Doom

How This Combo Ranks

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 combination places at rank 75 out of 1,681 tested combos in Doom, placing it within the top 4.5% of all systems evaluated for this title. This is a strong showing, though the pairing itself is lopsided: the RTX 4090 is an end-of-life flagship that dominates the GPU percentile rankings at 91, while the Ryzen 5 5600 sits at the 79th percentile among all CPUs. The data suggests the CPU is the limiting factor in this configuration, but the sheer power of the graphics card still pushes the combo to an elite tier.

Looking at the CPU's nearest rivals, the Ryzen 5 5600 posts an average benchmark score of 21,765, which is 0.6% ahead of the Intel Xeon D-1746TER (21,635) and 0.6% behind the AMD EPYC 9554P (21,899). The gap to the AMD EPYC 9534 (21,900) is also a mere 0.6%, while the Intel Core i7-11700F (21,957) leads by 0.9%. These deltas are trivial in real-world gaming terms, meaning the 5600's compute performance is effectively on par with a cluster of enterprise and desktop parts. For Doom, the benchmark results indicate that the 5600's 6-core, 12-thread configuration is sufficient to feed the RTX 4090 at most settings, though the GPU's headroom is not fully exploited at lower resolutions.

On the GPU side, the RTX 4090's average benchmark score of 66,473 places it within 0.4% of the NVIDIA Tesla T4 (66,733) and 0.5% ahead of the NVIDIA Tesla P40 (66,127). It trails the AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56 (67,097) by 0.9% and the NVIDIA Quadro P6000 (67,320) by 1.3%. These comparisons are drawn from synthetic workloads, but the measured FPS data in Doom tells a more specific story: the 4090 is capable of triple-digit frame rates at 4K Ultra, which confirms its raw throughput. The combo's rank of 75 suggests that only a handful of CPU+GPU pairings outperform it in this specific game, likely those with newer or higher-clocked processors.

FAQ

Q: What is the combo's rank among all tested CPU-GPU combinations in Doom?

A: The AMD Ryzen 5 5600 + RTX 4090 combo ranks 75th out of 1,681 tested combinations, placing it in the top 4.5% of all systems benchmarked for this game.

Q: How does the CPU compare to its nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The Ryzen 5 5600 scores 21,765 on average, which is 0.6% higher than the Intel Xeon D-1746TER (21,635) and 0.6% lower than both the AMD EPYC 9554P (21,899) and AMD EPYC 9534 (21,900). The Intel Core i7-11700F (21,957) leads by 0.9%.

Q: What frame rate does the combo achieve at 1080p with Low settings?

A: At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo produces an average FPS of 340, which is the highest measured frame rate across all resolution and settings combinations in the data.

Q: How much does the GPU's performance vary from its nearest rivals?

A: The RTX 4090's average benchmark score of 66,473 is 0.4% below the NVIDIA Tesla T4 (66,733) and 0.5% above the NVIDIA Tesla P40 (66,127). It trails the AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56 (67,097) by 0.9% and the NVIDIA Quadro P6000 (67,320) by 1.3%.

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

A: The data indicates the CPU limits performance at lower resolutions. At 1080p, the frame rate gap between Low (340 FPS) and Ultra (266.2 FPS) is 73.8 FPS, which is narrower than the 4K spread, suggesting the GPU has more headroom than the CPU can utilize at 1080p.

Q: What is the CPU's single-thread performance relative to its multi-thread scores?

A: The Ryzen 5 5600 achieves a single-thread score of 882 in 3DMark and 2,584 in Cinebench R23, while its multi-thread scores reach 5,659 in 3DMark max threads and 18,309 in Cinebench R23, indicating strong scaling across its 6 cores and 12 threads.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals a clear pattern of resolution-dependent scaling that highlights the RTX 4090's dominance and the Ryzen 5 5600's role as a constraint. Moving from 1080p to 4K, the frame rates drop substantially, but the magnitude of that drop varies by settings tier. At Low settings, the combo goes from 340 FPS at 1920x1080 to 156.3 FPS at 3840x2160, a reduction of 183.7 FPS (54.0%). This is the steepest percentage decline across all settings, indicating that at Low settings, the GPU is heavily utilized and the CPU's 3.50 GHz base clock (4.40 GHz boost) becomes less of a factor as resolution increases.

At High settings, the drop from 1080p to 4K is from 306.5 FPS to 117.3 FPS, a loss of 189.2 FPS (61.7%). The Medium settings tier shows a similar trend: 327.8 FPS at 1080p down to 134.6 FPS at 4K, a 193.2 FPS decline (58.9%). The Ultra settings tier, which stresses the GPU most heavily, drops from 266.2 FPS at 1080p to 91.6 FPS at 4K, a 174.6 FPS reduction (65.6%). The fact that Ultra at 4K still maintains above 90 FPS is remarkable, but the scaling curves suggest that below 4K, the CPU's 6 cores and 12 threads are the primary bottleneck, preventing the 4090 from reaching its full potential.

The 1440p results sit between the 1080p and 4K extremes. At 2560x1440, Low settings yield 290.3 FPS, which is only 49.7 FPS less than 1080p Low (340 FPS). The gap narrows at Ultra: 170.4 FPS at 1440p versus 266.2 FPS at 1080p, a 95.8 FPS difference. This pattern indicates that the RTX 4090's 24 GB of GDDR6X memory and 1.01 TB/s bandwidth are more than sufficient for 1440p, and the limiting factor shifts to the CPU's instruction throughput. At 4K, however, the GPU's 82.58 TFLOPS FP32 compute becomes the dominant factor, and the CPU's relative weakness is masked by the increased pixel workload.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The benchmark data provides a full matrix of average FPS across three resolutions and four settings levels. At 1920x1080, the combo delivers 340 FPS on Low, 327.8 FPS on Medium, 306.5 FPS on High, and 266.2 FPS on Ultra. The spread from Low to Ultra is 73.8 FPS, which is the smallest absolute gap among all resolutions, reinforcing that the CPU is the limiting component at 1080p. The Ryzen 5 5600's single-thread score of 882 in 3DMark and 2,584 in Cinebench R23 suggest it can handle the game's logic, but the 4090's raw rasterization power (443.5 GPixel/s pixel rate) outpaces the CPU's ability to feed it frames.

At 2560x1440, the frame rates are 290.3 FPS (Low), 253.3 FPS (Medium), 213.4 FPS (High), and 170.4 FPS (Ultra). The gap between Low and Ultra expands to 119.9 FPS, indicating that the GPU is now doing more work per frame, but the CPU still holds back the lower settings. The 1440p Ultra result of 170.4 FPS is particularly notable because it exceeds the 1080p Ultra result of 266.2 FPS by a significant margin, but the relative performance drop from Low to Ultra (119.9 FPS) is larger than at 1080p (73.8 FPS), showing that the GPU's workload scaling is becoming more pronounced.

At 3840x2160, the results are 156.3 FPS (Low), 134.6 FPS (Medium), 117.3 FPS (High), and 91.6 FPS (Ultra). The Low-to-Ultra gap is 64.7 FPS, which is the smallest absolute difference across resolutions, but the percentage drop is the largest at 41.4% from Low to Ultra. This suggests that at 4K, the GPU is fully saturated, and the CPU's bottleneck is minimized. The 91.6 FPS at 4K Ultra is still above 60 FPS, making this combo playable at maximum settings for Doom, but the data shows that the RTX 4090's 24 GB VRAM and 1.01 TB/s bandwidth are being pushed hard at this resolution.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600 is a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on the Zen 3 architecture (codenamed Vermeer), manufactured on TSMC's 7 nm process. It has a base clock of 3.50 GHz and a boost clock of 4.40 GHz, with a 65 W TDP. The CPU features 64 KB of L1 cache per core, 512 KB of L2 per core, and 32 MB of shared L3 cache. These specifications are modest by modern standards, but the benchmark results show that the 5600 delivers a single-thread score of 882 in 3DMark and 2,584 in Cinebench R23, which are respectable for a desktop part. Its multi-thread scores of 5,659 (3DMark max threads) and 18,309 (Cinebench R23) reflect the 12 threads' ability to handle parallel workloads.

In Doom, the CPU's role is critical at lower resolutions. The data shows that at 1080p Low, the combo achieves 340 FPS, which is likely near the game engine's rendering ceiling or the CPU's frame submission limit. The 5600's boost clock of 4.40 GHz helps maintain high single-thread performance, which is essential for game logic, but the 6-core layout means that background tasks or heavily threaded game code could cause frame pacing issues. The benchmark results indicate that the 5600's average benchmark score of 21,765 places it in the 79th percentile of all CPUs, and its nearest rivals are all within 0.9% in either direction, suggesting that the 5600 is a well-balanced mid-range part.

The RTX 4090, by contrast, is a 5 nm Ada Lovelace GPU with 16,384 shading units, 512 TMUs, and 176 ROPs. Its 82.58 TFLOPS FP32 compute and 1,290.2 GTexel/s texture rate are far beyond what a 6-core CPU can consistently feed. The measured FPS data confirms this imbalance: at 1080p, the frame rate differences between settings are compressed (266.2 to 340 FPS), suggesting the CPU is the bottleneck. At 4K, the GPU's 91.6 FPS at Ultra is more indicative of its true rasterization limits, and the CPU's impact is reduced. The combo's rank of 75 out of 1,681 reflects this dynamic: it outperforms most systems because the 4090 is so powerful, but it falls short of top-tier combos that pair the 4090 with higher-end CPUs like the Ryzen 7 or Core i7 series, which would better exploit the GPU's capabilities at 1080p and 1440p.