Greedfall

Settings Recommendations

For Greedfall with the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, the data indicates that Low settings at 1920x1080 delivers the only consistently comfortable experience, with an average of 73 FPS. This is the clear recommendation for playable frame rates without compromise. The Medium preset at 1080p drops to 57 FPS average, which remains acceptable for an Action RPG, but the margin narrows significantly when resolution increases. High settings at 1080p yield 52 FPS, still playable, yet the step down from Low to High costs 21 FPS — a 29% reduction that is substantial given the GPU's position in the benchmark hierarchy.

At 2560x1440, the situation becomes more constrained. Low settings produce 50 FPS average, which is borderline for smooth gameplay in a combat-focused RPG. Medium drops to 40 FPS with a minimum of 34 FPS, indicating noticeable stutter during demanding scenes. The Ultra preset at 1440p falls to 23 FPS, which is effectively unplayable for this genre. The recommendation is to stay at 1080p for any serious playthrough, as the performance cliff at higher resolutions is steep and unforgiving.

The 4K results are decisively poor. Even Low settings at 3840x2160 only reach 30 FPS average, and Medium dips to 24 FPS with a minimum of 20 FPS. Ultra at 4K is a slideshow at 14 FPS. No preset at 4K meets the minimum threshold for a responsive action RPG experience. The data strongly suggests that 4K is not a viable option for this combination, regardless of settings adjustments.

The best experience per the measured rows is Low at 1920x1080 — it provides the highest average FPS (73) and the least risk of frame drops below playability. If visual fidelity is prioritized over raw frame rate, Medium at 1080p (57 FPS) is the highest preset that remains consistently playable, with a documented minimum of 48 FPS. High at 1080p (52 FPS) is a middle ground but offers no meaningful advantage over Medium given the minimal visual difference in this older engine.

FAQ

Q: Can this combo run Greedfall at 60 FPS in any configuration?

A: Yes, but only at 1920x1080 with Low settings, where the average FPS is 73. No other resolution or preset combination in the measured data reaches 60 FPS average. Medium at 1080p comes closest at 57 FPS, but it falls short of the 60 FPS threshold.

Q: What is the best 4K preset for this hardware?

A: The data shows that Low at 3840x2160 offers the highest 4K average at 30 FPS. However, this is below the typically desired 60 FPS for an action RPG. Medium at 4K drops to 24 FPS, and Ultra falls to 14 FPS. None of the 4K presets are recommended for actual gameplay.

Q: How does the GPU bottleneck manifest in this game?

A: The benchmark results indicate a severe GPU limitation. The Ryzen 9 9900X is a high-end 12-core processor with a 92nd percentile ranking among all CPUs, while the GTX 1650 sits at the 40th percentile among GPUs. The FPS drops dramatically as resolution increases — from 73 FPS at 1080p Low to 30 FPS at 4K Low — which is characteristic of a GPU-bound scenario where the graphics card cannot keep up with the rendering load.

Q: Is the GTX 1650's 4GB VRAM a limiting factor in Greedfall?

A: The measured data shows that Ultra presets at all resolutions produce significantly lower FPS than Low or Medium. At 1080p, Ultra averages 33 FPS versus 73 FPS for Low. At 1440p, Ultra averages 23 FPS versus 50 FPS for Low. While the data does not explicitly state VRAM usage, the pattern of severe performance degradation at higher settings is consistent with a 4GB memory capacity being exceeded, forcing the GPU to handle larger texture loads inefficiently.

Q: What is the minimum FPS recorded in the data?

A: The lowest minimum FPS documented is 20 FPS, which occurs at 3840x2160 with Medium settings. The next lowest minimum is 34 FPS at 2560x1440 with Medium settings. At 1080p Medium, the minimum is 48 FPS. These figures highlight how quickly performance degrades as resolution increases.

Q: How does this combo rank among all tested configurations?

A: The combo ranks 3581 out of 3703 tested combinations in Greedfall, placing it in the bottom 3.3% of all tested systems. This ranking reflects the profound mismatch between the high-end CPU and the entry-level GPU, which severely limits the overall gaming experience.

How This Combo Ranks

The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X paired with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 ranks 3581 out of 3703 tested combos in Greedfall. This places the system in the bottom percentile of all configurations benchmarked for this game, which is a direct consequence of the GPU's limited capabilities relative to the CPU's high performance ceiling. The rank of 3581 means that only 122 tested combinations performed worse, underscoring how poorly this pairing handles Greedfall's demands.

The ranking is heavily influenced by the GPU's percentile position. The GTX 1650 sits at the 40th percentile among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 7472. Its nearest rivals include the AMD Radeon HD 8850M (7447, 0.3% slower), Intel UHD Graphics 750 (7441, 0.4% slower), and AMD Radeon R7 350 (7425, 0.6% slower), while the Intel Arc A310 is 1% faster at 7550. This places the GTX 1650 in entry-level territory, where even integrated graphics solutions are within a percentage point of its performance.

In contrast, the Ryzen 9 9900X ranks at the 92nd percentile among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 57498. Its nearest rivals include the AMD EPYC 9015 (57555, 0.1% faster), Intel Core i9-14900 (58115, 1.1% faster), and Intel Xeon Platinum 8260M (58323, 1.4% faster), with the AMD EPYC 7313 being 0.2% slower. This CPU is a top-tier processor, but its power is entirely wasted in this configuration because the GPU cannot translate CPU compute into frame rate.

The combination rank of 3581 out of 3703 effectively means that a user would have been better served by a more balanced system, even with a significantly weaker CPU, as long as the GPU was more capable. The data shows that the GTX 1650 is the primary constraint, and no amount of CPU headroom can overcome the GPU's fundamental throughput limitations in Greedfall.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a comprehensive view of how this combo performs across three resolutions and four settings presets. At 1920x1080, the results are as follows: Low settings achieve 73 FPS average, Medium achieves 57 FPS with a minimum of 48 FPS and a maximum of 66 FPS, High achieves 52 FPS, and Ultra drops to 33 FPS. The spread from Low to Ultra is 40 FPS, which represents a 55% performance loss when maxing out settings.

Moving to 2560x1440, the performance drops significantly. Low settings produce 50 FPS average, Medium produces 40 FPS with a minimum of 34 FPS and a maximum of 45 FPS, High produces 36 FPS, and Ultra falls to 23 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra narrows in absolute terms to 27 FPS, but the percentage loss remains similar at 54%. The minimum FPS at Medium (34 FPS) indicates that even this preset can experience noticeable hitches during intense scenes.

At 3840x2160, the results are uniformly poor. Low settings average 30 FPS, Medium averages 24 FPS with a minimum of 20 FPS and a maximum of 27 FPS, High averages 21 FPS, and Ultra averages 14 FPS. The data shows that even the lowest settings at 4K fail to reach 30 FPS consistently, and the Medium preset's minimum of 20 FPS suggests unplayable stuttering during combat or exploration.

Comparing across resolutions at the same settings reveals the GPU's limitations clearly. At Low settings, the FPS drops from 73 at 1080p to 50 at 1440p (a 32% reduction) and then to 30 at 4K (a 59% reduction from 1440p). At Medium settings, the progression is 57 to 40 to 24 FPS. At High settings, it goes from 52 to 36 to 21 FPS. At Ultra settings, the numbers are 33, 23, and 14 FPS. These figures demonstrate that the GTX 1650 simply does not have the raw throughput to handle Greedfall's rendering demands at higher resolutions, regardless of the CPU's ability to feed it data.

Resolution Scaling

The resolution scaling behavior in Greedfall with this combo reveals a textbook GPU-bound scenario. From 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 at Low settings, the average FPS drops from 73 to 50, a 31.5% decrease. From 1440p to 4K at Low, the drop is more severe at 40% (50 to 30 FPS). This non-linear degradation is typical of a GPU that is already operating near its limits at 1080p, where increasing pixel count overwhelms the available shader throughput.

At Medium settings, the scaling is similar: 57 FPS at 1080p drops to 40 FPS at 1440p (a 29.8% decrease) and then to 24 FPS at 4K (a 40% decrease from 1440p). The consistency of these percentage drops across settings suggests that the GPU's memory bandwidth and pixel fill rate are the limiting factors, rather than any specific setting that taxes the CPU or shader units disproportionately.

The data indicates that the Ryzen 9 9900X is not the bottleneck at any resolution. The CPU's 12 cores and 24 threads, with a boost clock of 5.60 GHz, provide far more compute capacity than Greedfall requires, especially given the game's 2019 release date. If the CPU were the limiting factor, we would expect to see FPS remain relatively flat across resolutions, as the same CPU work would be required regardless of pixel count. Instead, the FPS scales inversely with pixel count, which is the definitive signature of GPU limitation.

The 4K results are particularly telling. Even at Low settings, the 30 FPS average is below the 33 FPS that Ultra achieves at 1080p, which indicates that the GPU is completely saturated at 4K. The drop from 30 FPS at Low to 14 FPS at Ultra (a 53% reduction) at 4K shows that the GTX 1650's 128.1 GB/s memory bandwidth and 2.984 TFLOPS FP32 throughput are insufficient for the pixel count, forcing severe compromises even at the lowest quality presets.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X is a 12-core, 24-thread processor based on the Zen 5 architecture (Granite Ridge), manufactured on a 4 nm process. It has a base clock of 4.40 GHz and a boost clock of 5.60 GHz, with 64 MB of L3 cache. Its benchmark scores are exceptional: a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 32172, a single-core score of 2253, and a Geekbench multi-core score of 22174. The CPU ranks at the 92nd percentile among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 57498.

In Greedfall, the CPU's role is largely passive due to the GPU bottleneck. The game's measured FPS does not improve with the CPU's capabilities, as evidenced by the consistent performance drops across resolutions. At 1080p Low, the 73 FPS average is likely near the maximum that the GTX 1650 can produce in this game, even with a CPU that could theoretically handle far higher frame rates. The CPU's 12 cores provide ample headroom for the game's AI, physics, and world simulation, but these are not the limiting factors in this configuration.

The CPU's high single-thread performance (Cinebench R23 single-core score of 2253) is relevant for Greedfall's engine, which likely has a primary game thread that handles core gameplay logic. However, the data shows that even at 1080p Low, the FPS is constrained by the GPU's 896 shading units and 32 ROPs, which cap the rendering throughput. The CPU's 5.60 GHz boost clock ensures that it can feed the GPU without stalling, but this does not translate into higher frame rates because the GPU simply cannot render faster.

The memory configuration also plays a role. The CPU supports DDR5 with a dual-channel bus and 89.6 GB/s memory bandwidth, which is more than sufficient for Greedfall's data throughput requirements. The GPU's 4 GB GDDR5 memory with 128.1 GB/s bandwidth is the more constrained memory subsystem, and it is likely the reason why Ultra settings perform so poorly — the larger texture sets and higher-quality assets exceed the VRAM capacity, forcing the GPU to swap data from system memory, which introduces latency and reduces FPS.

In summary, the Ryzen 9 9900X is a top-tier processor that is entirely wasted in this pairing. Its 92nd percentile ranking and multi-core scores place it among the best CPUs available, but the GTX 1650's 40th percentile ranking and 2.984 TFLOPS FP32 throughput create an insurmountable bottleneck. The data shows that for Greedfall, this combination is severely GPU-limited, and the CPU's 12 cores, 24 threads, and 5.60 GHz boost clock provide no benefit beyond ensuring that the GPU is never waiting on the processor. Users would see identical or nearly identical FPS with a much weaker CPU, as long as the GPU remained the same.