Greedfall

Greedfall, the 2019 Action RPG, places the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti in a position where settings selection is more about smoothing frame pacing than chasing raw headroom. The measured data shows that the gap between presets shrinks as resolution climbs, but the cost of Ultra is consistently steep. At 1920x1080, the average frame rate of 153 FPS on High drops to 98 FPS on Ultra, a 36% penalty that yields marginal visual gains in a game from this era. The Medium preset, with its measured range of 143 to 194 FPS at 1080p, offers a tighter experience than High’s single average of 153 FPS, suggesting that Medium is the sweet spot for competitive smoothness. At 2560x1440, Medium delivers 117 FPS with a minimum of 99 FPS, ensuring that even busy combat scenes stay well above display refresh rate thresholds. The data indicates that High is the optimal choice for 4K, where it produces 63 FPS, while Medium drops to 70 FPS but includes a recorded minimum of 59 FPS, which can cause perceptible stutter on standard 60 Hz panels. Ultra is not recommended at any resolution, as its 40 FPS at 4K and 68 FPS at 1440p represent the only rows where the combination fails to maintain a fluid baseline.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS rows provide a clear hierarchy: Medium offers the best balance of performance and stability across all three resolutions. At 1920x1080, Medium posts an average of 168 FPS with a minimum of 143 FPS, while High averages 153 FPS without a recorded minimum. The 15 FPS average advantage for Medium, combined with the documented floor, makes it the safer choice for high-refresh-rate displays. Moving to 2560x1440, Medium again leads with 117 FPS and a 99 FPS minimum, versus High’s 106 FPS average. The pattern reverses slightly at 3840x2160, where High’s 63 FPS average beats Medium’s 70 FPS but lacks the minimum data; however, the Medium row’s 59 FPS minimum is concerning for 60 Hz V-sync. For users prioritizing a locked experience, High at 4K is the recommendation, as it avoids the sub-60 dips that the Medium row exposes. Low settings are only useful for maximizing frame rate, reaching 214 FPS at 1080p and 149 FPS at 1440p, but the jump from Low to Medium at 1440p costs only 22% of the frame rate while likely providing substantial visual uplift in a game with detailed environments. Ultra is a trap: it reduces performance by 36% at 1080p, 42% at 1440p, and 43% at 4K compared to High, making it the least efficient preset in every measured configuration.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus presents a 24-core, 24-thread configuration with a base clock of 3.70 GHz and a boost clock of 5.80 GHz. This processor sits in the 96th percentile of all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 84003. Its nearest rival, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, scores 83807, a delta of only 0.2%, indicating that the 290K Plus offers negligible raw compute advantage over its predecessor. In Greedfall, a game that is primarily GPU-bound at higher resolutions, the CPU’s role is to feed the RTX 3070 Ti without bottlenecking at lower settings. The data supports this: at 1080p Low, the combo reaches 214 FPS, which is high enough to stress single-thread performance, but the 290K Plus’s single-core Cinebench R23 score of 7303 places it well above typical gaming demands. The multi-core score of 51731 in Cinebench R23 and a Passmark multithread score of 60860 show massive headroom for background tasks, but Greedfall’s engine likely uses only a fraction of these threads. The 36 MB of shared L3 cache and 115.2 GB/s of dual-channel DDR5 memory bandwidth are more relevant to frame pacing than core count, as the game’s open-world streaming benefits from cache locality. The processor’s 96th percentile ranking, compared to the RTX 3070 Ti’s 75th percentile, confirms that the CPU is not the limiting factor in this pairing; the GPU dictates performance scaling across settings and resolutions.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution for this combo to maintain 60+ FPS consistently?

A: The measured data shows that 2560x1440 on Medium settings delivers 117 FPS average with a 99 FPS minimum, and 1920x1080 on Medium reaches 168 FPS with a 143 FPS minimum. At 3840x2160, only the High preset (63 FPS) and Low preset (89 FPS) stay above 60 FPS, but Medium’s 70 FPS average includes a 59 FPS minimum, making 1440p the safest choice.

Q: How does the RTX 3070 Ti compare to its nearest GPU rivals in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The RTX 3070 Ti has an average benchmark score of 29945, placing it in the 75th percentile of all GPUs. Its closest competitor, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Mobile, scores 29928, a delta of 0.1%, while the AMD Radeon RX 6800 scores 30095, putting the 3070 Ti behind by 0.5%. The RTX 2080 Ti trails slightly at 29783, meaning the 3070 Ti is 0.5% faster.

Q: Is the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus significantly faster than its direct predecessor?

A: No, the difference is marginal. The 290K Plus scores 84003 on average, while the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K scores 83807, a delta of just 0.2%. This places them statistically level in synthetic workloads, though the 290K Plus has a slightly higher boost clock of 5.80 GHz.

Q: Why does the Ultra preset perform so poorly in Greedfall?

A: The data shows that Ultra reduces average FPS by 36% at 1080p (from 153 to 98 FPS), 42% at 1440p (from 106 to 68 FPS), and 43% at 4K (from 63 to 40 FPS) compared to High. This suggests that Ultra applies disproportionately heavy effects that the RTX 3070 Ti’s 8 GB of GDDR6X memory and 21.75 TFLOPS of FP32 compute cannot sustain efficiently.

Q: What does the combo’s rank of 1012 out of 2938 indicate?

A: This rank places the combo in the 65.6th percentile of all tested combinations for Greedfall. While not top-tier, it is above the median, meaning the pairing of this CPU and GPU offers above-average performance for the game, with the CPU’s 96th percentile ranking offsetting the GPU’s 75th percentile.

Q: Does the CPU’s cache configuration impact gaming performance here?

A: The 290K Plus features 192 KB of L1 cache per core, 3 MB of L2 per core, and 36 MB of shared L3 cache. The large L3 is likely beneficial for Greedfall’s asset streaming, but the benchmark data does not isolate cache effects; the performance differences between settings are more directly attributable to GPU load.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti achieves a rank of 1012 out of 2938 tested combos in Greedfall. This places the pairing in the upper third of all configurations, which is notable given the GPU’s mid-range standing. The CPU is a top-5% part (96th percentile), while the GPU sits in the 75th percentile, meaning the bottleneck is clearly the graphics card. The rank suggests that many combos with weaker CPUs but stronger GPUs outperform this setup at higher resolutions, but at 1080p, the CPU’s strength helps achieve frame rates like 214 FPS on Low, which is competitive with more balanced pairings. The 1012 rank also implies that the 290K Plus’s 24 cores are underutilized in this title, as Greedfall’s engine likely scales to fewer threads; a combo with a cheaper CPU and a faster GPU might rank higher in pure FPS terms. However, the data shows that the combo’s performance is consistent across resolutions, with the CPU never causing frame rate collapses even at 1080p Low. The deltaPct values for the CPU’s rivals (0.2% to 1.3%) are far smaller than the GPU’s rival deltas (-0.5% to -1.6%), reinforcing that the GPU choice has a larger impact on this game’s ranking than the CPU.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals a predictable decline as resolution increases, but the rate of decline varies by settings preset. At High settings, the average FPS drops from 153 at 1080p to 106 at 1440p (a 30.7% decrease) and then to 63 at 4K (a 40.6% decrease from 1440p). This scaling indicates that the RTX 3070 Ti is the limiting factor, as the CPU’s performance headroom is constant across resolutions. For Medium settings, the progression is 168 FPS at 1080p, 117 FPS at 1440p (a 30.4% drop), and 70 FPS at 4K (a 40.2% drop). The similarity in percentage drops between High and Medium suggests that the GPU’s pixel throughput is the bottleneck, not memory bandwidth or CPU caches. Low settings show a slightly different pattern: 214 FPS at 1080p, 149 FPS at 1440p (a 30.4% drop), and 89 FPS at 4K (a 40.3% drop). The consistent ~30% and ~40% drops across all presets point to a GPU that is scaling linearly with pixel count, which is typical for a card with 8 GB of memory and a 256-bit bus. The 4K Ultra preset’s 40 FPS average is the only data point that breaks this pattern, suggesting that Ultra settings introduce effects that overwhelm the GPU’s resources beyond simple resolution scaling. The 1440p to 4K gap is larger than the 1080p to 1440p gap by roughly 10 percentage points, which aligns with the 2.25x pixel count increase from 1440p to 4K versus the 1.78x increase from 1080p to 1440p.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete measured FPS data for the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti in Greedfall is as follows:

At 1920x1080, the Low preset achieves an average of 214 FPS with no recorded minimum or maximum. The Medium preset averages 168 FPS, with a minimum of 143 FPS and a maximum of 194 FPS. High settings produce an average of 153 FPS, while Ultra drops to 98 FPS. The Medium preset’s documented range of 143-194 FPS shows a variance of 51 FPS, which is the largest spread among all 1080p rows, indicating that Medium can occasionally dip close to the High preset’s average.

At 2560x1440, Low settings deliver 149 FPS average, Medium reaches 117 FPS with a 99 FPS minimum and 134 FPS maximum, High averages 106 FPS, and Ultra averages 68 FPS. The Medium row’s minimum of 99 FPS is critical, as it stays above 100 FPS for most of the test, but the 35 FPS gap between minimum and maximum suggests some scene-dependent variability.

At 3840x2160, Low settings hit 89 FPS, Medium averages 70 FPS with a minimum of 59 FPS and maximum of 80 FPS, High averages 63 FPS, and Ultra averages 40 FPS. The Medium row’s 59 FPS minimum is the only sub-60 FPS reading in the entire dataset, making it unsuitable for strict 60 Hz V-sync. High’s 63 FPS average lacks a minimum, but the single data point suggests it is more stable than Medium’s range. The Ultra preset’s 40 FPS average at 4K is the lowest measurement across all resolutions and settings, representing a 71% drop from the 1080p Low score of 214 FPS. The data also shows that the jump from High to Ultra is consistently the largest performance hit, ranging from 55 FPS at 1080p to 23 FPS at 4K, confirming that Ultra’s effects are disproportionately expensive on this GPU.