K are larger, around 45-50%. For instance, High settings lose 106 FPS going from 1080p to 1440p, but then lose another 86 FPS going from 1440p to 4K. This indicates that the GPU’s memory bandwidth and compute resources are being saturated more aggressively at 4K, where the 10 GB GDDR6X frame buffer and 760.3 GB/s bandwidth are pushed harder.

The limiting component is clearly the GPU at 4K. At 1080p, the CPU could theoretically push even higher frame rates, but the RTX 3080 caps the output. The fact that Low settings at 1080p reach 449 FPS while Ultra at 1080p only reaches 206 FPS shows that the GPU’s shading units, TMUs, and ROPs are the constraining factors even at the lowest resolution. The CPU’s 24 cores and 24 threads, running at a base clock of 3.70 GHz and boost clock of 5.80 GHz, provide far more compute than Barony requires at any resolution.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus is a 24-core, 24-thread processor based on the Arrow Lake Refresh architecture, built on a 3 nm process from TSMC. Its benchmark scores are exceptional. In Cinebench R23, it scores 51731 in multi-core and 7303 in single-core. PassMark multithread score is 60860, and single-thread score is 4823. These numbers place the CPU in the 96th percentile of all CPUs tested, with an average benchmark score of 84003. Compared to its nearest rivals, the Core Ultra 9 285K scores 83807 (a 0.2% delta), the AMD EPYC 4584PX scores 83090 (1.1% delta), and the AMD EPYC 9135 scores 82980 (1.2% delta). The EPYC 7F72 scores 85072, which is 1.3% higher than the 290K Plus.

In Barony, a roguelike game, the CPU’s role is primarily handling game logic, AI pathfinding, procedural generation, and physics calculations. The data from the measured FPS shows that even at 4K Ultra, the average frame rate of 68 FPS is well above what would indicate CPU limitation. The lack of min FPS data for most settings, except Medium where min FPS is recorded, suggests that frame time consistency is not a major concern. At 1080p Low, the 449 FPS average demonstrates that the CPU can feed the GPU far more frames than the RTX 3080 can render.

The CPU’s cache hierarchy includes 192 KB L1 per core, 3 MB L2 per core, and 36 MB shared L3. This large cache is beneficial for roguelike games that often have complex state tracking and random map generation. The dual-channel DDR5 memory support with 115.2 GB/s bandwidth is adequate for this workload, as evidenced by the high frame rates. The CPU’s ECC memory support and PCIe Gen 5 with 20 lanes provide a modern platform, though Barony likely does not stress these features heavily.

The 290K Plus’s single-core performance, as shown by the 736 score in Cinebench R15 single-core and 3067 in R20 single-core, is particularly relevant for Barony. Many roguelike games have significant single-threaded components in their game loops, and the high boost clock of 5.80 GHz ensures that these threads execute quickly. The PassMark single-thread score of 4823 confirms this strength. However, the data does not show any scenario where the CPU becomes the bottleneck; even at 1080p Low with 449 FPS, the GPU is still the limiting factor, as evidenced by the resolution scaling pattern.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 is an Ampere architecture GPU with 8704 shading units, 272 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. It has 68 RT cores and 272 tensor cores, providing 29.77 TFLOPS of FP32 performance. The GPU operates at a base clock of 1440 MHz and boost clock of 1710 MHz, with memory running at 1188 MHz (19 Gbps effective). The 10 GB GDDR6X memory on a 320-bit bus provides 760.3 GB/s bandwidth. These specifications place the RTX 3080 in the 68th percentile of all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 23172.

In the PassMark suite, the GPU scores 25086 in G3D and 14397 in GPU compute. Its nearest rivals include the NVIDIA P106-100 (score 23249, delta -0.3%), AMD Radeon Pro Vega 16 (score 23250, delta -0.3%), AMD Radeon RX 6600M (score 23273, delta -0.4%), and AMD Radeon R9 M290X (score 23276, delta -0.4%). These delta values are negligible, indicating that the RTX 3080’s raw benchmark performance is nearly identical to these other cards, though the architectural differences would manifest in actual gaming workloads.

For Barony, the GPU’s role is to render the game’s visuals, which include procedurally generated dungeons, lighting effects, and particle systems. The measured FPS data shows that the RTX 3080 handles this game well at all resolutions, though with diminishing returns as settings increase. At 1080p, the GPU can push 206 FPS on Ultra and 449 FPS on Low. At 1440p, these figures drop to 130 FPS and 284 FPS respectively. At 4K, Ultra settings yield 68 FPS, while Low settings produce 148 FPS.

The VRAM usage is a consideration. The 10 GB GDDR6X frame buffer is sufficient for Barony even at 4K Ultra, as the game’s art style and texture resolution do not appear to exceed this capacity. The memory bandwidth of 760.3 GB/s is ample for the pixel throughput required at high resolutions. The pixel rate of 164.2 GPixel/s and texture rate of 465.1 GTexel/s are key specifications that determine how quickly the GPU can fill the screen. The fact that 4K Ultra yields 68 FPS average, which is below the 95 FPS of 4K High, suggests that the Ultra preset likely enables more demanding effects such as higher shadow resolution or more complex post-processing, which taxes the GPU’s compute and memory subsystems.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The full set of measured FPS data provides a comprehensive picture of performance across resolutions and settings. At 1920x1080, the results are as follows: Low settings produce an average of 449 FPS, Medium produces 334 FPS with a minimum of 284 FPS and maximum of 384 FPS, High produces 287 FPS, and Ultra produces 206 FPS. The Medium preset is the only one at 1080p with min/max data, showing a 100 FPS range between minimum and maximum, which indicates some frame time variance but not problematic stuttering.

At 2560x1440, Low settings average 284 FPS, Medium averages 211 FPS with a minimum of 179 FPS and maximum of 242 FPS, High averages 181 FPS, and Ultra averages 130 FPS. The Medium preset shows a 63 FPS range between min and max, which is tighter than the 1080p Medium range, suggesting that the GPU is more consistently utilized at this resolution. The drop from 449 FPS at 1080p Low to 284 FPS at 1440p Low is 165 FPS, while the drop from 206 FPS at 1080p Ultra to 130 FPS at 1440p Ultra is 76 FPS. This indicates that higher settings are relatively less impacted by resolution increases, as the GPU is already working hard at 1080p.

At 3840x2160, Low settings average 148 FPS, Medium averages 110 FPS with a minimum of 94 FPS and maximum of 127 FPS, High averages 95 FPS, and Ultra averages 68 FPS. The Medium preset’s minimum of 94 FPS is the lowest recorded minimum in the entire dataset, but it still provides a smooth experience for a roguelike game. The progression from Low to Ultra at 4K shows a 54% drop in average FPS (148 to 68), which is steeper than the 1080p drop of 54% (449 to 206) and the 1440p drop of 54% (284 to 130). This consistency across resolutions suggests that the Ultra preset imposes a relatively fixed additional workload over Low, regardless of pixel count.

The performance deltas between settings are noteworthy. At 1080p, moving from Low to Medium costs 115 FPS (449 to 334), Medium to High costs 47 FPS (334 to 287), and High to Ultra costs 81 FPS (287 to 206). At 1440p, the deltas are 73 FPS (284 to 211), 30 FPS (211 to 181), and 51 FPS (181 to 130). At 4K, the deltas are 38 FPS (148 to 110), 15 FPS (110 to 95), and 27 FPS (95 to 68). The diminishing absolute FPS drops at higher resolutions are expected, but the percentage differences are larger, indicating that each settings tier has a more significant relative impact at 4K.

How This Combo Ranks

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 combination ranks 806 out of 2935 tested combos in Barony. This places the combo in the top 27.5% of all tested systems. The rank is a composite measure that considers performance across all resolutions and settings. Given that the RTX 3080 is a previous-generation GPU (released August 2020) and the CPU is a current-generation flagship, the ranking reflects the GPU’s limitations relative to newer hardware.

The GPU’s 68th percentile ranking among all GPUs is lower than the CPU’s 96th percentile, which explains why the combo rank is not higher. The CPU is clearly capable of supporting a more powerful GPU, as evidenced by the fact that at 1080p Low, the combo reaches 449 FPS, which is likely near the game’s engine limits or the GPU’s maximum output. The CPU’s average benchmark score of 84003 is 0.2% higher than the Core Ultra 9 285K, but this small difference does not translate into meaningful FPS gains in Barony, as the game is not CPU-bound in most configurations.

The combo’s rank of 806 out of 2935 means there are 2129 combos that perform better. These would include systems with newer GPUs such as the RTX 40-series or AMD equivalents, which have higher raw compute and memory bandwidth. However, the RTX 3080 still delivers excellent performance in Barony, with no settings combination dropping below 68 FPS average. The 4K Ultra result of 68 FPS is the only sub-70 FPS figure, and it remains playable for a roguelike where reaction times are not as critical as in competitive shooters.

The rank also suggests that the CPU-GPU pairing is balanced in the sense that neither component is severely underutilized. The CPU’s 96th percentile performance ensures that it never holds back the GPU, while the GPU’s 68th percentile performance means it is the determining factor for frame rates. If the GPU were replaced with a higher-tier card, the combo rank would likely improve significantly, as the CPU has ample headroom to support faster rendering.

Settings Recommendations

Based on the measured FPS data, the optimal settings depend on the target resolution and desired frame rate. For 1920x1080, all settings presets produce average FPS above 200, with Low at 449 FPS, Medium at 334 FPS, High at 287 FPS, and Ultra at 206 FPS. Players with 144Hz or 165Hz monitors should have no trouble using Ultra settings, as the 206 FPS average exceeds any standard refresh rate. Even the minimum FPS for Medium at 284 FPS is above 240Hz, which is the highest common refresh rate. Therefore, at 1080p, the Ultra preset is recommended for the best visual quality without sacrificing smoothness.

At 2560x1440, the situation is slightly different. Ultra settings produce 130 FPS average, which is sufficient for 120Hz displays but may not fully saturate a 144Hz monitor in all scenes. High settings produce 181 FPS, which comfortably handles 144Hz and even 165Hz displays. Medium produces 211 FPS, and Low produces 284 FPS. For 1440p, the High preset offers the best balance: it delivers 181 FPS average, which is above 144Hz, while providing better visual fidelity than Medium. The Ultra preset at 130 FPS is also viable for 120Hz displays, but the 51 FPS drop from High to Ultra may not justify the visual improvements, depending on the player’s preference.

At 3840x2160, the recommendations are more constrained. Ultra settings produce 68 FPS average, which is below 70 FPS and may not be ideal for players who prefer high refresh rates. High settings produce 95 FPS, which is excellent for 4K gaming and suitable for 90Hz or 100Hz displays. Medium produces 110 FPS, and Low produces 148 FPS. For 4K, the High preset is the recommended choice, as it provides a 95 FPS average, which is a significant improvement over Ultra’s 68 FPS while maintaining good visual quality. The Medium preset at 110 FPS is also a strong option for players who prioritize frame rate over visuals, and it has a recorded minimum of 94 FPS, ensuring consistent performance.

The Medium preset at all resolutions offers the most complete data, with min and max FPS recorded. At 1080p, Medium has a 284 FPS minimum and 384 FPS maximum, at 1440p it has 179 FPS minimum and 242 FPS maximum, and at 4K it has 94 FPS minimum and 127 FPS maximum. This suggests that Medium settings provide the most stable frame time performance, which is valuable for a roguelike where unpredictable dungeon layouts can cause sudden rendering demands. The 4K Medium result of 110 FPS average with a 94 FPS minimum is arguably the best 4K experience, as it guarantees no frame drops below 90 FPS.

In summary, the data indicates that Ultra settings are only recommended at 1080p, where the 206 FPS average leaves ample headroom. At 1440p, High is the sweet spot with 181 FPS, and at 4K, High at 95 FPS or Medium at 110 FPS are both viable, with Medium offering better frame time consistency. The RTX 3080’s 10 GB VRAM is not a limiting factor at any resolution in Barony, as the game’s graphical demands are within its capacity. The CPU’s performance is never a bottleneck, allowing the GPU to be the sole determinant of frame rates, which simplifies the settings recommendation process.