Dave The Diver

Dave The Diver is not a typical stress test for high-end hardware, but the measured frame rates for this AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 combination reveal a clear performance curve. The data shows a system that is massively overqualified for the task, delivering playable frame rates even at 4K, but with scaling behavior that indicates the GPU becomes the primary bottleneck as resolution increases.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate drop from 1080p to 4K is substantial, but the game remains highly playable throughout. At 1080p with Ultra settings, the combo produces 153 FPS average. Moving to 1440p reduces that to 115 FPS, a 24.8% drop. At 4K Ultra, the average falls to 77 FPS, which is a 49.7% reduction compared to 1080p Ultra. This scaling pattern is typical for a GPU-bound scenario at higher resolutions.

The gap between resolution tiers is more pronounced at lower settings. With Low settings, the average FPS goes from 231 at 1080p to 174 at 1440p (a 24.7% drop) and then to 117 at 4K (a 49.4% drop from 1080p). The consistency of these percentage drops across settings suggests that the resolution scaling is largely independent of the graphics preset, which points to the RTX 4060's memory bandwidth and fill rate being the limiting factor rather than the CPU or shader complexity.

What is more revealing is the relationship between 1080p and 1440p at High settings. The 1080p High average of 173 FPS drops to 130 FPS at 1440p, a 24.9% reduction. The 4K High result of 87 FPS represents a 49.7% drop from 1080p High. The near-identical percentage drops across all settings tiers — roughly 25% for the step from 1080p to 1440p and another 33% from 1440p to 4K — indicate that the game's rendering load scales almost linearly with pixel count. This is a strong signal that the RTX 4060's 128-bit memory bus and 272.0 GB/s bandwidth are the constraining factors at higher resolutions.

At 1080p, the CPU has more headroom to push frames, as evidenced by the fact that the gap between Low (231 FPS) and Ultra (153 FPS) is 78 FPS. At 4K, that same Low-to-Ultra gap narrows to 40 FPS (117 vs 77). The shrinking performance delta between presets as resolution increases confirms that the GPU is becoming the bottleneck, with the CPU's role diminishing at higher pixel counts.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 is built on the Ada Lovelace architecture with a 5 nm process. Its base clock is 1830 MHz with a boost clock of 2460 MHz. The 8 GB of GDDR6 memory operates at 2125 MHz with a 128-bit bus, yielding 272.0 GB/s of bandwidth. These specifications place the card in the 61st percentile among all GPUs in the benchmark database.

The measured results in Dave The Diver show that this GPU configuration is sufficient for smooth gameplay at all tested settings, but the 8 GB VRAM capacity combined with the relatively narrow memory bus becomes the limiting factor at 4K. The 4K Ultra average of 77 FPS is still playable, but the card's 15.11 TFLOPS of FP32 compute is not being fully utilized at that resolution — the memory subsystem is the constraint.

Compared to its nearest rivals in the benchmark database, the RTX 4060's average benchmark score of 17639 is nearly identical to the AMD Radeon HD 7790 (17666, which is 0.2% higher) and the AMD Radeon 780M (17588, 0.3% lower). The card also sits close to the AMD Radeon Pro 560 (17551, 0.5% lower) and AMD Radeon Pro 460 (17509, 0.7% lower). This clustering indicates that the RTX 4060's overall compute performance is comparable to those older or integrated solutions, but Dave The Diver's results show the card can still deliver high frame rates because the game is not particularly demanding.

The 24 RT cores and 96 tensor cores present on the chip are not directly utilized by this game's measured results, but they contribute to the card's overall feature set. The card's 118.1 GPixel/s pixel rate and 236.2 GTexel/s texture rate are sufficient for the game's 2D-heavy art style, which is why even the 4K Ultra preset maintains an average above 60 FPS.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 ranks 2003 out of 3710 tested combos in Dave The Diver. This places the combo in the 54th percentile of all tested systems, which is lower than what the individual component percentiles might suggest. The CPU alone is in the 91st percentile among all CPUs, while the GPU is in the 61st percentile. The combo ranking being below both suggests that the pairing is not optimal for this specific game, likely because the CPU's power is wasted when the GPU becomes the bottleneck at higher resolutions.

The rank of 2003 out of 3710 indicates that there are 1707 combos that perform better in this game, and 1706 that perform worse. This middle-of-the-pack placement is interesting because the measured FPS numbers are quite high — even the lowest average (77 FPS at 4K Ultra) is well above playable thresholds. The ranking likely reflects that other combos with more powerful GPUs achieve even higher frame rates, pushing this combo down in the relative standings despite its absolute performance being strong.

The delta between the combo's rank and the CPU's percentile suggests that pairing the Ryzen 9 7900X with a more powerful GPU would yield better results in this game. The 12-core, 24-thread CPU has ample headroom, as evidenced by its Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 29300 and Geekbench multi-core score of 19267, but the RTX 4060 cannot fully exploit that processing power at higher resolutions.

Settings Recommendations

Based on the measured frame rates, the Medium preset offers the best balance of visual quality and performance across all resolutions. At 1080p Medium, the combo delivers 194 FPS average with a minimum of 165 FPS and maximum of 223 FPS. At 1440p Medium, the average is 146 FPS with a minimum of 124 FPS and maximum of 168 FPS. Even at 4K Medium, the average remains at 98 FPS with a minimum of 83 FPS and maximum of 112 FPS.

The Medium preset provides a 41 FPS advantage over Ultra at 1080p (194 vs 153), a 31 FPS advantage at 1440p (146 vs 115), and a 21 FPS advantage at 4K (98 vs 77). The minimum FPS figures for Medium are also solid — 165 FPS at 1080p, 124 FPS at 1440p, and 83 FPS at 4K — ensuring consistent frame pacing without drops below playable thresholds.

For users with high refresh rate monitors, the Low preset at 1080p delivers 231 FPS average, which is the highest measured result. However, the visual trade-off may not be worth the extra 37 FPS over Medium. At 4K, the Low preset's 117 FPS average is significantly higher than Medium's 98 FPS, but the visual quality difference is more noticeable at that resolution.

The Ultra preset is only recommended for 1080p displays where the 153 FPS average still exceeds most monitor refresh rates. At 1440p and 4K, the Ultra preset's averages of 115 FPS and 77 FPS respectively are playable but leave less headroom for demanding scenes. The data suggests that Medium is the sweet spot, offering frame rates that are 26.5% higher than Ultra at 4K while maintaining a minimum FPS above 80.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo produces its highest frame rates. The Low preset averages 231 FPS, Medium averages 194 FPS with a minimum of 165 and maximum of 223, High averages 173 FPS, and Ultra averages 153 FPS. The spread from Low to Ultra is 78 FPS, representing a 33.8% performance penalty for the highest visual quality settings.

At 2560x1440, the averages are 174 FPS for Low, 146 FPS for Medium (minimum 124, maximum 168), 130 FPS for High, and 115 FPS for Ultra. The Low-to-Ultra spread narrows to 59 FPS, a 33.9% penalty that mirrors the 1080p ratio. This consistency indicates that the GPU's compute resources scale evenly with resolution for this game.

At 3840x2160, the averages drop to 117 FPS for Low, 98 FPS for Medium (minimum 83, maximum 112), 87 FPS for High, and 77 FPS for Ultra. The Low-to-Ultra spread further narrows to 40 FPS, a 34.2% penalty. The minimum FPS of 83 at 4K Medium is the lowest measured minimum across all tested configs, but it remains well above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay.

The step from Medium to High at each resolution is consistent: 21 FPS at 1080p (194 to 173), 16 FPS at 1440p (146 to 130), and 11 FPS at 4K (98 to 87). The step from High to Ultra follows a similar pattern: 20 FPS at 1080p (173 to 153), 15 FPS at 1440p (130 to 115), and 10 FPS at 4K (87 to 77). These consistent deltas suggest that each preset tier adds a roughly equal rendering cost, which is characteristic of a game that scales settings in a linear fashion.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 9 7900X is a 12-core, 24-thread processor from the 7000 series, built on Zen 4 architecture (Raphael) using a 5 nm process at TSMC. It features a base clock of 4.70 GHz and a boost clock of 5.60 GHz. The CPU's cache hierarchy includes 64 KB of L1 per core, 1 MB of L2 per core, and 64 MB of shared L3. It supports DDR5 memory in dual-channel configuration with 83.2 GB/s bandwidth.

The CPU's benchmark scores place it in the 91st percentile among all CPUs. Its Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 29300 and single-core score of 2016.5 demonstrate strong multi-threaded and single-threaded performance. The Geekbench multi-core score of 19267 and single-core score of 2617 further confirm this. In the Passmark suite, the CPU achieves a multithread score of 51406 and a single-thread score of 4238.

Despite this compute power, the CPU's role in Dave The Diver is minimal at higher resolutions. The game's measured results show that at 1080p Low, the combo reaches 231 FPS, but at 4K Low it drops to 117 FPS. This 114 FPS difference is entirely attributable to GPU limitations, as the CPU can easily handle the game's logic and draw calls at any resolution.

The CPU's nearest rivals in the benchmark database include the AMD EPYC 7313P (0.2% higher average score), Intel Xeon Phi 7290 (0.3% lower), Intel Xeon 634 (0.6% higher), and Intel Core i7-14700F (0.6% lower). The Ryzen 9 7900X's average benchmark score of 53288 sits between these processors, but in Dave The Diver specifically, the 12-core configuration provides far more processing headroom than the game requires. The 64 MB of L3 cache and 5 nm process node contribute to the CPU's efficiency, but the game's modest CPU demands mean that even a significantly weaker processor would likely produce similar frame rates once the GPU becomes the bottleneck.