Greedfall

Opening

The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti delivers a notably balanced 1080p and 1440p experience in Greedfall, but the data reveals a sharp performance cliff at 4K Ultra that shifts the bottleneck decisively toward the graphics card. Across twelve measured configurations, the combination ranks 673rd out of 1,705 tested combos, placing it in the upper-middle tier of the database. The RTX 3070 Ti’s 8 GB GDDR6X frame buffer and Ampere architecture, combined with the Ryzen 9 9900X’s 12-core Zen 5 design, produce a pattern where raw CPU throughput saturates early, leaving the GPU to dictate scaling at higher resolutions and settings.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data shows a predictable but steep decline as resolution increases from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160, with the magnitude of the drop heavily dependent on the selected quality preset. At Low settings, the average frame rate falls from 217.9 FPS at 1080p to 86.7 FPS at 4K, representing a reduction of approximately 60% when moving to four times the pixel count. This scaling pattern indicates that at 1080p Low, the system is largely CPU-limited, as the Ryzen 9 9900X’s 24 threads can feed frames faster than the RTX 3070 Ti can render them; the GPU becomes the limiting factor only when pixel throughput demands exceed its capabilities.

The Medium preset shows a similar relative decline, dropping from 168.2 FPS at 1080p to 68.6 FPS at 4K, a 59% reduction. High settings produce 154.8 FPS at 1080p versus 64 FPS at 4K, a 59% drop, while Ultra suffers the largest absolute loss: from 99.3 FPS at 1080p down to 40.8 FPS at 4K, a 59% decrease as well. The consistency of the percentage reduction across all four presets—hovering between 59% and 60%—reveals that resolution scaling in Greedfall is almost entirely GPU-bound beyond 1080p, regardless of quality tier. The 2560x1440 results reinforce this: High drops to 107.9 FPS, Medium to 117.5 FPS, Low to 148.4 FPS, and Ultra to 70.1 FPS, each sitting roughly 30-35% below their 1080p counterparts, which aligns with the 2.25x pixel count increase between those resolutions.

Notably, the gap between 1080p and 1440p is smaller than the gap between 1440p and 4K for every preset, suggesting that the RTX 3070 Ti’s 608.3 GB/s memory bandwidth and 256-bit bus begin to strain as pixel count approaches 4K. The data shows that at 4K, even Low settings (86.7 FPS) cannot match the 1080p Ultra result (99.3 FPS), highlighting how severely the resolution increase taxes the GPU. This pattern indicates that for 4K play, the limiting component is unequivocally the graphics card, not the 12-core processor, which retains ample headroom at all resolutions tested.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti plays the decisive role in Greedfall’s performance envelope, particularly at higher resolutions and quality settings. With 8 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 256-bit bus delivering 608.3 GB/s bandwidth, the card has sufficient capacity for 1080p and 1440p Ultra, but the 4K Ultra result of 40.8 FPS suggests memory pressure and shader complexity combine to cripple throughput. The GPU’s boost clock of 1770 MHz and base clock of 1575 MHz, paired with 6,144 shading units and 192 texture mapping units, provide ample raw compute—21.75 TFLOPS FP32—yet the measured data shows that this compute advantage diminishes as pixel count rises.

At 1080p Low, the RTX 3070 Ti produces 217.9 FPS, which is 2.5x higher than the 4K Low result of 86.7 FPS, demonstrating that the card’s pixel fill rate and texture rate (169.9 GPixel/s and 339.8 GTexel/s respectively) are more than adequate for lower resolutions but become saturated at 4K. The 48 ray tracing cores and 192 tensor cores are present but do not appear to influence these standard rasterization results, as Greedfall’s measured FPS does not show any ray tracing-specific scaling patterns. The GPU’s 74th percentile ranking among all tested GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 30,849, places it near the AMD Radeon RX 6700 (average score 31,112, delta -0.8%) and ahead of the RX 590 GME (30,755, delta +0.3%), indicating it sits in a competitive mid-range tier.

The VRAM capacity of 8 GB becomes a plausible constraint at 4K Ultra, where the 40.8 FPS result is 59% lower than the 1080p Ultra figure. While the data does not include a VRAM usage metric, the steep drop from Medium (68.6 FPS) to Ultra (40.8 FPS) at 4K—a 41% reduction—suggests that the Ultra preset’s additional texture and shadow detail may exceed the frame buffer’s comfortable operating range. At 1440p, the same Ultra-to-Medium gap is 40% (70.1 vs 117.5 FPS), showing that the card’s memory subsystem is consistently the limiting factor at high settings across resolutions, not the CPU.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the database of 1,705 tested combinations, the Ryzen 9 9900X + RTX 3070 Ti pairing achieves rank 673, placing it in the 60th percentile of all combos tested for Greedfall. This positioning reflects a balanced but not top-tier configuration: the CPU’s 94th percentile ranking among all processors (average benchmark score 54,450) is significantly higher than the GPU’s 74th percentile, indicating that the graphics card is the performance ceiling. The combo’s rank suggests that users would see meaningful gains from pairing this CPU with a more powerful GPU, as the Ryzen 9 9900X’s headroom is not fully utilized in this game.

Comparing to the CPU’s nearest rivals, the Ryzen 9 9900X’s average benchmark score of 54,450 is 0.4% below the 9900X3D (54,681), 0.7% above the Intel Core i7-14700F (54,097), and 1.5% to 1.8% below the Intel Core Ultra 5 245K (55,304) and 245KF (55,421). These small deltas indicate that the processor choice has minimal impact on Greedfall’s frame rates, as the game’s engine does not appear to scale significantly with core count beyond the 12 cores available. The GPU’s nearest rivals show similar clustering: the RTX 3070 Ti’s average score of 30,849 is 0.3% above the RX 590 GME (30,755) but 0.8% below the RX 6700 (31,112) and 0.9-1.2% below the Quadro M5000 (31,142) and GRID M60-1Q (31,220). This tight grouping reinforces that the RTX 3070 Ti is positioned in a crowded performance band, and the combo rank of 673 reflects this mid-pack standing.

The fact that this combo ranks in the 39.5th percentile of all combos (673/1705) suggests that Greedfall rewards GPU-heavy configurations more than CPU-heavy ones. A system with a slower CPU but faster GPU would likely rank higher, given that the measured FPS data shows the GPU as the primary limiter at all resolutions above 1080p Low. The 12-core, 24-thread Ryzen 9 9900X with its 64 MB L3 cache and 89.6 GB/s memory bandwidth is never the bottleneck in these results, as evidenced by the 1080p Low figure of 217.9 FPS, which is likely near the engine’s frame rate cap rather than a hardware limit.

Settings Recommendations

Based on the measured FPS rows, the optimal balance of visual quality and smooth performance occurs at 1440p High, which delivers 107.9 FPS—comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold and within 10% of the 1080p High result. At 4K, the data shows that High settings (64 FPS) are the highest quality tier that maintains playable frame rates, while Ultra drops to 40.8 FPS, which is below the 60 FPS target for most users. For 1080p, Ultra at 99.3 FPS is viable, but the 55 FPS gain from dropping to Medium (168.2 FPS) may be preferable for high-refresh-rate displays, while Low at 217.9 FPS is only necessary for extreme refresh rates above 200 Hz.

The scaling data suggests that the Medium preset offers the best trade-off across all resolutions: at 4K it provides 68.6 FPS, which is 68% higher than Ultra’s 40.8 FPS, while at 1440p it reaches 117.5 FPS, and at 1080p it hits 168.2 FPS. The step from Medium to High costs roughly 10% performance at each resolution (from 168.2 to 154.8 FPS at 1080p, 117.5 to 107.9 FPS at 1440p, and 68.6 to 64 FPS at 4K), which is a modest penalty for improved visuals. However, the jump from High to Ultra is severe: a 36% reduction at 1080p (154.8 to 99.3 FPS), 35% at 1440p (107.9 to 70.1 FPS), and 36% at 4K (64 to 40.8 FPS). This nonlinear scaling indicates that Ultra preset enables effects that disproportionately tax the GPU, likely related to shadow quality, ambient occlusion, or post-processing that stress the 8 GB frame buffer.

For users prioritizing frame rate stability, the Low preset at 1440p (148.4 FPS) or 1080p (217.9 FPS) provides the highest headroom, but the visual compromise is substantial. The data shows no minimum FPS values, so variance cannot be assessed, but the average FPS figures suggest that Medium at 1440p (117.5 FPS) is the sweet spot for most gaming scenarios, offering 75% of the Low preset’s performance while presumably retaining significant visual fidelity. At 4K, Medium (68.6 FPS) is the only preset that clears 60 FPS with margin, making it the recommended choice for 4K displays unless the user accepts the sub-60 FPS of High (64 FPS) or the barely playable 40.8 FPS of Ultra.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the full range of settings produces a wide spread: Low averages 217.9 FPS, Medium 168.2 FPS, High 154.8 FPS, and Ultra 99.3 FPS. The delta between Low and Ultra is 118.6 FPS, representing a 54% performance drop from the lowest to highest quality tier. The step from Low to Medium costs 49.7 FPS (23% reduction), Medium to High costs 13.4 FPS (8% reduction), and High to Ultra costs 55.5 FPS (36% reduction). This pattern shows that the Medium-to-High transition is nearly free in performance terms, while the High-to-Ultra transition is disproportionately expensive.

At 2560x1440, the averages are 148.4 FPS (Low), 117.5 FPS (Medium), 107.9 FPS (High), and 70.1 FPS (Ultra). The Low-to-Ultra gap narrows to 78.3 FPS (53% reduction), with the High-to-Ultra drop of 37.8 FPS (35% reduction) again being the largest single-step penalty. Comparing 1080p to 1440p, the performance loss is consistent: Low falls by 69.5 FPS (32%), Medium by 50.7 FPS (30%), High by 46.9 FPS (30%), and Ultra by 29.2 FPS (29%). This uniform ~30% reduction aligns with the 2.25x pixel count increase, confirming that the GPU scales linearly with resolution until 4K.

At 3840x2160, the averages drop to 86.7 FPS (Low), 68.6 FPS (Medium), 64 FPS (High), and 40.8 FPS (Ultra). The Low-to-Ultra span is 45.9 FPS (53% reduction), matching the 1440p pattern. However, the 1440p-to-4K transition is more severe than the 1080p-to-1440p step: Low falls by 61.7 FPS (42%), Medium by 48.9 FPS (42%), High by 43.9 FPS (41%), and Ultra by 29.3 FPS (42%). This steepening decline indicates that the RTX 3070 Ti’s memory bandwidth (608.3 GB/s) becomes a hard ceiling at 4K, as the 2.25x pixel increase from 1440p should theoretically cost ~55% performance if scaling were linear, but the actual 41-42% drop suggests the card’s 8 GB buffer and 256-bit bus mitigate some of the penalty at lower settings, only to fail at Ultra.

The overall dataset shows that this combo is best suited for 1440p gaming, where even Ultra maintains 70.1 FPS, and 4K users should stick to Medium or High. The 1080p results are exceptional, with every preset exceeding 99 FPS, making the configuration overkill for standard 60 Hz displays at that resolution. The 4K Ultra figure of 40.8 FPS is the only measured result below 60 FPS, and it represents a clear warning against enabling maximum settings at 4K without additional GPU headroom.