Evolve

FAQ

Q: What is the average FPS for this combo at 1080p with Low settings?

A: The measured average is 89 FPS at 1920x1080 on Low, which is the highest frame rate recorded across all tested settings and resolutions for this pairing.

Q: How does the Intel Arc B390 GPU compare to its nearest rival in raw benchmark score?

A: The Arc B390 scores 1482 in the 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 test. Its closest rival, the NVIDIA GeForce GT 520MX, scores 1463, placing the Arc B390 1.3% ahead. The GPU sits at the 9th percentile among all GPUs.

Q: What is the CPU's percentile ranking and how does it compare to the Intel Core i7-14650HX?

A: The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X ranks in the 87th percentile among all CPUs. Its average benchmark score is 41376, which is 0.5% lower than the Intel Core i7-14650HX's 41576 average score.

Q: What is the best playable setting at 1440p based on measured data?

A: At 2560x1440, Low settings produce 60 FPS average, which is the only setting at this resolution reaching a 60 FPS threshold. Medium yields 46 FPS, High drops to 36 FPS, and Ultra falls to 25 FPS.

Q: Does the combo's in-game rank reflect a competitive position among tested configurations?

A: No. The combo ranks 2530 out of 2872 tested combos for Evolve, placing it in the lower 12% of all tested pairings. This low rank aligns with the GPU's 9th percentile performance standing.

Q: What is the CPU's single-thread performance score in Cinebench R23?

A: The Ryzen 9 5900X scores 1527 in Cinebench R23 single-core and 16262 in multi-core. Its 3DMark single-thread score is 941, while the 16-thread score reaches 9075.

Settings Recommendations

Based strictly on the measured FPS rows, the optimal experience for this combo depends heavily on the target resolution. At 1080p, Low settings deliver 89 FPS average, which is the smoothest result in the entire dataset. Medium at 1080p drops to 69 FPS with a minimum of 59 FPS, still playable but with a noticeable 22% reduction from Low. High at 1080p yields 54 FPS, and Ultra falls to 37 FPS, which approaches the lower boundary of acceptable smoothness for an FPS title.

At 1440p, the situation tightens. Low settings produce exactly 60 FPS average, making it the only viable option for a consistent 60 FPS experience. Medium drops to 46 FPS, High to 36 FPS, and Ultra to 25 FPS. The measured minimum at 1440p Medium is 39 FPS, indicating that even the middle preset can stutter in demanding scenes.

At 4K, no setting provides a consistently playable frame rate. Low averages 34 FPS, Medium 26 FPS, High 21 FPS, and Ultra 14 FPS. Even the lowest preset fails to reach 40 FPS, making 4K effectively unsuitable for this game with these components.

The data suggests that Low settings at 1080p offers the best balance of smoothness and visual fidelity, given that the jump from Low to Medium costs 20 FPS (from 89 to 69), a 22% performance penalty that is hard to justify for a genre where frame rate directly impacts aim and reaction. For users who prioritize visual quality over raw FPS, Medium at 1080p remains the highest preset that stays above 60 FPS average, with a 59 FPS minimum. At 1440p, Low is the only preset that reaches 60 FPS, so it is the recommended choice for that resolution. No setting at 4K is recommended based on the measured data.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo's in-game rank of 2530 out of 2872 tested combinations places it in the bottom 12% of all configurations tested for Evolve. This is a poor standing, driven almost entirely by the GPU's weak performance profile. The CPU, by contrast, is a high-end part sitting at the 87th percentile among all CPUs, but the GPU's 9th percentile ranking drags the overall combo down significantly.

To contextualize the GPU's impact: the Intel Arc B390's average benchmark score of 1482 is only 1.3% higher than the NVIDIA GeForce GT 520MX (1463), 1.5% higher than the GeForce 800M (1460), and 2.5% higher than the GT 625 OEM (1446). These are all entry-level or legacy GPUs, and the Arc B390 barely edges them out. The GPU's percentile rank of 9 means it outperforms only about 9% of all GPUs in the database, which is consistent with its very low 3DMark Steel Nomad score of 1482.

The CPU's rank of 87th percentile is a stark contrast. The Ryzen 9 5900X's average score of 41376 sits just 0.3% above the Intel Core Ultra 7 366H (41263) and 0.4% above both the Core Ultra 7 356H (41215) and AMD Ryzen AI 5 PRO 440 (41208). It trails the Core i7-14650HX (41576) by 0.5%. This tight clustering around the 41,200-41,600 mark shows that the CPU is competitive with modern mid-range and high-end mobile processors, but the GPU is not competitive with even the lowest-tier discrete GPUs.

The combination of a top-tier CPU with a bottom-tier GPU creates a massively unbalanced pairing. In Evolve, the GPU becomes the clear bottleneck, and the combo rank reflects this: the 2530th position out of 2872 is consistent with a system where the GPU cannot keep up with even modest graphical demands, regardless of CPU headroom.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the measured average FPS across settings is as follows: Low 89, Medium 69, High 54, Ultra 37. The Medium preset includes measured minimum and maximum values of 59 and 79 FPS respectively, showing a 20 FPS variance. The progression from Low to Medium is a 20 FPS drop (89 to 69), from Medium to High a 15 FPS drop (69 to 54), and from High to Ultra a 17 FPS drop (54 to 37). This linear degradation pattern suggests that each preset level costs roughly 15-20 FPS at this resolution.

At 2560x1440, the averages are: Low 60, Medium 46, High 36, Ultra 25. The Medium preset shows a minimum of 39 and maximum of 53 FPS, a 14 FPS variance. The low-to-medium drop is 14 FPS (60 to 46), medium-to-high is 10 FPS (46 to 36), and high-to-ultra is 11 FPS (36 to 25). The percentage drops are larger at this resolution: Low to Medium is a 23% reduction, Medium to High is 22%, and High to Ultra is 31%.

At 3840x2160, the averages are: Low 34, Medium 26, High 21, Ultra 14. The Medium preset has a minimum of 22 and maximum of 30 FPS, an 8 FPS variance. The drop from Low to Medium is 8 FPS (34 to 26), Medium to High is 5 FPS (26 to 21), and High to Ultra is 7 FPS (21 to 14). At 4K, the absolute FPS differences shrink because the frame rates are so low, but the relative penalties remain severe: Low to Ultra is a 59% reduction in average FPS.

Across all resolutions, the Medium preset is the only one with recorded min/max values, which suggests it may have been the focus of more detailed analysis. The 1080p Medium min of 59 FPS is notably high relative to its 69 average, indicating that this combo can sustain near-60 FPS even in demanding scenes at 1080p Medium. At 1440p Medium, the 39 FPS minimum shows that the GPU struggles to maintain playable frame rates when resolution increases.

GPU Role

The Intel Arc B390 is an integrated graphics solution based on the Xe3-LPG architecture, built on Intel's 3 nm process. Its base clock is 300 MHz with a boost clock of 2500 MHz. The GPU features 1536 shading units, 48 texture mapping units, and 24 raster operation units, along with 12 ray tracing cores. Its pixel rate is 60.00 GPixel/s and texture rate is 120.0 GTexel/s, with FP32 performance of 7.680 TFLOPS.

Critically, the B390 uses System Shared memory with System Shared bandwidth, meaning there is no dedicated VRAM. The memory type is "System Shared" and bandwidth is "System Dependent," which means the GPU competes with the CPU for memory access. This is a significant limitation for gaming, especially at higher resolutions where memory bandwidth becomes a bottleneck.

The GPU's measured 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score is 1482, placing it at the 9th percentile among all GPUs. Its nearest rivals are all legacy NVIDIA parts: GT 520MX (1463), GeForce 800M (1460), GT 625 OEM (1446), and GT 710 (1443). The B390 outperforms these by 1.3% to 2.7%, but this is a marginal victory over hardware that is over a decade old in some cases.

In Evolve, the GPU's limited memory bandwidth and low compute throughput are directly reflected in the FPS numbers. At 1080p Low, the GPU manages 89 FPS, but this drops to 37 FPS at Ultra, a 58% reduction. At 4K, even Low only reaches 34 FPS. The 12 ray tracing cores and DirectX 12 Ultimate support (12_2) are present, but the overall performance envelope is too low to leverage these features meaningfully in a modern FPS title. The GPU's 80 W TDP and IGP slot width indicate it is designed for power efficiency rather than raw performance, which aligns with its low benchmark scores.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is a 12-core, 24-thread processor based on Zen 3 architecture (Vermeer), built on TSMC's 7 nm process. It has a base clock of 3.70 GHz and boost clock of 4.80 GHz, with a TDP of 105 W. The cache hierarchy includes 64 KB L1 per core, 512 KB L2 per core, and a 64 MB L3 cache. Memory support is DDR4 dual-channel with 51.2 GB/s bandwidth and ECC support enabled.

The CPU's benchmark scores show strong multi-threaded performance: Cinebench R23 multi-core scores 16262, while single-core scores 1527. Geekbench multi-core is 14118 and single-core is 2083. In 3DMark, the 16-thread score is 9075, 8-thread is 6601, 4-thread is 3588, and 2-thread is 1852. Passmark multi-thread scores 39002, with single-thread at 3469.

The CPU's 87th percentile ranking places it well above the GPU's 9th percentile. Its average benchmark score of 41376 is within 0.5% of the Intel Core i7-14650HX (41576) and just 0.3-0.4% above the Core Ultra 7 366H, Core Ultra 7 356H, and Ryzen AI 5 PRO 440. This tight grouping around 41,200-41,600 indicates the 5900X remains competitive with modern processors despite its 2020 release date.

In Evolve, the CPU's role is to feed the GPU with draw calls and game logic. Given the GPU's extreme bottleneck, the CPU is almost certainly underutilized in most scenes. The 12 cores and 24 threads provide ample headroom for the game's threading model, and the 64 MB L3 cache helps with data locality. However, the measured FPS results show that the CPU's power is irrelevant when the GPU cannot render frames fast enough. The 89 FPS at 1080p Low is likely near the CPU's limit for this game, but the GPU's inability to maintain higher frame rates at higher settings masks the CPU's true capability.

Resolution Scaling

The data shows a clear resolution scaling pattern. From 1080p to 1440p, the average FPS drops by approximately 33% across all settings: Low goes from 89 to 60 (33% drop), Medium from 69 to 46 (33% drop), High from 54 to 36 (33% drop), and Ultra from 37 to 25 (32% drop). This consistent 33% reduction indicates that the GPU is the primary limiting factor, as a CPU-limited scenario would show smaller FPS drops with increasing resolution.

From 1440p to 4K, the drops become more severe in relative terms: Low goes from 60 to 34 (43% drop), Medium from 46 to 26 (43% drop), High from 36 to 21 (42% drop), and Ultra from 25 to 14 (44% drop). The larger percentage drops at higher resolutions are characteristic of a GPU that is severely bandwidth-constrained. The System Shared memory bandwidth becomes an increasingly severe bottleneck as the pixel count increases, because the GPU must access system RAM for both frame buffer and texture data.

The overall scaling from 1080p Low (89 FPS) to 4K Low (34 FPS) is a 62% reduction. For comparison, from 1080p Ultra (37 FPS) to 4K Ultra (14 FPS) is a 62% reduction as well. This uniform scaling factor across settings suggests that resolution is the dominant variable, not the quality preset. In a balanced system, higher settings would typically show a larger FPS drop from resolution scaling because of increased shader and texture pressure. Here, the consistent 62% reduction indicates that the GPU's memory bandwidth, not its compute units, is the primary constraint.

The limiting component is unambiguously the GPU. The CPU's 87th percentile ranking and strong multi-threaded performance cannot compensate for the GPU's 9th percentile standing. At every resolution, the FPS scales with the pixel count in a way that points to memory bandwidth saturation. The 1080p Medium minimum of 59 FPS versus the 4K Medium average of 26 FPS illustrates how quickly the GPU's shared memory subsystem becomes overwhelmed as resolution increases. For users targeting higher resolutions, the CPU has ample headroom, but the GPU simply cannot deliver the necessary fill rate.