Greedfall

Greedfall, the 2019 action RPG from Spiders, presents an interesting stress profile for the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 pairing. The measured data reveals a system that scales predictably with resolution and settings, but the relationship between the CPU and GPU shifts dramatically depending on the workload. At 1080p, the combination demonstrates extreme headroom, while at 4K Ultra, the frame rate collapses to a level that indicates a hard limit being hit by the graphics card.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate progression from 1080p to 4K under High settings shows a classic GPU-bound curve, but the slope is steeper than typical for this class of hardware. At 1920x1080 High, the system produces 171.9 FPS, which drops to 120 FPS at 2560x1440 High, a reduction of roughly 30%. Moving to 3840x2160 High, the average falls to 72.2 FPS, representing another 40% decline from the 1440p figure. This pattern indicates that the RTX 3080 is the dominant factor at higher resolutions, as the CPU has ample headroom to feed the graphics pipeline.

The scaling becomes more revealing when examining Low settings. At 1080p Low, the system hits 236 FPS, but at 1440p Low it drops to 166.7 FPS, and at 4K Low it lands at 96.5 FPS. The delta between 1080p Low and 4K Low is a massive 139.5 FPS, which suggests that even at the lowest graphical fidelity, the GPU is still the primary bottleneck at 4K. However, the fact that 1080p Low reaches 236 FPS while 1440p Low stays above 166 FPS shows that the CPU is not limiting performance at these lower resolutions.

The Ultra preset tells a different story. At 1080p Ultra, the system produces 108.2 FPS, which is actually lower than the 4K High result of 72.2 FPS by a significant margin. This suggests that the Ultra preset introduces effects that are particularly taxing on the RTX 3080's memory subsystem or shading units. The 4K Ultra result of 42.4 FPS is barely playable, and the gap between 4K High (72.2 FPS) and 4K Ultra (42.4 FPS) represents a 29.8 FPS drop, indicating that the Ultra settings include features that disproportionately impact the GPU.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the database of tested combinations, this pairing sits at rank 531 out of 1705 combos for Greedfall. This places it in the top 31% of all tested systems, which is a respectable position given the age of the game and the hardware involved. The rank reflects that while the RTX 3080 is a capable card, it is not the top-tier option for this title, and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D cannot overcome the GPU's limitations at higher settings.

The combination's rank is likely influenced by the fact that Greedfall is not particularly demanding on CPU resources, meaning the 7800X3D's strengths are underutilized. The 3D V-Cache technology that gives this CPU its edge in many modern titles does not provide the same benefit here, as the game's engine appears to be more GPU-limited. The rank of 531 suggests that there are 530 combinations that produce higher average frame rates, which is expected given that the RTX 3080 is now two generations old and was not the flagship of its own lineup.

Benchmark results for the individual components show that the CPU is in the 87th percentile among all processors, while the GPU is in the 80th percentile among all graphics cards. This asymmetry explains why the combo rank is lower than either component's individual standing—the GPU is the weaker link in this pairing, and the CPU's performance headroom is not fully realized in this title.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 brings 10 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 320-bit bus, delivering 760.3 GB/s of bandwidth. This memory configuration is adequate for Greedfall at 1440p and below, but the 4K Ultra results suggest that the frame buffer capacity becomes a constraint. The 42.4 FPS average at 4K Ultra is not a result of raw compute limitations alone; the memory bandwidth and capacity are likely contributing to the performance collapse.

The GPU's clock speeds are listed as 1440 MHz base and 1710 MHz boost, which are modest figures for a card of this class. The boost clock behavior in Greedfall appears to be consistent with typical Ampere performance, but the game's engine does not seem to push the card to its maximum boost frequency consistently. The pixel rate of 164.2 GPixel/s and texture rate of 465.1 GTexel/s are sufficient for 1080p and 1440p, but the 4K resolution demands more from the ROPs and TMUs.

The RTX 3080's 8704 shading units and 272 TMUs are tasked heavily at 4K Ultra, where the frame rate drops to 42.4 FPS. This is a 36.5% reduction from the 4K High result of 72.2 FPS, which indicates that the Ultra preset includes effects that saturate the GPU's compute resources. The fact that 4K Medium (75.2 FPS) is only slightly lower than 4K High (72.2 FPS) suggests that the High preset is already pushing the card near its limits, and Ultra adds features that the architecture struggles with.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the system demonstrates exceptional performance across all settings. Low produces 236 FPS, Medium yields 188.9 FPS, High delivers 171.9 FPS, and Ultra still manages 108.2 FPS. The gap between High and Ultra at 1080p is 63.7 FPS, which is the largest percentage drop among the tested settings at this resolution. This indicates that the Ultra preset introduces a significant workload increase even at lower resolutions.

The 2560x1440 results show a similar pattern with reduced absolute values. Low hits 166.7 FPS, Medium reaches 132.4 FPS, High achieves 120 FPS, and Ultra drops to 74.1 FPS. The difference between High and Ultra at 1440p is 45.9 FPS, which is proportionally similar to the 1080p drop. The 4K results are where the GPU begins to struggle: Low produces 96.5 FPS, Medium yields 75.2 FPS, High delivers 72.2 FPS, and Ultra falls to 42.4 FPS.

The most striking data point is the 4K Ultra result of 42.4 FPS, which is less than half of the 1440p Ultra figure of 74.1 FPS. This 31.7 FPS drop represents a 42.8% reduction in performance when moving from 1440p to 4K at Ultra settings. The scaling from 1080p Ultra (108.2 FPS) to 4K Ultra (42.4 FPS) shows a cumulative decline of 65.8 FPS, or roughly 61%, which is a severe penalty for the resolution increase.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D is an 8-core, 16-thread processor based on the Zen 4 architecture, with a base clock of 4.20 GHz and a boost clock of 5.00 GHz. The 96 MB of shared L3 cache is the defining feature of this chip, and it provides substantial benefits in cache-sensitive workloads. However, Greedfall's engine does not appear to be one of those workloads, as the frame rates at lower resolutions suggest the CPU is not the limiting factor.

The benchmark scores for the 7800X3D show strong multi-threaded performance, with a Cinebench R23 multicore score of 29149 and a Geekbench multicore score of 15101. The single-thread results are also respectable, with a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 4115 and a Geekbench single-core score of 2725. These figures indicate that the CPU has ample processing power to handle game logic and draw calls, but the data from Greedfall suggests that the game does not heavily utilize multiple cores.

The fact that 1080p Low produces 236 FPS while 1080p High produces 171.9 FPS indicates that the CPU can maintain high frame rates even when the GPU is under less load. The 64.1 FPS gap between these two settings is due to the GPU's work increasing with graphical fidelity, not the CPU struggling. The 7800X3D's nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks include the Intel Core i7-12700F with a delta of 0.1% and the AMD Ryzen 9 5980HX with a delta of 0.3%, showing that this CPU is at the top of its class in general compute, but this does not translate to a dominant position in Greedfall.

The CPU's 120 W TDP and 5 nm process node from TSMC allow for sustained boost clocks, but the game's frame rates at 1080p and 1440p show that the CPU is never the bottleneck. Even at 4K, where the GPU is clearly limiting performance, the CPU's role is to provide consistent frame pacing, which the data suggests it does well given the absence of minimum frame rate data. The 7800X3D's 8 cores and 16 threads are more than sufficient for this title, and the 3D V-Cache does not provide a measurable advantage in Greedfall's specific rendering pipeline.