Evolve

# Evolve — Intel Core i7-14700F + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070

This combination delivers a remarkably fluid experience across most of Evolve's settings, with the 1080p Ultra preset hitting 108.2 FPS and the 4K High preset staying just above the 60 FPS threshold. The data reveals a system that is clearly GPU-bound at higher resolutions but shows surprising CPU headroom at lower settings, where frame rates climb past 260 FPS. The pairing ranks 420th out of 1695 tested combinations, placing it in the upper quartile of all measured configs.

Settings Recommendations

The measured rows show a clear sweet spot at 1440p High, where the average frame rate reaches 107.7 FPS — nearly identical to the 1080p Ultra result of 108.2 FPS, but with the visual benefit of higher resolution. This suggests that High settings at 1440p extract the most balanced experience from the hardware. At 1080p, the Medium preset (203.6 FPS) offers a massive 43.4 FPS advantage over High (160.2 FPS), making it the better choice for high-refresh-rate displays that can exploit frame rates beyond 200. For 4K users, the High preset at 62.5 FPS is the only measured configuration that maintains a playable average above 60, while Ultra drops to 44.4 FPS — a 29% reduction that makes it hard to justify unless visual fidelity takes absolute priority. The Low presets across all resolutions deliver massive frame rate headroom (264.8 FPS at 1080p, 176 FPS at 1440p, 99.7 FPS at 4K), but given the game's age and the hardware's capabilities, those settings likely sacrifice too much visual quality for performance that exceeds what most displays can show.

GPU Role

The RTX 4070's 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus provides 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth, which proves sufficient even at 4K Ultra where the average frame rate stays at 44.4 FPS. The GPU's boost clock of 2475 MHz and 5888 shading units drive the frame rate scaling across resolutions. The data shows a pronounced GPU bottleneck: moving from 1080p High (160.2 FPS) to 1440p High (107.7 FPS) costs 52.5 FPS (32.8%), and the jump to 4K High (62.5 FPS) costs another 45.2 FPS (42%). This steep degradation pattern — where each resolution doubling roughly halves performance — is characteristic of a system where the graphics card is the limiting component. The GPU's 29.15 TFLOPS of FP32 compute and 455.4 GTexel/s texture rate are being fully utilized, as evidenced by the 4K Ultra result falling to less than half of the 4K Low score (44.4 vs 99.7 FPS). Interestingly, the RTX 4070's nearest rival in synthetic benchmarks, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, scores only 0.6% higher on average, yet this comparison may not reflect Evolve's specific rendering workload.

CPU Role

The Core i7-14700F brings 20 cores and 28 threads across a 2.10 GHz base and 5.40 GHz boost clock, with 33 MB of shared L3 cache. In this game, the CPU shows it is rarely the bottleneck: at 1080p Low, the system reaches 264.8 FPS, which implies the processor can feed the GPU far more frames than the graphics card can render at higher settings. The CPU's 94th percentile ranking among all processors, with an average benchmark score of 54097, places it just 0.6% behind the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and 1.1% behind the Ryzen 9 9900X3D. The multicore strength is evident in Cinebench R23 where it scores 35443, but Evolve likely relies more on the single-core performance, where the 5003 R23 score and 4261 Passmark single-thread score indicate strong per-core capability. The data suggests that even at 1080p Low, the frame rate ceiling is set by the GPU rather than the CPU, since the 264.8 FPS result is more than double the 4K High score — a pattern that would look different if the CPU were limiting performance.

FAQ

Q: Can this combo run Evolve at 4K with playable frame rates?

A: Yes, but only at High settings, where the average is 62.5 FPS. The Medium preset at 4K drops to 78.2 FPS, while Ultra falls to 44.4 FPS, which is below the 60 FPS threshold.

Q: What is the best preset for competitive play at 1080p?

A: The Medium preset at 203.6 FPS offers the best balance, as it delivers 43.4 FPS more than High (160.2 FPS) while being only 61.2 FPS shy of the Low preset's 264.8 FPS.

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

A: The i7-14700F scores 54097 on average, which is 0.6% below the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X (54450) and 1.1% below the Ryzen 9 9900X3D (54681), while sitting 1.2% above the Intel Xeon Phi 7290 (53469).

Q: Is the 12 GB VRAM sufficient for Evolve at maximum settings?

A: The 4K Ultra preset achieves 44.4 FPS, indicating the GPU's memory and compute resources are handling the load, but the frame rate suggests the rendering pipeline is saturated rather than hitting a VRAM capacity wall.

Q: What frame rate can I expect at 1440p with High settings?

A: The measured average is 107.7 FPS, which is nearly identical to the 1080p Ultra result of 108.2 FPS, making 1440p High the most efficient high-visual-quality configuration.

Q: How does the GPU's synthetic benchmark performance translate to Evolve?

A: The RTX 4070 scores 37283 on average (81st percentile among all GPUs), and its nearest rival, the RX Vega 56, scores 37507 — a 0.6% delta — yet the actual in-game results show this combo ranks 420th of 1695, indicating the GPU's performance in Evolve is consistent with its synthetic standing.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling across resolutions reveals a textbook GPU-bound scenario. At High settings, the progression is 160.2 FPS (1080p) → 107.7 FPS (1440p) → 62.5 FPS (4K). The drop from 1080p to 1440p is 52.5 FPS (32.8%), and from 1440p to 4K is 45.2 FPS (42%), producing a total reduction of 97.7 FPS (61%) from 1080p to 4K. This trend holds across all settings presets. At Low settings, the same resolution scaling shows 264.8 → 176 → 99.7 FPS, with a 62.3% total drop. The consistency of these percentages — 61% and 62.3% — strongly indicates that the GPU is the limiting factor at every resolution and preset combination. If the CPU were bottlenecking, we would expect the frame rate to plateau at lower resolutions, but instead the frame rate continues to rise as resolution decreases, suggesting the processor has headroom that the GPU cannot exploit. The CPU's 5.40 GHz boost clock and 28 threads are evidently not the constraint; rather, the RTX 4070's rendering throughput determines the ceiling.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the full settings spectrum is covered: Low averages 264.8 FPS, Medium 203.6 FPS, High 160.2 FPS, and Ultra 108.2 FPS. The gap between Low and Medium is 61.2 FPS, while High to Ultra costs 52 FPS, showing diminishing returns as settings increase. At 2560x1440, the results are 176 FPS (Low), 135.3 FPS (Medium), 107.7 FPS (High), and 71.8 FPS (Ultra). The 1440p Ultra result is notably lower than 1080p Ultra by 36.4 FPS, a 33.6% reduction. At 3840x2160, the averages are 99.7 FPS (Low), 78.2 FPS (Medium), 62.5 FPS (High), and 44.4 FPS (Ultra). The 4K Ultra figure is the only measured result below 60 FPS, and it represents just 16.8% of the 1080p Low peak of 264.8 FPS. Across all twelve measured combinations, the spread from fastest (1080p Low at 264.8 FPS) to slowest (4K Ultra at 44.4 FPS) is 220.4 FPS, a 5.96x difference that underscores how dramatically settings and resolution interact with this hardware.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Intel Core i7-14700F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 ranks 420th out of 1695 tested combos in Evolve, placing it in the 75.2nd percentile of all configurations measured. This ranking reflects the balance of the two components: the CPU's 94th percentile standing among all processors and the GPU's 81st percentile among all graphics cards combine to produce a system that outperforms roughly three-quarters of tested setups. The rank is more modest than the individual component percentiles might suggest, which indicates that Evolve's engine is not fully utilizing the CPU's capabilities — the game's performance is more dependent on the GPU, where the RTX 4070 sits at the 81st percentile. This also explains why the combo's rank (420th) is closer to the GPU's percentile than the CPU's, as the measured FPS data consistently shows GPU-bound behavior across all resolutions. The 1695-combo pool includes both weaker and stronger pairings, and this specific configuration achieves its standing through the RTX 4070's strong 4K performance (62.5 FPS at High) and the i7-14700F's ability to sustain high frame rates at lower resolutions without becoming a limiting factor.