Greedfall

Greedfall on the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus and AMD Radeon RX 6600 combination shows a clear performance hierarchy across its four quality presets. The 1080p Medium preset, averaging 109 FPS with a minimum of 93 FPS and a maximum of 126 FPS, represents the best balance between visual fidelity and fluidity, as it sits comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold while maintaining a stable frame delivery. The Low preset at 139 FPS is the fastest, but it sacrifices the visual quality that the Medium preset retains for a marginal 30 FPS gain. The High preset at 99 FPS is playable but introduces a steeper performance cost for its improvements, and the Ultra preset, at 63 FPS, dips too close to the lower bound for consistent high-refresh gameplay.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data points to Medium as the optimal setting for this pairing. At 1920x1080, Medium delivers an average of 109 FPS, which is a 10 FPS improvement over High and only 30 FPS less than Low, while providing substantially better rendering quality than the lowest preset. The frame time consistency is also strong, as the 93 FPS minimum recorded on Medium is higher than the average frame rates of both High and Ultra at this resolution, indicating that the preset avoids severe dips that could cause stuttering. For 2560x1440, the Medium preset remains the most sensible choice, yielding 76 FPS on average with a 64 FPS minimum, which still clears the 60 FPS playability bar. At 3840x2160, the situation changes; Medium drops to 45 FPS and Ultra falls to 26 FPS, making High at 41 FPS the highest quality option that approaches playability, though none of the 4K presets achieve a consistently smooth experience. Users prioritizing maximum frame rates above all else would select Low, which reaches 139 FPS at 1080p and 57 FPS at 4K, but the data shows that Medium offers the most efficient trade-off across all resolutions.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 6600, built on the RDNA 2.0 architecture with the Navi 23 chip, is the primary driver of graphical performance in this configuration. Its 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus provides 224.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which proves adequate for Greedfall's demands at the tested settings. The GPU's clock behavior is characterized by a base clock of 1626 MHz, a game clock of 2044 MHz, and a boost clock of 2491 MHz, with the latter dictating peak throughput under load. The compute resources include 1792 shading units, 112 texture mapping units, and 64 render output units, which together deliver a pixel rate of 159.4 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 279.0 GTexel/s. The FP32 performance of 8.928 TFLOPS gives a reference point for raw shader capability. The GPU holds a 63rd percentile ranking among all GPUs in the database, and its average benchmark score of 19036 places it within 0.1% of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Mobile and exactly even with the NVIDIA Quadro K6000, which scores 19030. This positioning explains why the RX 6600 can handle 1080p and 1440p Medium settings well but struggles to maintain high frame rates at 4K Ultra, where the 26 FPS result reflects the GPU hitting its architectural limits rather than any CPU bottleneck. The 8 GB VRAM capacity is sufficient for Greedfall's textures at these settings, as evidenced by the consistent scaling from Low to High, but the Ultra preset's heavy demands cause the frame rate to collapse, suggesting the GPU's bandwidth and compute are the constraining factors.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate progression from 1080p to 4K reveals a classic GPU-bound scenario. At Medium settings, performance drops from 109 FPS at 1920x1080 to 76 FPS at 2560x1440, a 30% reduction, and then further to 45 FPS at 3840x2160, another 41% drop from 1440p. This scaling pattern, where increasing pixel count by 2.25 times from 1080p to 1440p results in a 30% frame rate loss, and then doubling again to 4K produces an additional 41% loss, indicates that the rendering workload grows faster than the GPU's throughput can compensate. The High preset follows a similar trajectory: 99 FPS at 1080p, 69 FPS at 1440p, and 41 FPS at 4K. The Low preset shows the least severe scaling, going from 139 FPS at 1080p to 96 FPS at 1440p to 57 FPS at 4K, which still represents a 59% reduction from 1080p to 4K. The Ultra preset is the most punishing, starting at 63 FPS at 1080p and falling to 44 FPS at 1440p and 26 FPS at 4K. The fact that even the lowest settings cannot maintain 60 FPS at 4K, with the 57 FPS average on Low, confirms that the RX 6600 is the limiting component at higher resolutions. The CPU's role becomes more prominent at 1080p, where the 139 FPS Low result and 109 FPS Medium result suggest the processor can feed the GPU adequately, but at 4K, the GPU's compute limitations dominate, as shown by the sub-60 FPS results across all presets.

How This Combo Ranks

In the database of tested combinations for Greedfall, this pairing of the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus and AMD Radeon RX 6600 achieves a combo rank of 2288 out of 2938 total configurations. This places the system in the lower 22% of tested combos for this game, which is a direct consequence of the GPU's mid-range positioning rather than the CPU's capabilities. The CPU itself ranks in the 96th percentile among all processors, with an average benchmark score of 84003, placing it 0.2% ahead of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, which scores 83807, and 1.1% ahead of the AMD EPYC 4584PX, which scores 83090. The GPU, by contrast, sits in the 63rd percentile among all GPUs, which is a significant gap. The 2288 rank reflects that most other tested systems either pair a similarly modest GPU with a less powerful CPU or, more commonly, pair a more powerful GPU with a lesser CPU, resulting in higher frame rates in this GPU-bound title. The data suggests that the CPU is not the bottleneck, as the combo's rank is determined almost entirely by the GPU's 15096 passmark G3D score, which is 0% different from the NVIDIA Quadro K6000's 19030 score. In practical terms, this combo delivers frame rates that are typical for a mid-range GPU in 2019-era titles, but it is far from the top of the leaderboard for Greedfall, where higher-tier GPUs would achieve significantly better results.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus provides substantial computational headroom that Greedfall, an Action RPG from 2019, does not fully utilize. The CPU features 24 cores and 24 threads, with a base clock of 3.70 GHz and a boost clock of 5.80 GHz, operating on the Intel Socket 1851 with a 125 W TDP. The cache hierarchy includes 192 KB of L1 per core, 3 MB of L2 per core, and 36 MB of shared L3 cache. This processor scores 51731 in Cinebench R23 multicore and 7303 in single-core, with a Passmark multithread score of 60860 and a single-thread score of 4823. The nearest rival, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, scores 83807 on average, which is just 0.2% lower, showing the 290K Plus is at the top of its class. For Greedfall, the CPU's role is to maintain a stable frame pipeline that allows the GPU to render at its maximum capacity. At 1080p Low, the 139 FPS result demonstrates that the CPU can push frame rates well beyond the GPU's typical mid-range output. However, the fact that FPS drops from 139 at 1080p to 96 at 1440p and 57 at 4K on Low settings indicates that the GPU becomes the limiting factor as resolution increases, not the CPU. The CPU's 96th percentile ranking and 24-core configuration suggest it would handle any CPU-intensive scenarios in the game, such as large numbers of NPCs or complex physics, without issue, but the measured frame rates are capped by the RX 6600's rendering capabilities.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the measured average frame rates are 139 FPS on Low, 109 FPS on Medium, 99 FPS on High, and 63 FPS on Ultra. The Medium preset shows a minimum of 93 FPS and a maximum of 126 FPS, while the other presets at this resolution do not have recorded min/max values. The spread from Low to Ultra is 76 FPS, indicating that the GPU has significant performance headroom at this resolution, but the Ultra preset's demands cut deeply into that headroom. At 2560x1440, the averages are 96 FPS on Low, 76 FPS on Medium, 69 FPS on High, and 44 FPS on Ultra. The Medium preset records a minimum of 64 FPS and a maximum of 87 FPS. The drop from 1080p to 1440p at the Medium setting is 33 FPS, which is a 30% reduction. At 3840x2160, the averages are 57 FPS on Low, 45 FPS on Medium, 41 FPS on High, and 26 FPS on Ultra. The Medium preset has a minimum of 38 FPS and a maximum of 52 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra at 4K is 31 FPS, showing that the GPU's performance envelope narrows as resolution increases. The data reveals that the 1080p Medium setting is the only configuration that consistently exceeds 90 FPS, while the 1440p Medium setting is the only 1440p option that maintains an average above 70 FPS. At 4K, no preset achieves an average above 60 FPS, with Low coming closest at 57 FPS. The minimum frame rates recorded on Medium settings across all resolutions—93 FPS at 1080p, 64 FPS at 1440p, and 38 FPS at 4K—provide a reliable floor for what this combination can deliver without stutter.

FAQ

Q: What is the best settings preset for this CPU/GPU combo in Greedfall at 1080p?

A: The Medium preset provides the best experience, averaging 109 FPS with a minimum of 93 FPS, which offers both high frame rates and better visual quality than the Low preset's 139 FPS average.

Q: How does the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus compare to its nearest rival in processing power?

A: The 290K Plus has an average benchmark score of 84003, which is 0.2% higher than the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K's score of 83807 and 1.1% higher than the AMD EPYC 4584PX's score of 83090.

Q: Can this combination handle 4K gaming in Greedfall?

A: No preset achieves a 60 FPS average at 3840x2160; the best result is 57 FPS on Low settings, while Medium averages 45 FPS, High averages 41 FPS, and Ultra averages 26 FPS.

Q: What is the GPU's performance ranking relative to other graphics cards?

A: The AMD Radeon RX 6600 ranks in the 63rd percentile among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 19036, which is exactly even with the NVIDIA Quadro K6000's score of 19030.

Q: How much does performance drop when moving from 1080p to 1440p at Medium settings?

A: The average frame rate falls from 109 FPS at 1920x1080 to 76 FPS at 2560x1440, a 33 FPS reduction that represents a 30% performance loss.

Q: What is the combo's overall ranking for this game in the database?

A: This configuration ranks 2288 out of 2938 tested combos in Greedfall, placing it in the lower portion of the leaderboard due to the GPU's mid-range positioning.