Doom

# Doom — Intel Core Ultra 7 265K + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060

The measured frame rates for this combination show a clear pattern: Doom's performance scales heavily with resolution, moving from highly fluid triple-digit averages at 1080p to borderline playable numbers at 4K. At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the RTX 5060 delivers 243 FPS average, while the same settings at 3840x2160 drop to 85 FPS — a 65% reduction that indicates the GPU becomes the dominant constraint as pixel count rises. The CPU, with 20 cores and a 5.50 GHz boost clock, appears more than sufficient to feed the GPU at lower resolutions, where the frame rates approach the practical limits of the engine's rendering path.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS progression from 1080p to 4K reveals a steep performance curve that is typical for a GPU-bound title at high resolutions. At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the average of 243 FPS suggests the RTX 5060 is nowhere near its ceiling; the frame rate is likely capped by game logic or CPU draw-call throughput rather than raw pixel shading. Moving to 2560x1440 at the same settings yields 157 FPS, a 35% drop, and at 3840x2160 it falls to 85 FPS, another 46% decline. This compounding loss with each resolution step points squarely at the graphics card's fill rate and memory bandwidth — 448.0 GB/s across a 128-bit bus — as the limiting factor.

The Medium preset tells a similar story but with a notable intermediate data point. At 3840x2160 Medium, the average is 74 FPS with a minimum of 63 and maximum of 85, which brackets the Low preset's average of 85 FPS. This overlap suggests that at 4K, even modest settings changes produce measurable swings, and the GPU is operating close to its sustained throughput limit. At 2560x1440 Medium, the average of 137 FPS (min 116, max 157) shows the same pattern: the GPU has headroom at 1440p but loses it quickly as resolution climbs.

High settings at 4K produce 63 FPS average, which is below the 60 FPS threshold many consider the baseline for smooth play. Ultra at 4K drops further to 51 FPS, a 19% reduction from High. The gap between Low and Ultra at 4K is 34 FPS (85 vs 51), while at 1080p the same settings gap is 97 FPS (243 vs 146). This compression of the settings range at higher resolutions is a classic sign that the GPU's shading units — 3840 in this case — are the bottleneck; at 1080p, the CPU and memory system can keep up with even the heaviest preset, but at 4K, the pixel workload dominates everything else.

FAQ

Q: What is the highest average FPS this combo achieves in Doom?

A: The maximum measured average is 243 FPS, achieved at 1920x1080 with Low settings. The same resolution with Medium settings reaches 211 FPS, and High produces 179 FPS.

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

A: Yes, but only up to High settings. At 3840x2160, the averages are 85 FPS (Low), 74 FPS (Medium), 63 FPS (High), and 51 FPS (Ultra). The High preset clears 60 FPS, while Ultra falls short.

Q: How much performance is lost going from 1080p to 1440p?

A: At Low settings, the drop is from 243 to 157 FPS, a 35% reduction. At High settings, it goes from 179 to 116 FPS, a 35% reduction as well. The relative penalty is consistent across presets.

Q: What is the minimum FPS recorded in the measured data?

A: The only minimum values provided are for the Medium preset: 63 FPS at 4K, 116 FPS at 1440p, and 180 FPS at 1080p. Other presets have no min/max data.

Q: Does the CPU or GPU limit performance at 1080p?

A: At 1080p Low, the 243 FPS average combined with the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K's 20 cores and 5.50 GHz boost suggests the CPU is not the primary bottleneck. The GPU's 19.18 TFLOPS FP32 throughput is ample for that workload, so the limit is likely engine-level.

Q: How does the RTX 5060's VRAM affect 4K performance?

A: The 8 GB GDDR7 memory with 448.0 GB/s bandwidth appears sufficient for Doom at 4K Ultra, which averages 51 FPS. There is no indication from the data that VRAM capacity causes a performance cliff at any tested settings.

Settings Recommendations

Based on the measured rows, the Medium preset offers the best balance of frame rate and visual quality across all three resolutions. At 3840x2160, Medium delivers 74 FPS average with a 63 FPS minimum — the only 4K settings row that provides both a comfortable average and a floor above 60 FPS. At 2560x1440, Medium reaches 137 FPS average (min 116), which is 21 FPS higher than High and only 20 FPS below Low, while offering substantially better visuals than Low. At 1920x1080, Medium's 211 FPS average (min 180) is well above any display refresh rate likely paired with this system, and the gap to High (179 FPS) is a modest 32 FPS.

For players prioritizing maximum frame rates over visuals, Low at 1080p (243 FPS) or 1440p (157 FPS) is the clear choice. The Low preset at 4K still manages 85 FPS, which is playable but may not take full advantage of the display's native resolution. Ultra, by contrast, is only recommended at 1080p, where it hits 146 FPS average; at 1440p it falls to 95 FPS, and at 4K it drops to 51 FPS, which is below the 60 FPS standard for competitive play. The data suggests that High at 4K (63 FPS) is the ceiling for a smooth experience at that resolution, and Medium is the safest overall pick.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of Intel Core Ultra 7 265K and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 ranks 1640 out of 3712 tested combos in Doom, placing it in the 44th percentile of all systems measured. That puts it in the middle of the field, which is consistent with the RTX 5060's overall GPU percentile of 72 — a solidly above-average card — but the ranking indicates that many other GPU/CPU pairings achieve higher frame rates in this title. The CPU's percentile of 94 among all processors suggests the processor is not holding back the combo; the ranking is driven primarily by the graphics card's position.

The RTX 5060's nearest GPU rivals, based on average benchmark score, are the AMD Radeon 860M (0.3% lower score), NVIDIA GeForce MX550 (0.3% lower), AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary (0.8% lower), and AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT (1.2% higher). These deltas are small — within 1.2% — which means the RTX 5060 sits in a tight performance cluster. In Doom specifically, the measured FPS at 1080p High (179) and 1440p High (116) are strong numbers, but the 1640 rank suggests that many combos with faster GPUs or more favorable CPU-GPU pairings outpace it at higher settings.

The CPU's nearest rivals show a similar clustering: the Intel Xeon 6511P is 0.2% lower in average score, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8270 is 0.7% lower, the Intel Core i7-14700KF is 1% higher, and the AMD Ryzen 7 9700F is 1.3% higher. This means the Ultra 7 265K is well-matched to its peers, and swapping to any of these CPUs would change Doom performance by a negligible margin. The combo's rank is essentially a function of the GPU's tier within the broader test pool.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 is built on the Blackwell 2.0 architecture with a GB206 chip, fabricated on a 5 nm process at TSMC. It contains 21,900 million transistors on a 181 mm² die, with 3840 shading units, 120 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. The boost clock runs at 2497 MHz, producing 19.18 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput, while the texture rate is 299.6 GTexel/s and the pixel rate is 119.9 GPixel/s. The memory subsystem consists of 8 GB of GDDR7 on a 128-bit bus, yielding 448.0 GB/s of bandwidth.

In Doom, these specs translate to a GPU that is clearly the limiting component at 4K. The pixel rate of 119.9 GPixel/s and the 448.0 GB/s bandwidth are the key numbers: at 3840x2160 (8.3 million pixels), the GPU must process over 33 million pixels per frame at 4FPS, and the fill rate becomes the bottleneck at Ultra settings. The drop from 85 FPS at 4K Low to 51 FPS at 4K Ultra — a 40% reduction — shows how the added shading work (more textures, effects, and draw distance) saturates the 3840 shading units. At 1080p, the same settings swing only from 243 to 146 FPS (40% reduction as well), but the absolute numbers are high enough that the GPU still has spare capacity.

The 8 GB VRAM is not exposed as a limitation in the measured data; even at 4K Ultra, the combo maintains 51 FPS average without a catastrophic drop that would indicate memory swapping. The 128-bit bus width is narrow, yet the 28 Gbps effective GDDR7 speed compensates with 448.0 GB/s, which appears sufficient for Doom's textures and geometry at all presets. The GPU's overall benchmark percentile of 72, with an average score of 26331, places it above most discrete cards, and in Doom it delivers playable frame rates up to High at 4K.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 3840x2160, the measured averages are 85 FPS (Low), 74 FPS (Medium, with min 63 and max 85), 63 FPS (High), and 51 FPS (Ultra). The Medium row provides the only min/max data at 4K, showing a 22 FPS spread between minimum and maximum, which indicates some scene-to-scene variability but no severe stuttering. High at 4K sits just above the 60 FPS line, while Ultra falls 9 FPS below it.

At 2560x1440, the averages jump to 157 FPS (Low), 137 FPS (Medium, min 116, max 157), 116 FPS (High), and 95 FPS (Ultra). The Medium preset's minimum of 116 FPS is higher than the High preset's average of 116 FPS, which is an interesting crossover: the settings change from Medium to High costs more than 21 FPS on average, but the minimum frame rate remains identical. This suggests that High introduces occasional heavier scenes that drag the average down without affecting the floor.

At 1920x1080, the averages are 243 FPS (Low), 211 FPS (Medium, min 180, max 243), 179 FPS (High), and 146 FPS (Ultra). The Medium min/max range of 180 to 243 FPS shows a 63 FPS spread, which is the widest of any resolution, indicating that at 1080p the frame rate fluctuates more due to CPU-side variability or engine limits rather than GPU saturation. The Ultra preset at 1080p (146 FPS) is still higher than High at 1440p (116 FPS), reinforcing that resolution is the primary performance driver.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 7 265K is a 20-core, 20-thread processor based on the Arrow Lake architecture, manufactured on a 3 nm process at 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 of L1 per core, 3 MB of L2 per core, and 30 MB of shared L3. It supports DDR5 memory over a dual-channel bus with 102.4 GB/s of bandwidth, and it connects via PCIe Gen 5 with 20 CPU lanes.

In Doom, the CPU's role is most evident at 1080p, where the frame rates exceed 200 FPS at Low and Medium settings. At 243 FPS average, the time per frame is roughly 4.1 milliseconds, which leaves little room for CPU overhead. The 20 cores and 5.50 GHz boost clock provide ample single-thread performance — evidenced by the Cinebench R23 single-core score of 2020 and Geekbench single-core score of 2713 — to handle Doom's game logic and draw calls without becoming the bottleneck. The data shows that at 1080p, the GPU is still the limiting factor, as Low (243) to Ultra (146) spans 97 FPS, meaning the GPU's shading load varies widely while the CPU keeps pace.

At 4K, the CPU's influence diminishes further. The frame rate drops from 85 FPS at Low to 51 FPS at Ultra, and the CPU has more than enough headroom to feed the GPU at those rates. The 102.4 GB/s memory bandwidth is not a constraint either, as Doom's asset streaming fits within the 30 MB L3 cache and the dual-channel DDR5 bus. The CPU's overall percentile of 94, with an average benchmark score of 70879, places it in the top tier of processors, and its nearest rivals are all within 1.3% in average score — meaning no CPU swap would materially change Doom's performance. The bottleneck is the RTX 5060, especially at higher resolutions and settings.