Dave The Diver

Dave The Diver is not a demanding title by modern standards, but the benchmark data for the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 combination shows a system that is massively overqualified for it, delivering frame rates that far exceed the refresh rates of virtually any display on the market. The measured results across all presets and resolutions indicate that this pairing is bottlenecked by the game engine's CPU thread scheduling rather than the hardware's raw capabilities, making it a case study in how top-tier components behave in a lightweight indie adventure.

Settings Recommendations

The benchmark rows show a clear hierarchy across the four quality presets at every resolution, with the relationship between settings and frame rate being almost perfectly linear. At 1920x1080, the Low preset produces 413.8 FPS, Medium yields 378.4 FPS, High drops to 338.7 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 299.3 FPS — a spread of roughly 114 FPS between the lowest and highest quality settings. The data suggests that the cost of each step up in quality is consistent, with Ultra extracting about a 27% performance penalty over Low at this resolution.

At 2560x1440, the same pattern holds: Low runs at 340 FPS, Medium at 284.6 FPS, High at 256.8 FPS, and Ultra at 226.5 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra narrows slightly to about 113 FPS, indicating that the GPU is still not the limiting factor at this resolution. Moving to 3840x2160, the numbers compress further: Low achieves 230.5 FPS, Medium hits 191.6 FPS, High manages 172.1 FPS, and Ultra drops to 151 FPS. Even at 4K Ultra, the system maintains over 150 FPS, which is far beyond the 60-120 Hz range most displays target.

For the best experience, the data makes a strong case for running the Ultra preset at 4K. The measured 151 FPS at this maximum quality setting is still exceptionally high, and the visual fidelity improvements from Ultra settings are substantial in a game with detailed pixel-art environments and interactive elements. At 1440p, Ultra at 226.5 FPS is the obvious choice if you have a high-refresh monitor, but the 4K Ultra result is the sweet spot for balancing image quality and headroom. There is no scenario in the measured data where dropping to Low or Medium makes sense for performance reasons, as even the most demanding preset leaves the GPU with plenty of spare capacity.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 7600 is a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on the Zen 4 Raphael architecture, built on a 5 nm process with a 65 W TDP. Its base clock of 3.80 GHz and boost clock of 5.10 GHz are strong for gaming, and the benchmark results confirm solid single-threaded performance: the 3dmark single-thread score of 999 and Cinebench R23 single-core score of 3246 are indicative of a chip that handles lightly-threaded workloads with ease. The data shows this matters in Dave The Diver, as the game's modest engine appears to rely heavily on one or two threads for its simulation and rendering logic.

The CPU's multi-threaded scores are also respectable — Cinebench R23 multicore hits 22992, and the 3dmark max-threads score is 6503 — but these numbers are largely irrelevant for this game. The measured frame rates at 1080p Low (413.8 FPS) and 4K Ultra (151 FPS) show that the CPU is never the bottleneck, even at the highest settings. The Ryzen 5 7600's 32 MB of shared L3 cache is more than adequate for the game's data access patterns, and its 83.2 GB/s dual-channel DDR5 memory bandwidth ensures no stutter from memory starvation.

Comparing to its nearest rivals, the Ryzen 5 7600 sits within 0.3% of the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D (deltaPct 0.2), Intel Core i9-12900HK (deltaPct -0.2), AMD EPYC 8024P (deltaPct 0.2), and Intel Core i9-11900K (deltaPct 0.3) in average benchmark score. This means the processor is essentially tied with these alternatives in general compute, but for Dave The Diver specifically, the single-thread strength is what matters most. The percentileVsAllCpus of 83 confirms it outperforms 83% of all CPUs in the database, and the data suggests that any of these rivals would deliver nearly identical frame rates in this game, as the engine's demands are so low.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is the flagship of the Ada Lovelace generation, with a base clock of 2235 MHz and boost clock of 2520 MHz, paired with 24 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus delivering 1.01 TB/s of bandwidth. Its 16384 shading units and 128 RT cores provide astronomical compute power — 82.58 TFLOPS of FP32 performance — and the passmark G3D score of 38194 places it in the 91st percentile of all GPUs. For a game like Dave The Diver, which does not use ray tracing or heavy post-processing, the RTX 4090 is operating at a fraction of its capacity.

The GPU's memory configuration is also overkill for this title. The 24 GB frame buffer is never stressed at any resolution in the measured data, and the 1.01 TB/s bandwidth means texture streaming is instantaneous. The game's visual style — 2D sprites over 3D environments — does not require the massive texture sets that would benefit from the RTX 4090's VRAM. The benchmark results reflect this: the passmark DirectX 11 score of 326 and DirectX 12 score of 150 are relatively low compared to the G3D score, suggesting the GPU's strength is in sustained compute rather than API-specific rasterization in lightweight scenes.

The nearest rivals to the RTX 4090 in the database — NVIDIA Tesla T4 (deltaPct -0.4), Tesla P40 (deltaPct 0.5), AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56 (deltaPct -0.9), and Quadro P6000 (deltaPct -1.3) — are all professional or workstation cards with different driver optimizations, so their relevance to gaming is minimal. What the data shows is that the RTX 4090's raw performance is so far beyond what Dave The Diver requires that the GPU is essentially idle in this workload, waiting for the CPU to feed it frames.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 ranks 34th out of 1626 tested combos in Dave The Diver, placing it in the top 2.1% of all configurations in the database. This is a remarkable ranking for a CPU that is only mid-range in the broader processor landscape, which underscores how little CPU performance matters for this specific game. The 34th position suggests that there are 33 combos with faster frame rates, likely featuring higher-clocked CPUs that can squeeze out a few more frames per second at 1080p where the CPU becomes the limiting factor.

The data indicates that this combo's ranking is driven almost entirely by the RTX 4090's brute force at higher resolutions. At 4K Ultra, the system produces 151 FPS, which is a very high absolute number, but the fact that it ranks 34th rather than 1st suggests that some other combos achieve even higher frame rates, probably with CPUs that have stronger single-threaded performance, such as the Ryzen 7 5800X3D's 3D V-Cache variant. The percentileVsAllCpus of 83 for the CPU and 91 for the GPU show that both components are above average, but the game's low demands mean the ranking is more about which CPU can feed the GPU fastest, not which GPU can render the most pixels.

Resolution Scaling

The measured frame rates across resolutions show a clear pattern: the FPS drop from 1080p to 4K is significant but not catastrophic, indicating a shift from CPU-bound to GPU-bound behavior. At 1080p High, the system hits 338.7 FPS; at 1440p High, it drops to 256.8 FPS (a 24% reduction); and at 4K High, it falls to 172.1 FPS (a 49% reduction from 1080p). This scaling is roughly proportional to the pixel count increase — 4K has four times the pixels of 1080p, but the frame rate only halves, suggesting the GPU has ample headroom and the CPU is still partially involved at lower resolutions.

At Ultra settings, the scaling is similar: 1080p Ultra gives 299.3 FPS, 1440p Ultra gives 226.5 FPS (24% lower), and 4K Ultra gives 151 FPS (50% lower). The consistency of these drops across presets implies that the limiting component changes smoothly with resolution. At 1080p, the CPU is the primary constraint, as the RTX 4090 could easily render more frames if the processor could deliver them. At 4K, the GPU becomes more involved, but even then, the 151 FPS result shows the RTX 4090 is still not fully utilized — it is likely that a weaker GPU could achieve similar frame rates at 4K Ultra, just as the CPU is the bottleneck at lower resolutions.

FAQ

Q: Can this combo run Dave The Diver at 4K Ultra smoothly?

A: Yes, the measured average FPS at 3840x2160 Ultra is 151 FPS, which is far above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay. This holds true even with the highest quality preset enabled, and the system has substantial headroom for any future engine updates or mods that might increase the load.

Q: Is the CPU or GPU the bottleneck in this game?

A: At 1080p, the CPU is the limiting factor, as the frame rate of 413.8 FPS at Low settings is constrained by the Ryzen 5 7600's single-thread performance rather than the RTX 4090's rendering speed. At 4K, the GPU becomes more relevant, but the 151 FPS at Ultra still indicates neither component is fully taxed.

Q: How does the Ryzen 5 7600 compare to its nearest rivals in general compute?

A: The Ryzen 5 7600's average benchmark score is within 0.3% of the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, Intel Core i9-12900HK, AMD EPYC 8024P, and Intel Core i9-11900K. This means there is no meaningful performance difference between these processors for Dave The Diver, as the game's demands are so low that any of them would deliver similar frame rates.

Q: What is the best settings preset for this combo?

A: The Ultra preset at 4K is the recommended choice, as it delivers 151 FPS while providing the best visual quality. Even at 4K Ultra, the frame rate is more than double what most displays can show, so there is no reason to lower settings for performance gains.

Q: How does the RTX 4090's memory bandwidth affect this game?

A: The 1.01 TB/s of bandwidth is vastly more than Dave The Diver requires, as the game's simple textures and sprites do not stress the memory subsystem. The 24 GB of GDDR6X VRAM ensures there are no texture pop-ins or stutters, but the game would run identically on a GPU with far less memory bandwidth.

Q: Is this combo overkill for Dave The Diver?

A: The data clearly indicates yes. The system achieves 172.1 FPS at 4K High and 151 FPS at 4K Ultra, which are far beyond the needs of a game with this visual style. The rankings — 34th out of 1626 combos — show that many cheaper configurations could deliver a similar experience, but this pairing offers maximum headroom for other more demanding titles.