Downfall

# Downfall with Intel Core Ultra 5 235 + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090

FAQ

Q: What is the combo's overall ranking in Downfall?

A: This pairing of Intel Core Ultra 5 235 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 ranks 90th out of 2,928 tested combos in Downfall, placing it in the top 3% of all configurations measured for this title.

Q: How does the CPU compare to its nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The Core Ultra 5 235 scores an average benchmark of 46,062, which is within 0.2% of the AMD EPYC 4364P (45,970) and AMD EPYC 7303 (45,960), and essentially tied with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 (46,030) and Intel Core i9-13900HX (46,098).

Q: What is the best performance tier available for this GPU in the measured data?

A: The RTX 4090 achieves its highest average frame rate at 1080p Low settings, delivering 442 FPS. At 4K Ultra, the same combo drops to 82 FPS, which remains playable but represents the most demanding tested configuration.

Q: Does the CPU hold the GPU back at any resolution?

A: The data suggests the CPU becomes a limiting factor primarily at lower resolutions. At 1080p Low, the combo produces 442 FPS, while at 4K Low it drops to 196 FPS — a 55.7% reduction that reflects GPU-bound scaling rather than CPU saturation.

Q: What memory bandwidth does the CPU provide, and does it matter for this game?

A: The Core Ultra 5 235 supports dual-channel DDR5 with a theoretical bandwidth of 102.4 GB/s. Given that the GPU has 1.01 TB/s of bandwidth, the system memory is not a bottleneck in the measured results.

Q: Is this a current production part?

A: The CPU is listed as Active in production status with a launch MSRP of $257, while the GPU is marked End-of-life. The CPU was released on 2025-01-06, and the GPU on 2022-09-19.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 5 235 is a 14-core, 14-thread processor built on the Arrow Lake architecture, fabricated on a 3 nm process by TSMC. It has a base clock of 3.40 GHz and a boost clock of 5.00 GHz, with a 65 W TDP. The chip carries 24 MB of shared L3 cache and 3 MB of L2 cache per core, plus 192 KB of L1 cache per core. This configuration produces a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 14,769 and a single-core score of 2,085, with a PassMark multithread score of 37,816 and a single-thread score of 4,516.

In Downfall, the CPU's role varies by resolution and settings. At 1080p Low, the measured 442 FPS average suggests the processor is feeding frames efficiently without becoming a hard ceiling — the GPU has headroom to run at extremely high rates. The single-core performance, reflected in the R15 single-core score of 210 and R20 single-core score of 875, is sufficient for this horror title's game logic and physics. The 14-core design also handles background tasks and streaming overhead without contention, though Downfall is unlikely to leverage all 14 threads heavily.

The CPU's percentile ranking of 89 among all tested CPUs places it in the upper tier of processors. Its nearest rival, the Intel Core i9-13900HX, scores only 0.1% higher on average, indicating that the Ultra 5 235 trades blows with a previous-generation flagship mobile part. The AMD EPYC 4364P and EPYC 7303 trail by 0.2% each, further confirming that this desktop chip sits in a competitive band for gaming workloads. For Downfall specifically, the boost clock of 5.00 GHz is the more relevant specification, as horror games typically favor high single-thread throughput over many-core parallelism.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS data covers four settings tiers (Low, Medium, High, Ultra) across three resolutions. At 1080p, the Ultra preset yields 185 FPS average, which is more than sufficient for any display. High produces 296 FPS, Medium 361 FPS, and Low 442 FPS. The gap between Ultra and High at 1080p is 111 FPS, suggesting that the Ultra preset imposes a significant rendering cost for marginal visual gain in this title.

At 1440p, the pattern shifts. Ultra delivers 132 FPS, High 212 FPS, Medium 258 FPS, and Low 315 FPS. The drop from High to Ultra is 80 FPS, while the step from Medium to High costs 46 FPS. For players with 144 Hz displays, the High preset at 1440p is the sweet spot: it clears the refresh rate with 68 FPS of headroom. The Medium preset at 1440p, with 258 FPS, is overkill for most monitors but provides a large safety margin for frame-time spikes.

At 4K, the recommended preset depends on the display's refresh rate. Ultra manages 82 FPS average, which is suitable for 60 Hz panels but not for 120 Hz displays. High reaches 132 FPS, Medium 161 FPS, and Low 196 FPS. The Medium preset at 4K, with a minimum FPS of 136 and maximum of 185, offers the best balance of visual quality and frame rate consistency for high-refresh 4K monitors. The Ultra preset's 82 FPS average is technically playable but leaves no headroom for demanding scenes, and the missing minimum FPS data for Ultra suggests potential instability. Given that the GPU is capable of 132 FPS at 4K High, that setting is the sensible default for most users, with Medium as the fallback for those prioritizing frame rate stability.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo's rank of 90 out of 2,928 tested combinations puts it in the 97th percentile of all CPU-GPU pairings measured in Downfall. This is a strong result, but not a top-tier one — the fact that 89 other combinations score higher indicates that the Core Ultra 5 235, despite its excellent synthetic performance, does not extract the absolute maximum from the RTX 4090 in this game.

The GPU's percentile ranking of 88 against all GPUs is slightly lower than the CPU's percentile of 89, yet the combo still achieves a top-3% overall rank. This suggests that the RTX 4090's raw compute, particularly its 82.58 TFLOPS FP32 throughput and 1.01 TB/s memory bandwidth, compensates for any CPU limitation in this title. The nearest GPU rivals in the benchmark database — the Intel Arc Pro A60 (0% delta), AMD Radeon Pro Vega 48 (0.3% delta), and AMD Radeon PRO V710 (2.9% delta) — are not gaming parts, which underscores how the RTX 4090's synthetic scores translate to real-world gaming dominance.

The rank also reflects the measured data's fidelity: all FPS values are marked as measured, not estimated. This means the 90th-place ranking is an empirical observation rather than a projection. For context, the gap between this combo and the top-ranked configurations likely comes from CPUs with higher boost clocks or better gaming-specific optimizations, though the data does not specify which processors outperform it. What the data does show is that this pairing delivers excellent frame rates across all tested settings, with no configuration falling below 82 FPS average.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is built on the Ada Lovelace architecture with a 5 nm process from TSMC, containing 76,300 million transistors on a 609 mm² die. It has 16,384 shading units, 512 TMUs, and 176 ROPs, with 128 RT cores and 512 tensor cores. The GPU runs at a base clock of 2235 MHz and a boost clock of 2520 MHz, with memory clocked at 1313 MHz (21 Gbps effective). The 24 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus provides 1.01 TB/s of bandwidth.

In Downfall, the GPU's role dominates at higher resolutions. At 4K, the difference between Low and Ultra settings is 114 FPS (196 vs. 82), which is a 58.2% performance swing driven almost entirely by GPU workload. The RTX 4090's pixel rate of 443.5 GPixel/s and texture rate of 1,290.2 GTexel/s allow it to handle the horror game's lighting and particle effects without strain, even at 4K High where it sustains 132 FPS.

The GPU's PassMark G3D score of 38,194 and 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 9,223 reflect its compute capabilities, but the measured FPS data is more telling. At 1080p, the GPU is rarely the bottleneck — the CPU can feed it enough frames to reach 442 FPS at Low settings. By 4K, the GPU becomes the clear limiting factor, with the 196 FPS at Low dropping to 132 FPS at High, demonstrating that the rendering resolution scales directly with GPU load. The 24 GB VRAM is ample for Downfall, which is a 2016 title and unlikely to exceed even 8 GB at 4K Ultra; the capacity headroom is irrelevant for this game but future-proofs the system.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo delivers its highest frame rates across all settings. Low averages 442 FPS, Medium 361 FPS (with a minimum of 307 and maximum of 416), High 296 FPS, and Ultra 185 FPS. The progression from Low to Ultra is a 257 FPS drop, representing a 58.1% reduction. The Medium preset's minimum of 307 FPS is notably close to the High average of 296 FPS, suggesting that Medium maintains very consistent frame times.

At 2560x1440, the averages scale down predictably. Low yields 315 FPS, Medium 258 FPS (min 219, max 297), High 212 FPS, and Ultra 132 FPS. The drop from Low to Ultra is 183 FPS, or 58.1% — nearly identical to the 1080p percentage, which indicates that settings tier has a consistent relative impact regardless of resolution. The Medium preset's minimum of 219 FPS is still well above the 144 Hz threshold, making it a safe choice for high-refresh 1440p monitors.

At 3840x2160, the averages are 196 FPS for Low, 161 FPS for Medium (min 136, max 185), 132 FPS for High, and 82 FPS for Ultra. The Ultra preset's 82 FPS is the only measured configuration below 100 FPS, which is notable for a game from 2016. The Medium preset at 4K, with its minimum of 136 FPS, maintains a comfortable margin above 60 FPS even in demanding scenes. The data shows that the RTX 4090 handles 4K High with ease, delivering 132 FPS average, and only the Ultra preset pushes the GPU to its limits in this title.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K varies by settings tier, revealing the balance between CPU and GPU load. At Low settings, the average FPS falls from 442 at 1080p to 315 at 1440p (−28.7%) and then to 196 at 4K (−55.7% total). At Medium, the progression is 361 → 258 → 161, a total drop of 55.4%. At High, it is 296 → 212 → 132, a 55.4% reduction. At Ultra, the numbers are 185 → 132 → 82, a 55.7% decline.

The remarkable consistency of the total drop — hovering around 55.5% across all settings — indicates that resolution scaling is governed by the GPU's rendering workload rather than CPU bottlenecks. If the CPU were limiting at 1080p, the percentage drop from 1080p to 4K would be larger at Low settings (where the CPU must feed more frames) than at Ultra (where GPU load dominates). Instead, the identical scaling across settings suggests that even at 1080p Low, the Core Ultra 5 235 can produce frames fast enough to keep the RTX 4090 busy, and the 4K penalty is purely a function of pixel throughput.

The step from 1080p to 1440p costs roughly 29% of frame rate, while the step from 1440p to 4K costs an additional 38%. This non-linear scaling is characteristic of a GPU-bound scenario where the increase in pixel count (2.25x from 1080p to 4K) outpaces the frame rate drop (55.7%), implying that other factors such as memory bandwidth and texture fill rate partially absorb the resolution increase. The RTX 4090's 1.01 TB/s bandwidth is the key enabler here — it allows the GPU to maintain higher frame rates at 4K than would be possible with a narrower memory bus. The data confirms that this combo is GPU-limited at 4K and CPU-sufficient at 1080p, with the crossover point somewhere between 1440p and 4K where the GPU's workload begins to dominate the frame time budget.