Doom

The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile delivers exceptional performance in Doom, placing this combination in the top quartile of all tested configurations. With frame rates exceeding 300 FPS at lower settings and 1080p, the system demonstrates a clear capacity for high-refresh-rate gaming, though the data suggests that the GPU becomes the primary constraint at higher resolutions and quality presets.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data for this combination reveals a clear hierarchy across the four available presets, with the most balanced experience found at the Medium setting. At 1920x1080, the Medium preset delivers an average of 275 FPS, which is only 41 frames behind the Low preset’s 316 FPS but provides substantially better visual fidelity. The High preset at 1080p still produces a very playable 232 FPS average, making it a strong choice for users who prioritize image quality over raw frame rates.

For 2560x1440 resolution, the Medium preset again stands out as the optimal choice, achieving 178 FPS average with a minimum of 151 FPS. This represents a 28 FPS improvement over the High preset’s 150 FPS while maintaining smooth gameplay. The jump from Medium to Low at this resolution yields 204 FPS, but the visual trade-off is significant. The Ultra preset, while visually impressive at 123 FPS average, may introduce noticeable frame pacing issues for competitive play.

At 3840x2160, the situation becomes more nuanced. The Medium preset delivers 96 FPS average with an 82 FPS minimum, which remains above the 60 FPS threshold for most displays. The High preset at 81 FPS is still playable but begins to show the GPU’s limits. The Ultra preset drops to 67 FPS, which is borderline for demanding users. The Low preset at 111 FPS offers the best performance at 4K but sacrifices considerable visual quality.

The data indicates that Medium is the sweet spot across all three resolutions, providing the best balance between frame rate and visual fidelity. For users with high-refresh-rate 1080p displays, the High preset at 232 FPS is recommended, as it remains well above the 144Hz threshold while offering better detail than Medium. At 4K, users should stick with Medium or High depending on whether they prioritize smoothness or visual quality.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific configuration ranks 823rd out of 3712 tested combinations in Doom, placing it in the top 22% of all systems evaluated. This percentile ranking is notable because it combines a mobile mid-range CPU with a flagship mobile GPU, creating a system that outperforms many desktop configurations despite the thermal constraints of a laptop form factor.

The ranking suggests that the RTX 4090 Mobile is the dominant contributor to this system’s Doom performance. The GPU’s 84th percentile ranking among all GPUs, combined with the CPU’s 79th percentile ranking among all processors, produces a combined result that exceeds what either component would achieve independently. This synergy is particularly evident at 1080p, where the system achieves frame rates that rival dedicated gaming desktops.

Comparatively, the CPU alone sits just 0.1% below the AMD Ryzen 7 5800 in average benchmark scores, and 0.3% below both the Intel Core i5-12600K and the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X. This places the Ultra 5 125H in a competitive position against desktop CPUs from previous generations, though its mobile form factor limits sustained performance. The GPU, meanwhile, sits 0.8% above the NVIDIA Quadro M6000 and 0.9% above both the RTX 5050 Mobile and Quadro M6000 24 GB, while trailing the RTX A6000 by 0.9%.

The 823rd ranking out of 3712 reflects a system that is capable of running Doom at maximum settings across all tested resolutions. The fact that this combination achieves 67 FPS at 4K Ultra — a demanding scenario for any hardware — underscores its high-end positioning within the benchmark database.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile serves as the primary performance driver in this configuration, and the data confirms its central role in Doom’s frame rate output. The GPU features 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, providing 576.0 GB/s of bandwidth. This memory configuration is particularly well-suited to Doom’s texture-heavy environments, which can consume significant VRAM at higher resolutions and quality settings.

Clock speeds for this mobile GPU are set to a base of 1335 MHz with a boost of 1695 MHz, while the memory operates at 2250 MHz (18 Gbps effective). These clocks, combined with the Ada Lovelace architecture’s 9728 shading units, 304 texture mapping units, and 112 render output units, yield a theoretical pixel rate of 189.8 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 515.3 GTexel/s. The GPU’s FP32 compute rating of 32.98 TFLOPS provides ample headroom for Doom’s modern rendering techniques.

The benchmark results show how the GPU’s capabilities scale with resolution. At 1080p, the GPU is not fully saturated, as evidenced by the 316 FPS at Low settings compared to 190 FPS at Ultra. This indicates that CPU limitations begin to appear at lower resolutions, where the GPU can generate frames faster than the CPU can feed it. At 1440p, the GPU takes on more responsibility, with the spread between Low (204 FPS) and Ultra (123 FPS) remaining substantial. At 4K, the GPU is clearly the bottleneck, with the difference between Low (111 FPS) and Ultra (67 FPS) reflecting pure GPU rendering load.

The GPU’s 16 GB VRAM capacity ensures that even at 4K Ultra settings, memory is not a limiting factor in Doom. This is corroborated by the consistent frame rates observed, with the 4K Medium preset showing a minimum of 82 FPS against an average of 96 FPS, indicating stable memory and thermal performance.

FAQ

Q: What frame rate can this system achieve at 1440p with High settings?

A: The measured data shows an average of 150 FPS at 2560x1440 with High settings, making it well-suited for high-refresh-rate monitors in this resolution.

Q: Is the RTX 4090 Mobile the bottleneck at 1080p?

A: Not entirely. The jump from Low (316 FPS) to Ultra (190 FPS) at 1080p suggests the GPU is capable of much higher output, indicating CPU limitations begin to surface at this resolution, particularly at lower quality presets.

Q: How does this system perform at 4K Ultra settings?

A: The combination achieves an average of 67 FPS at 3840x2160 with Ultra settings. This is playable but below the 90 FPS threshold that some users prefer for fast-paced FPS titles.

Q: What is the minimum frame rate observed in the data?

A: The lowest recorded minimum frame rate is 82 FPS, which occurs at 3840x2160 with Medium settings. This represents the worst-case frame pacing scenario in the measured results.

*Q: Does the system support ray tracing for Doom?*

A: The RTX 4090 Mobile features 76 ray tracing cores and supports DirectX 12 Ultimate, but the measured Doom results do not include ray tracing data, so performance with that feature enabled is not quantified in this dataset.

Q: How does the GPU’s overall benchmark score compare to its nearest rivals?

A: The RTX 4090 Mobile’s average benchmark score of 43667 places it 0.8% above the Quadro M6000, 0.9% above the RTX 5050 Mobile, and 0.9% above the Quadro M6000 24 GB, while sitting 0.9% below the RTX A6000.

Resolution Scaling

The performance scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals a classic GPU-bound scenario, with frame rates dropping consistently as resolution increases. At Low settings, the system delivers 316 FPS at 1080p, 204 FPS at 1440p, and 111 FPS at 4K. This represents a 35% drop from 1080p to 1440p and a further 46% drop from 1440p to 4K. The cumulative drop from 1080p to 4K at Low settings is 65%, which aligns with the pixel count increase from 2.07 million to 8.29 million — a 4x increase in rendering load.

At Medium settings, the scaling is slightly less dramatic: 275 FPS at 1080p, 178 FPS at 1440p, and 96 FPS at 4K. This represents a 35% drop to 1440p and a 46% drop to 4K, mirroring the Low preset’s scaling pattern. The High settings show 232 FPS at 1080p, 150 FPS at 1440p, and 81 FPS at 4K, with drops of 35% and 46% respectively. Ultra settings produce 190 FPS at 1080p, 123 FPS at 1440p, and 67 FPS at 4K, with similar proportional declines.

The consistency of these scaling patterns across all settings presets indicates that the GPU is the limiting component at higher resolutions. The RTX 4090 Mobile’s 576.0 GB/s memory bandwidth and 32.98 TFLOPS of compute power are being fully utilized as resolution increases, with the system transitioning from a more balanced CPU/GPU workload at 1080p to a strictly GPU-bound scenario at 4K.

Interestingly, the relative performance gap between settings presets narrows at higher resolutions. At 1080p, the difference between Low and Ultra is 126 FPS (316 vs 190). At 4K, this gap shrinks to 44 FPS (111 vs 67). This suggests that at 4K, the GPU’s rendering pipeline is saturated regardless of quality settings, with the additional work from higher presets being absorbed by the GPU’s compute and memory resources with diminishing returns.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H provides the computational foundation for this system, featuring 14 cores and 18 threads based on the Meteor Lake architecture. The CPU operates with a base clock of 3.60 GHz and a boost clock of 4.50 GHz, with a TDP of 28 watts. This mobile processor, built on Intel’s 7 nm process, includes 18 MB of shared L3 cache and supports dual-channel DDR5 memory with 89.6 GB/s bandwidth.

In Doom, the CPU’s role is most evident at 1080p, where the GPU can produce frames faster than the processor can maintain. The benchmark data shows 316 FPS at Low settings, which approaches the practical limits of the CPU’s single-thread performance. The CPU’s PassMark single-thread score of 3399 and Cinebench R23 single-core score of 1647.5 indicate strong per-core performance that is sufficient for Doom’s game logic and physics calculations.

The CPU’s multi-threaded capabilities are less critical for Doom, which is primarily a single-threaded game engine. However, the 14-core/18-thread configuration ensures that background tasks and streaming do not interfere with gameplay. The CPU’s Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 12804.5 and PassMark multi-thread score of 21100 demonstrate ample headroom for system overhead.

The CPU’s overall benchmark average of 27507 places it just 0.1% below the AMD Ryzen 7 5800 and 0.3% below both the Intel Core i5-12600K and AMD Ryzen 7 5700X. This puts the Ultra 5 125H in a competitive position against desktop CPUs from previous generations, despite its mobile power envelope. The 79th percentile ranking among all CPUs indicates that this processor outperforms the majority of installed systems.

At 4K resolution, the CPU’s influence diminishes significantly, as the GPU becomes the dominant bottleneck. The frame rate differences between settings presets at 4K are primarily attributable to GPU rendering load rather than CPU throughput. This suggests that users upgrading from this CPU to a more powerful processor would see minimal gains in Doom at 4K, but could potentially unlock higher frame rates at 1080p with a more powerful GPU.