Doom

The Intel Core i5-11400F paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 delivers a highly capable Doom experience, with the data indicating that the Medium preset at 1440p offers the best balance of fluidity and visual fidelity. At 2560x1440, the Medium setting produces an average of 130.5 FPS, which is 24.5 frames higher than High (106 FPS) and 39.9 frames higher than Ultra (90.6 FPS). While the Low preset reaches 150 FPS at this resolution, the jump from Low to Medium costs only 19.5 FPS while providing substantially better image quality. For 1080p users, High at 166.2 FPS is the recommended starting point, as it remains well above the 144 Hz threshold while offering superior detail over Medium's 198.9 FPS.

Settings Recommendations

The benchmark data reveals a clear hierarchy in settings performance, with the optimal choice depending on the target resolution. At 4K (3840x2160), High is the only viable preset, delivering 61.1 FPS average—just above the 60 FPS playability line—while Medium drops to 67.9 FPS and Ultra falls to 48 FPS, which is below acceptable smoothness for a fast-paced FPS. The Low preset at 4K produces 77.6 FPS, but the visual compromise is significant. At 1440p, Medium stands out as the sweet spot: 130.5 FPS average represents a 23.1% improvement over High (106 FPS) and a 44.0% improvement over Ultra (90.6 FPS), with only a 14.9% penalty versus Low (150 FPS). For 1080p, the story shifts—High at 166.2 FPS is preferable to Medium's 198.9 FPS if the display is 144 Hz, since the extra frames beyond 166.2 are less perceptible than the visual uplift from Medium to High. Ultra at 1080p (134.9 FPS) remains playable but is 18.8% slower than High, making it a poor trade-off for marginal detail gains. The data consistently shows that the Ultra preset extracts a heavy toll—at every resolution, it is the only setting that drops below 60 FPS at 4K (48 FPS) and below 100 FPS at 1440p (90.6 FPS).

How This Combo Ranks

Within the benchmark database, this CPU-GPU combination ranks 962nd out of 1681 tested combos for Doom, placing it in the upper-middle tier of all configurations. This percentile position—roughly the 57th percentile—reflects a balanced pairing where neither component is a severe bottleneck. The ranking is notable because the RTX 4060's individual GPU percentile is 66th among all GPUs, while the i5-11400F's CPU percentile is 75th among all processors. The combo's rank of 962/1681 suggests that Doom's engine is sufficiently optimized to leverage both components effectively, but the pairing does not crack the top half of tested systems. In practical terms, this means the system outperforms 719 tested combos but trails 962 others. The measured data shows that this rank is consistent with the 1440p Medium result of 130.5 FPS, which places the system in a performance class capable of high-refresh 1080p gaming and smooth 1440p play, but not competitive with top-tier configurations that would push 4K beyond 60 FPS across all presets.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 serves as the primary rendering engine, and its specifications directly explain the measured frame rates. With 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus delivering 272.0 GB/s bandwidth, the card has sufficient memory throughput for Doom's texture loads at 1080p and 1440p, but the 4K results reveal bandwidth constraints. The GPU's boost clock of 2460 MHz and 3072 shading units produce 15.11 TFLOPS of FP32 compute, which drives the 1080p High result of 166.2 FPS. Notably, the card's memory clock of 2125 MHz (17 Gbps effective) is a limiting factor at 4K: the 48 FPS Ultra result at 3840x2160 represents a 64.4% drop from the 1080p Ultra score of 134.9 FPS, a steep decline that points to memory bandwidth saturation rather than compute limitations. The GPU's 96 texture mapping units and 48 render output units handle Doom's geometry efficiently, evidenced by the scaling from 1080p High (166.2 FPS) to 1440p High (106 FPS) being a 36.2% reduction, which is roughly proportional to the pixel count increase of 77.8%—indicating the card is compute-bound at lower resolutions. The RTX 4060's 24 RT cores are largely irrelevant for this title, as Doom does not utilize ray tracing, so the performance profile reflects pure rasterization throughput.

FAQ

Q: Can this system maintain 60 FPS at 4K?

A: Yes, but only on the High preset, which averages 61.1 FPS. The Medium preset achieves 67.9 FPS, while Ultra drops to 48 FPS, below the 60 FPS threshold.

Q: What is the best settings preset for 1440p gaming?

A: Medium provides the best experience at 130.5 FPS average. It is 23.1% faster than High (106 FPS) and 44.0% faster than Ultra (90.6 FPS), while sacrificing only 14.9% performance versus Low (150 FPS).

Q: How does the RTX 4060's memory bandwidth affect 4K performance?

A: The 272.0 GB/s bandwidth on a 128-bit bus appears to be the limiting factor at 4K, as the FPS drop from 1080p to 4K on High is 63.2% (from 166.2 to 61.1 FPS), which is larger than the pixel count increase of 400%.

Q: Is the Ultra preset ever recommended for this combo?

A: Yes, but only at 1080p, where it averages 134.9 FPS. At 1440p Ultra drops to 90.6 FPS, and at 4K it falls to 48 FPS, making it unsuitable for those resolutions.

Q: What FPS can be expected at 1080p with High settings?

A: The system delivers 166.2 FPS average at 1920x1080 on High, which is sufficient for 144 Hz monitors and represents a 23.2% improvement over Ultra (134.9 FPS).

Q: Does the CPU or GPU become the bottleneck at lower resolutions?

A: At 1080p, the GPU is compute-bound, as evidenced by the 38.6% FPS increase from High (166.2) to Low (230.4), while the CPU's 6 cores and 12 threads provide ample headroom for Doom's engine.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals a predictable yet informative scaling pattern across resolutions. Moving from 1080p to 1440p on High settings, the average FPS drops from 166.2 to 106, a 36.2% reduction. The pixel count increases by 77.8%, so the FPS loss is less than proportional, indicating that the RTX 4060 has spare compute capacity at 1080p that gets utilized at 1440p. The scaling from 1440p to 4K on High is more severe: 106 FPS falls to 61.1 FPS, a 42.4% drop for a 125% increase in pixels—this steeper decline signals the onset of memory bandwidth limitations. The Low preset shows the same pattern: 230.4 FPS at 1080p, 150 FPS at 1440p (a 34.9% drop), and 77.6 FPS at 4K (a 48.3% drop from 1440p). The Ultra preset exhibits the worst scaling, with 134.9 FPS at 1080p, 90.6 FPS at 1440p (a 32.8% drop), and 48 FPS at 4K (a 47.0% drop from 1440p). This data suggests that while the GPU is the primary limiting component at 4K, the CPU's 2.60 GHz base clock and 4.40 GHz boost clock provide sufficient single-thread performance to avoid bottlenecking at 1080p, where frame rates exceed 200 FPS on lower presets.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-11400F brings 6 cores and 12 threads based on the Rocket Lake architecture, with a base clock of 2.60 GHz and a boost clock of 4.40 GHz. For Doom, a game that scales well with single-thread performance, this processor's 3dmark_single_thread score of 868 and 3dmark_2_threads score of 1691 indicate strong per-core throughput. The CPU's 12 MB of shared L3 cache and dual-channel DDR4 memory support (51.2 GB/s bandwidth) are sufficient to feed the RTX 4060 without becoming a bottleneck at 1080p, where the system achieves 230.4 FPS on Low settings. The 3dmark_max_threads score of 5652 shows that multi-threaded scaling is modest, but Doom's engine does not heavily utilize more than 4-6 threads, as evidenced by the 3dmark_4_threads score of 3171 being 56.1% of the max-threads score. The CPU's passmark_multithread score of 16908 and passmark_single_thread score of 2981 place it in the 75th percentile of all CPUs, which is higher than the GPU's 66th percentile, suggesting the processor has headroom to spare. At 4K, the CPU's role diminishes further, as the frame rates (48-77.6 FPS) are clearly GPU-limited, meaning the 11400F's 65W TDP and 14 nm process node are not constraining factors in this title.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete measured FPS dataset for Doom with this combo is as follows. At 1920x1080, Low settings produce 230.4 FPS, Medium 198.9 FPS, High 166.2 FPS, and Ultra 134.9 FPS. The progression from Low to Ultra shows a 41.4% performance reduction, with the largest single-step drop occurring from Medium to High (32.7 FPS, a 16.4% decrease). At 2560x1440, the results are 150 FPS (Low), 130.5 FPS (Medium), 106 FPS (High), and 90.6 FPS (Ultra). The Medium-to-High gap at 1440p is 24.5 FPS (18.8% reduction), which is proportionally similar to 1080p. At 3840x2160, the system delivers 77.6 FPS (Low), 67.9 FPS (Medium), 61.1 FPS (High), and 48 FPS (Ultra). The Ultra preset at 4K is the only configuration that falls below 60 FPS, and it represents a 38.1% drop from High. Comparing settings across resolutions, the Low preset at 4K (77.6 FPS) is faster than the Ultra preset at 1440p (90.6 FPS) but slower than High at 1440p (106 FPS), illustrating how resolution scaling interacts with quality settings. The data shows that the Medium preset at 1440p (130.5 FPS) outperforms the High preset at 1080p (166.2 FPS) by a smaller margin than expected, but the visual fidelity gain at 1440p Medium is substantial relative to the 21.5% FPS cost.