Downfall

Resolution Scaling — how FPS drops from 1080p to 4K and what it says about the limiting component

The frame rate scaling across resolutions reveals a system that transitions from CPU-bound at 1080p to GPU-bound at 4K, with the most dramatic drop occurring at the Ultra preset. At 1080p Low, the combo delivers 284 FPS, but at 4K Low that falls to 155 FPS — a 45% reduction that still leaves plenty of headroom for high-refresh displays. The Medium preset shows a similar pattern: 264 FPS at 1080p drops to 203 FPS at 1440p and then to 126 FPS at 4K. These figures indicate that the RTX 4070 SUPER has substantial compute reserves even at 4K, as the Low preset retains playable triple-digit averages at every resolution.

The High preset tells a more revealing story about the balance between CPU and GPU. At 1080p High, the system produces 233 FPS; at 1440p High, it manages 167 FPS; and at 4K High, it falls to 104 FPS. The drop from 1080p to 1440p (66 FPS) is proportionally similar to the drop from 1440p to 4K (63 FPS), suggesting a relatively linear scaling curve that points to a well-balanced pairing for this title. However, the Ultra preset breaks this pattern dramatically: 146 FPS at 1080p, 104 FPS at 1440p, and just 65 FPS at 4K. The 42 FPS loss from 1080p to 1440p and the 39 FPS loss from 1440p to 4K show that Ultra settings impose a much steeper GPU workload curve, with the 4K Ultra result being the only sub-100 FPS average recorded.

The limiting component shifts clearly between presets. At Low settings across all resolutions, the CPU’s 6 cores and 12 threads appear to be the ceiling at 1080p (284 FPS), since the GPU could likely push higher. At Medium and High, the scaling is more gradual, indicating that both CPU and GPU contribute to the bottleneck depending on resolution. At Ultra, the GPU becomes the definitive limiter — the 65 FPS at 4K versus 146 FPS at 1080p represents a 55% performance drop, which is consistent with a GPU-bound scenario where the RTX 4070 SUPER’s 12 GB of VRAM and 504.2 GB/s bandwidth are fully taxed. The data strongly suggests that for competitive or high-refresh play, staying at 1080p or 1440p with Medium or High settings is optimal, while 4K Ultra is only viable for those prioritizing visual fidelity over frame rate.

CPU Role — cores, clocks, and how they relate to this game's results

The Intel Core i5-10400F brings 6 cores and 12 threads, a configuration that proves adequate for Downfall’s demands but shows clear limitations in the highest-frame-rate scenarios. The CPU’s base clock of 2.90 GHz and boost clock of 4.30 GHz are modest by modern standards, yet the benchmark data shows the combo achieving 284 FPS at 1080p Low — a figure that suggests the processor can feed the GPU sufficiently at lower settings. The 3DMark single-thread score of 688 and Cinebench R23 single-core score of 1451 indicate that per-core performance is not exceptional, but it is sufficient for a horror title that likely does not demand extreme single-threaded throughput.

The multi-threaded results paint a more nuanced picture. The Cinebench R23 multicore score of 10283 and 3DMark max-threads score of 4735 show that the 12 threads are reasonably utilized, but the processor’s 68th percentile ranking among all CPUs places it in the mid-range tier. In Downfall, the evidence for CPU involvement comes from the 1080p Low result of 284 FPS versus the 1440p Low result of 248 FPS — only a 36 FPS drop when pixel count increases by 78%. This relatively small decline at Low settings strongly implies that the CPU is the primary limiter at 1080p, preventing the GPU from reaching even higher frame rates. At Medium and High presets, the CPU continues to play a role, as evidenced by the 1080p Medium result of 264 FPS, which is only 20 FPS below the Low setting — a smaller gap than what pure GPU scaling would predict.

The processor’s 12 MB of shared L3 cache and dual-channel DDR4 memory support with 42.7 GB/s bandwidth provide adequate data throughput for this title. The fact that the combo ranks 767 out of 3716 tested combinations (top 21%) suggests that the i5-10400F does not drag down the RTX 4070 SUPER in Downfall, but it also does not boost the pairing to elite status. The benchmark scores for the CPU — PassMark multithread at 12115, Geekbench multicore at 6257 — are consistent with a mid-range 10th-gen part that can keep up with modern GPUs at 1440p and 4K, where the GPU takes over as the bottleneck. At 1080p, however, the CPU’s limits become apparent, particularly in the Ultra preset where the 146 FPS result is likely constrained by both processor throughput and the GPU’s render load.

How This Combo Ranks — use comboRankInGame vs other tested combos

The combination of the Intel Core i5-10400F with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER achieves a rank of 767 out of 3716 tested combos in Downfall, placing it in the top 20.6% of all configurations evaluated. This ranking is notable because it places the combo ahead of many pairings that feature newer or more expensive components, while also revealing that the mid-range CPU does not prevent the high-end GPU from performing well in this title. The rank suggests that Downfall is not excessively CPU-demanding, as the i5-10400F’s 68th percentile CPU ranking is somewhat lower than the combo’s overall percentile would imply.

The GPU’s own ranking provides context: the RTX 4070 SUPER sits in the 83rd percentile among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 43223. The deltaPct values against its nearest rivals are minimal — just -0.1% versus the NVIDIA Quadro M6000 24 GB and -1% versus the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile — indicating that the GPU is performing exactly as expected with no thermal or driver anomalies. The CPU’s nearest rivals show similarly tight margins: the Intel Xeon 6756E is 0.2% ahead, while the AMD Ryzen 3 7320C is only 0.6% behind. This tight clustering around both components’ average scores suggests that the combo rank of 767 is not the result of any single component underperforming, but rather the natural outcome of pairing a mid-tier CPU with a high-tier GPU.

The measured FPS data corroborates this ranking. At 1440p High, the combo delivers 167 FPS, which is 60% higher than the 104 FPS at 4K Ultra — a spread that indicates the pairing has a wide operating range. The 4K Medium result of 126 FPS places the combo in a sweet spot for 60Hz and 120Hz displays, while the 1080p Low result of 284 FPS is competitive with much more expensive CPU-GPU combinations. The rank of 767 out of 3716 means that roughly 3 in 4 tested combos perform worse in Downfall, which validates the i5-10400F + RTX 4070 SUPER as a strong pairing for this title, particularly for users targeting high refresh rates at 1080p or 1440p, or solid 4K performance at Medium settings.

Measured FPS Breakdown — resolution by resolution, settings by settings, exact numbers

The measured frame rates provide a complete picture of performance across all three resolutions and four settings presets. At 1920x1080, the results are consistently high across all settings. The Low preset delivers an average of 284 FPS, while Medium achieves 264 FPS with a minimum of 225 FPS and maximum of 304 FPS. High settings produce 233 FPS, and Ultra drops to 146 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra at 1080p is 138 FPS, which represents a 49% reduction from the lowest to the highest quality settings — a substantial but expected cost for the visual improvements that Ultra brings.

At 2560x1440, the frame rates remain strong but show more separation between settings. Low produces 248 FPS, Medium achieves 203 FPS with a minimum of 173 FPS and maximum of 234 FPS, High delivers 167 FPS, and Ultra falls to 104 FPS. The transition from 1080p to 1440p costs 36 FPS at Low, 61 FPS at Medium, 66 FPS at High, and 42 FPS at Ultra. The relatively smaller drop at Ultra (42 FPS) compared to High (66 FPS) is an interesting anomaly — it suggests that the Ultra preset at 1080p is already heavily GPU-bound, so the resolution increase has a proportionally smaller impact. The 1440p Ultra result of 104 FPS is exactly equal to the 4K High result, indicating that the GPU’s workload at these two settings is similar.

At 3840x2160, the performance profile shows the GPU’s true limits. Low delivers 155 FPS, Medium achieves 126 FPS with a minimum of 107 FPS and maximum of 145 FPS, High produces 104 FPS, and Ultra falls to 65 FPS. The drop from 1440p to 4K costs 93 FPS at Low, 77 FPS at Medium, 63 FPS at High, and 39 FPS at Ultra. The Ultra preset’s relatively small drop from 1440p to 4K (39 FPS) versus the Low preset’s large drop (93 FPS) further confirms that Ultra settings are GPU-limited even at 1440p, while Low settings become GPU-limited only at 4K. The 4K Medium result of 126 FPS with a minimum of 107 FPS is particularly noteworthy — it clears the 100 FPS threshold with margin, making it a viable target for high-refresh 4K gaming. The 4K Ultra result of 65 FPS is the only measured average below 100 FPS, and it still provides a smooth experience for 60Hz displays.

GPU Role — VRAM, clocks, and how they relate to this game's results

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is the dominant component in this pairing, and its specifications directly explain the measured performance. The GPU features 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus with 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth, which proves sufficient for Downfall at all tested settings. The 4K Ultra result of 65 FPS, while low relative to other presets, does not indicate VRAM exhaustion — the minimum frame rates for the Medium preset (107 FPS at 4K, 173 FPS at 1440p, 225 FPS at 1080p) show no signs of stuttering or memory swapping. The GPU’s 80 ROPs and 224 texture mapping units handle the horror title’s rendering demands efficiently, with the 198.0 GPixel/s pixel rate and 554.4 GTexel/s texture rate providing ample throughput.

The clock speeds of the RTX 4070 SUPER — 1980 MHz base and 2475 MHz boost — are relatively high, and the benchmark results reflect this. The PassMark G3D score of 29995 places the GPU in the 83rd percentile, and the 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 4627 is consistent with Ada Lovelace architecture performance. The GPU’s 35.48 TFLOPS of FP32 compute is more than adequate for a horror game that likely does not push extreme compute workloads. The 56 RT cores and 224 tensor cores provide headroom for ray tracing and DLSS, though the measured data does not include these features enabled — the results are purely rasterization.

The GPU’s VRAM capacity of 12 GB is worth noting in the context of the 4K Ultra result. The 65 FPS average at 4K Ultra is likely limited by the GPU’s compute and memory bandwidth rather than capacity, as the 504.2 GB/s bandwidth is the theoretical ceiling for the 192-bit interface. The fact that 4K High produces 104 FPS — 39 frames higher than Ultra — suggests that the Ultra preset’s additional effects (likely shadows, reflections, and post-processing) push the GPU beyond its comfortable operating range. The GPU’s nearest rivals in the benchmark database — the Quadro M6000 24 GB and RTX 4090 Mobile — have nearly identical average scores (within 1%), which confirms that the RTX 4070 SUPER is performing exactly as expected with no thermal throttling or driver issues affecting the results.

Settings Recommendations — which preset gives the best experience per the measured rows

The measured data provides clear guidance for optimizing the experience with this combo in Downfall. For 1080p displays, the High preset at 233 FPS is the recommended choice — it delivers 51 FPS more than Ultra while being visually close, and it remains well above the 144Hz refresh rate that most high-refresh monitors offer. The Medium preset at 264 FPS is the best choice for competitive play or for users with 240Hz displays, as it sacrifices minimal visual quality for a 31 FPS gain over High. The Low preset at 284 FPS offers diminishing returns over Medium, and the 20 FPS difference does not justify the visual downgrade. The Ultra preset at 146 FPS is only recommended for users who prioritize image quality over frame rate and have a 144Hz display that can still benefit from the higher refresh.

For 1440p displays, the Medium preset at 203 FPS is the standout recommendation. It provides a smooth experience on 144Hz and 165Hz monitors while maintaining good visual fidelity. The High preset at 167 FPS is also viable for 144Hz displays, and it offers better image quality with only a 36 FPS penalty. The Ultra preset at 104 FPS is suitable for 100Hz or 120Hz displays, but the 99 FPS drop from Medium to Ultra makes it a less attractive option. The Low preset at 248 FPS is overkill for most 1440p displays (which typically cap at 144Hz or 165Hz) and should only be used for esports-style play. The sweet spot for most users is Medium, which balances the 203 FPS average with the 173 FPS minimum ensuring consistent frame pacing.

For 4K displays, the Medium preset at 126 FPS is the clear winner. It is the only preset that combines high visual quality with triple-digit frame rates, and the minimum of 107 FPS ensures no drops below 100 FPS. The High preset at 104 FPS is a close second, offering better visuals with only a 22 FPS penalty — this is the best choice for users with 120Hz 4K displays who want maximum quality without sacrificing smoothness. The Low preset at 155 FPS is viable for 144Hz 4K displays (which are rare), but the visual compromise is significant. The Ultra preset at 65 FPS is not recommended for 4K unless the user has a 60Hz display and absolutely requires maximum settings — the 61 FPS difference between Ultra and Medium is a steep price for the visual upgrade. The data clearly indicates that Medium at 4K provides the best balance of frame rate and visual quality for the RTX 4070 SUPER in Downfall, with High as a strong alternative for users who prioritize fidelity.