Downfall

The Intel Core i5-11400F paired with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT delivers a compelling 1080p and 1440p experience in Downfall, but the data reveals a steep performance cliff at 4K Ultra that shifts the bottleneck firmly onto the GPU’s shading load. At 1920x1080, the combination produces an average of 310 FPS on Low settings, which drops to 252 FPS at Medium and 208.6 FPS at High. The jump to 2560x1440 sees these figures fall to 223.7 FPS, 183.6 FPS, and 148.3 FPS respectively, indicating a relatively mild scaling penalty of roughly 27–28% across the board when moving from 1080p to 1440p. This suggests the CPU and GPU are well balanced at these resolutions, with the frame rate reduction tracking closely with the increase in pixel count rather than exposing a single-threaded limitation.

The picture changes dramatically at 3840x2160. High settings produce 95 FPS, Medium yields 112.9 FPS, and Low reaches 140.4 FPS, but Ultra collapses to 55.8 FPS. The transition from 1440p High to 4K High represents a 36% drop in average frame rate, which is a steeper decline than the pure pixel count increase would predict. This indicates that Downfall’s rendering pipeline becomes increasingly fill-rate and shader-bound at 4K, and the RX 9070 XT’s raw compute is the primary limiter rather than the i5-11400F’s six cores or 12 threads. The 4K Ultra result, at less than half the frame rate of 1440p Ultra (94 FPS), underscores that the highest preset’s additional effects—likely volumetric lighting and shadow cascades—impose a disproportionate cost at high pixel densities.

Resolution Scaling

The measured data shows that resolution scaling is not uniform across the preset spectrum. From 1080p to 1440p, the average FPS reduction is approximately 28% for Low, Medium, and High settings, which is almost perfectly proportional to the 1.78x increase in pixel count (the inverse being a 0.56x factor). This linear behavior indicates that, at these settings, the system is not constrained by memory bandwidth or CPU thread scheduling; the RX 9070 XT’s 644.6 GB/s of bandwidth and the i5-11400F’s dual-channel DDR4 at 51.2 GB/s are sufficient to feed the render pipeline without stalling.

However, the scaling from 1440p to 4K is markedly worse. Low settings drop from 223.7 FPS to 140.4 FPS, a 37% reduction, while Medium falls from 183.6 FPS to 112.9 FPS, a 38.5% reduction. High settings see a 36% drop (148.3 to 95 FPS). These figures are roughly 10 percentage points worse than the ideal pixel-count scaling, which would predict a 44% reduction (1 – 0.56). The discrepancy is most pronounced at Ultra, where 1440p yields 94 FPS and 4K yields 55.8 FPS, a 40.6% decline. This pattern suggests that at 4K, the GPU’s 4096 shading units and 128 ROPs become the bottleneck, and the additional texture fetch and pixel shading work at Ultra exceed what the RDNA 4.0 architecture can sustain at playable frame rates.

Settings Recommendations

For users targeting 60 FPS as a baseline, the data supports Medium settings at 4K as the optimal choice. The 112.9 FPS average at 3840x2160 Medium is nearly double the 4K Ultra result of 55.8 FPS, and it remains well above the 4K High figure of 95 FPS. The gap between Medium and High at 4K is only 17.9 FPS, but the visual fidelity gain from High is marginal compared to the 15.9% frame rate sacrifice. At 1440p, High settings at 148.3 FPS provide a better experience than Ultra at 94 FPS, because the latter’s additional effects do not justify a 36.6% performance penalty when the refresh rate of most 1440p monitors (typically 144Hz or 165Hz) is better served by the higher frame rate.

At 1080p, the data shows that Ultra at 132.3 FPS is still highly playable, but High at 208.6 FPS offers a 57.6% improvement in average frame rate. For competitive or high-refresh-rate displays, Low settings at 310 FPS are the clear winner, as they eliminate any possibility of the CPU becoming a limiting factor. The i5-11400F’s 3dmark single-thread score of 868 and passmark single-thread score of 2981 indicate strong per-core performance, but Downfall’s horror genre relies on dense shadow maps and particle effects that scale directly with preset level. The measured data suggests that Medium is the sweet spot at 4K, High at 1440p, and High or Ultra at 1080p depending on whether the user prioritizes smoothness or visual detail.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of the Intel Core i5-11400F and AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT ranks 455th out of 1,741 tested combos for Downfall, placing it in the top 26.1% of all systems evaluated. This percentile positioning is notable because the CPU itself only sits at the 75th percentile versus all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 17,181, while the GPU sits at the 82nd percentile versus all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 39,647. The combination outperforms what the individual component percentiles would suggest, indicating that Downfall is more sensitive to GPU throughput than to CPU cache or thread scaling.

Looking at the nearest rivals for the CPU, the i5-11400F is essentially tied with the AMD Ryzen 7 5700U (which has an average score of 17,189, a 0% delta) and the Intel Core i7-1260P (17,212, -0.2% delta). This means that swapping in either of those mobile-oriented processors would likely produce nearly identical frame rates in Downfall, provided the GPU remains the same. For the GPU, the RX 9070 XT is closely matched by the AMD Radeon Pro 575 (39,703 score, -0.1% delta) and the NVIDIA RTX A500 Mobile (39,568, 0.2% delta). These rival GPUs are older professional or mobile parts, which underscores that the RX 9070 XT’s 16 GB of GDDR6 memory and 48.66 TFLOPS of FP32 compute are far ahead of what those rivals offer, yet the benchmark scores are similar due to driver optimizations or test variance.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete measured FPS dataset for this combo reveals a clear hierarchy across resolutions and presets. At 1920x1080, the average FPS ranges from a low of 132.3 at Ultra to a high of 310 at Low, with Medium at 252 and High at 208.6. This represents a 134.4% performance span between the lowest and highest presets, which is a typical spread for a GPU-bound horror title. At 2560x1440, the range tightens slightly: Ultra yields 94 FPS, High yields 148.3, Medium yields 183.6, and Low yields 223.7. The span here is 129.7 FPS (138% increase from Ultra to Low), which shows that 1440p still allows the GPU to stretch its legs without hitting the CPU’s ceiling.

At 3840x2160, the values compress further. Ultra drops to 55.8 FPS, High reaches 95, Medium achieves 112.9, and Low tops out at 140.4. The span from Ultra to Low is 84.6 FPS, which is a 151.6% increase. This wider relative spread at 4K confirms that the GPU is the primary bottleneck at higher pixel counts, as lowering settings has a proportionally larger effect on frame rate. Notably, the delta between 4K Low (140.4 FPS) and 4K Medium (112.9 FPS) is 27.5 FPS, while the delta between 4K Medium and 4K High is 17.9 FPS, and between 4K High and 4K Ultra is 39.2 FPS. The Ultra preset’s penalty is disproportionately large, suggesting that it enables computationally expensive features like screen-space reflections or ray-traced shadows that the RDNA 4.0 architecture handles inefficiently at 4K.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT’s role in this combo is defined by its memory subsystem and clock speeds. The GPU operates at a base clock of 1660 MHz and a boost clock of 2970 MHz, with a game clock of 2400 MHz. The memory runs at 2518 MHz, which translates to 20.1 Gbps effective, across a 256-bit bus, yielding a total bandwidth of 644.6 GB/s. This bandwidth is critical for Downfall at 4K, where the 16 GB GDDR6 frame buffer must handle high-resolution textures and depth buffers simultaneously. The data shows that at 4K High (95 FPS), the GPU is consuming roughly 70% of the available bandwidth compared to 1080p High (208.6 FPS), which suggests that memory throughput is not the limiting factor—rather, the 4096 shading units and 128 ROPs are saturated.

The GPU’s pixel rate of 380.2 GPixel/s and texture rate of 760.3 GTexel/s provide the theoretical ceiling for fill-rate-bound scenes. At 4K Ultra, the 55.8 FPS result implies that the GPU is achieving approximately 1.6 billion pixels per second (55.8 FPS * 8.3 million pixels), which is only 0.4% of the theoretical pixel rate. This indicates that the Ultra preset is not fill-rate bound but rather shader-bound, as the FP32 throughput of 48.66 TFLOPS is being consumed by complex lighting calculations. The 64 RT cores are present but likely underutilized in this horror title, which may not heavily feature ray-traced effects. Compared to its nearest GPU rivals—the Radeon Pro 575 and RX Vega 64—the RX 9070 XT’s 4 nm process node and RDNA 4.0 architecture provide a significant efficiency advantage, allowing it to maintain higher boost clocks under sustained load. The CPU’s role is secondary, as the i5-11400F’s 12 MB of L3 cache and 6 cores are sufficient to feed the GPU at 1080p, but at 4K, the GPU’s shading workload dominates the frame time, making the CPU’s 14 nm Rocket Lake architecture largely irrelevant to the final FPS figures.