Doom

How This Combo Ranks

The Intel Core Ultra 7 265K paired with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT lands at rank 1255 out of 1681 tested combos in Doom. That places this pairing in the lower-mid tier of the database, with roughly 75% of tested configurations delivering higher average frame rates. The ranking reflects a fundamental mismatch: a top-tier 2024 CPU paired with a 2019 mid-range GPU that was already end-of-life when this data was collected.

The CPU itself sits in the 97th percentile against all processors, with an average benchmark score of 79102. Its nearest rivals include the Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF at 79240 (0.2% behind), the Intel Core i9-14900KF at 79245 (0.2% behind), and the Intel Core i9-14900K at 79824 (0.9% ahead). The GPU, however, sits in just the 68th percentile among all graphics cards, with an average benchmark score of 24731. Its nearest rivals are the NVIDIA RTX A5000 Mobile at 24763 (0.1% ahead), the Intel Arc A350M at 24647 (0.3% behind), and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Mobile at 24592 (0.6% behind). The delta between CPU and GPU percentiles—97 versus 68—explains the middling combo rank: the processor is never the bottleneck in Doom, but the graphics card frequently is.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT is built on the Navi 10 chip using RDNA 1.0 architecture at a 7 nm process. It carries 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, yielding 448.0 GB/s of bandwidth. The base clock runs at 1605 MHz, with a game clock of 1755 MHz and a boost clock of 1905 MHz. Memory operates at 1750 MHz, or 14 Gbps effective. The card has 2560 shading units, 160 texture mapping units, and 64 raster operation units. Its theoretical peak rates are 121.9 GPixel/s for pixels and 304.8 GTexel/s for textures, with FP32 compute at 9.754 TFLOPS.

In Doom, these specifications produce a clear ceiling. The game was released in 2016 and runs on the id Tech 6 engine, which favors raw pixel throughput and memory bandwidth. The RX 5700 XT's 8 GB VRAM is adequate for this title, even at 4K, since Doom's texture sets are modest by modern standards. The card's pixel rate of 121.9 GPixel/s becomes the limiting factor at higher resolutions, particularly when settings push fill-rate demands. The 68th percentile GPU standing means this card outperforms roughly two-thirds of the database, but it is nowhere near the class leaders that populate the top combo ranks.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 7 265K is a 20-core, 20-thread processor from the Core Ultra Series 2, built on Arrow Lake architecture at a 3 nm process by TSMC. It has a base clock of 3.90 GHz and a boost clock of 5.50 GHz, with a 125 W TDP. The cache hierarchy includes 192 KB L1 per core, 3 MB L2 per core, and 30 MB of shared L3. Memory support is DDR5 over a dual-channel bus, providing 102.4 GB/s of bandwidth. The chip uses the Intel Socket 1851 and includes integrated Arc Xe-LPG Graphics with 64 execution units.

For Doom, the CPU is massively overprovisioned. The game's engine scales well up to about eight threads, and the 265K's 20 physical cores (with no hyperthreading, as threads equal cores) deliver far more parallel throughput than the title can utilize. Single-core performance is the more relevant metric here, and the 265K's Cinebench R23 single-core score of 7060 places it among the fastest desktop chips available. In multi-core workloads, the Cinebench R23 score of 50009 and PassMark multithread score of 58838 confirm this is a workstation-class CPU. But in Doom at 1080p with low settings, the frame rate is capped by the GPU, not the processor. The CPU's 97th percentile ranking means it is essentially never the constraint in this pairing.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured data covers three resolutions and four settings tiers each, for a total of twelve data points. All figures are average FPS; no minimum or maximum values were recorded.

At 1920x1080, the combo delivers 191.9 FPS on Low, 165 FPS on Medium, 141.2 FPS on High, and 115.2 FPS on Ultra. The gap from Low to Ultra is 76.7 FPS, or roughly 40% of the Low figure. This is a playable range across all settings, with even Ultra clearing 100 FPS. The 1080p results show the GPU still has headroom at this resolution, but the scaling between settings is steep—each tier costs about 15-20% performance.

Moving to 2560x1440, the numbers drop to 124.8 FPS on Low, 106.4 FPS on Medium, 89.2 FPS on High, and 72.6 FPS on Ultra. The Low-to-Ultra spread is 52.2 FPS. At this resolution, Ultra remains above 60 FPS, which is the threshold for smooth gameplay in a fast-paced FPS. Medium and High both exceed 85 FPS, giving players flexibility. The setting-to-setting deltas are consistent, suggesting the GPU is now the primary constraint.

At 3840x2160, performance falls to 68.8 FPS on Low, 58.1 FPS on Medium, 47 FPS on High, and 41.6 FPS on Ultra. This is the first resolution where no setting reaches 60 FPS. Low barely clears the 60 FPS mark, while Ultra drops below 45 FPS, which is borderline for competitive play. The 4K results expose the RX 5700 XT's limits: even with a powerful CPU behind it, the card cannot sustain high frame rates at this pixel count.

Resolution Scaling

The resolution scaling pattern tells a clear story about which component limits performance. From 1080p Low to 1440p Low, the frame rate drops from 191.9 to 124.8 FPS, a reduction of 35%. From 1440p Low to 4K Low, it falls from 124.8 to 68.8 FPS, another 45% drop. The cumulative 1080p-to-4K Low scaling is a 64% reduction, from 191.9 to 68.8 FPS.

For High settings, the progression is 141.2 FPS at 1080p, 89.2 FPS at 1440p, and 47 FPS at 4K—a 67% total drop. Ultra settings scale from 115.2 to 72.6 to 41.6 FPS, a 64% reduction. These percentages are remarkably consistent across settings, which indicates the bottleneck is purely pixel-throughput driven. If the CPU were limiting, the scaling would flatten at higher resolutions as the GPU took over; instead, the FPS drops proportionally with pixel count.

The data points to the GPU as the sole limiting component. At 1080p, the 191.9 FPS Low result is high enough that even a slower CPU might not change the outcome, but the 265K ensures zero CPU-side stalling. At 4K, the 41.6 FPS Ultra result is entirely attributable to the RX 5700 XT's 121.9 GPixel/s pixel rate and 9.754 TFLOPS FP32 throughput. The CPU's 97th percentile ranking and the GPU's 68th percentile standing create a situation where upgrading the graphics card would yield dramatic FPS gains at all resolutions, while swapping the CPU would produce negligible changes in this title. The combo rank of 1255 out of 1681 reflects this imbalance: the pairing is held back by its graphics card, not its processor.