Hard West

The AMD Ryzen 5 4600G paired with the Intel Arc B580 ranks 2817th out of 3722 tested combos in Hard West, placing it in the bottom quarter of all configurations measured for this title. This is a striking result given the hardware's individual benchmark standings — the CPU sits at the 71st percentile among all processors, while the GPU lands at the 68th percentile among all graphics cards. The disparity between component-level strength and in-game placement suggests that Hard West's engine, a turn-based tactics title from 2015, does not scale effectively with modern hardware, likely bottlenecking on single-threaded CPU performance rather than GPU throughput. The combo's nearest CPU rivals — the AMD Ryzen 3 PRO 5355GE (0.1% ahead), AMD Ryzen 3 8300GE (0.6% behind), Intel Core 7 150U (0.6% ahead), and Intel Core i3-14100T (0.8% behind) — all feature similar core counts and clock behavior, reinforcing that this tier of processor delivers comparable raw compute but none of them escape the game's performance ceiling. The Arc B580's nearest GPU rivals — AMD Radeon RX 580 2048SP (0.2% ahead), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 (0.6% behind), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (0.7% ahead), and NVIDIA P106-100 (1.0% ahead) — span vastly different performance classes, yet the in-game deltas remain within 1%, indicating that Hard West saturates well before the GPU's full capability is utilized.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data across all four settings presets — Low, Medium, High, and Ultra — at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K reveals a clear hierarchy for this combo. At 1080p, the Low preset delivers 151 FPS average, which is the highest figure recorded for this configuration in any resolution or setting. Medium drops to 124 FPS, High to 95 FPS, and Ultra to 71 FPS. The step from Low to Medium costs 27 FPS (an 18% reduction), while Medium to High costs 29 FPS (a 23% reduction), and High to Ultra costs 24 FPS (a 25% reduction). The performance curve is steep but consistent, with each preset tier reducing framerate by roughly a quarter.

For a turn-based tactics game where framerate smoothness matters less than in action titles, the High preset at 1080p offers the best balance: 95 FPS is well above the 60 FPS threshold for fluid camera pans and unit animations, while the visual uplift from Medium is substantial in terms of lighting and shadow detail. The Ultra preset at 1080p (71 FPS) remains playable but delivers diminishing returns — the 24 FPS sacrifice over High buys marginal increases in ambient occlusion and texture filtering that are barely perceptible in a game with static isometric scenes. At 1440p, the High preset holds 60 FPS exactly, which is the minimum for a consistently smooth experience; anything below this risks visible judder during map scrolling. The Medium preset at 1440p (79 FPS) provides a safety margin, and given that Hard West's tactical combat scenes are largely static, the Medium-to-High visual gap is less objectionable than the framerate delta. For users prioritizing a locked 60 FPS experience, 1440p High is the recommended preset, as it hits the target precisely without requiring the visual compromises of Medium. At 4K, no preset achieves 60 FPS — High averages 32 FPS, Medium 41 FPS, and Low 50 FPS — so 4K is only viable for screenshot purposes or turn-based play where sub-60 framerates are tolerable.

Resolution Scaling

The resolution scaling behavior exposes the combo's fundamental bottleneck. From 1080p High to 1440p High, the average framerate drops from 95 FPS to 60 FPS, a 37% reduction for a 78% increase in pixel count (from 2.07 million to 3.69 million pixels). This disproportionate decline — the framerate falls more than the pixel count rises — indicates that the GPU is not the limiting factor; a purely GPU-bound scenario would show framerate scaling inversely with pixel count, meaning a 78% pixel increase should yield roughly a 44% framerate reduction if the GPU were saturated. The observed 37% drop is steeper than that, suggesting memory bandwidth or CPU draw-call overhead is constraining performance before the GPU's shading units reach full utilization.

Moving from 1440p High to 4K High, the framerate drops from 60 FPS to 32 FPS, a 47% reduction for a 125% increase in pixels (from 3.69 million to 8.29 million). Again, the framerate decline outpaces the pixel scaling, with the 4K figure falling to roughly half of the 1440p figure despite more than double the pixel workload. The Arc B580's 456.0 GB/s of memory bandwidth and 13.67 TFLOPS of FP32 compute should theoretically handle this pixel count far better — the GPU's nearest rivals in the benchmark database, such as the RTX 2080, routinely exceed 60 FPS in similar titles at 4K. The fact that this combo cannot break 50 FPS even at 4K Low suggests the CPU's single-thread performance — measured at a 726 score in 3DMark single-thread and 1919 in Cinebench R23 single-core — is the primary limiter, as Hard West's engine appears to serialize game logic and rendering calls on a single thread. The gap between Low and High at 4K (50 FPS vs 32 FPS) is narrower than at 1080p (151 FPS vs 95 FPS), indicating that at higher resolutions the CPU bottleneck becomes more pronounced, capping the GPU's ability to translate its shading power into framerate.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete measured dataset for this combo spans three resolutions and four settings presets, with all figures representing average FPS unless otherwise noted.

1920x1080 (1080p):

• Low: 151 FPS average
• Medium: 124 FPS average (minimum 105, maximum 143)
• High: 95 FPS average
• Ultra: 71 FPS average

2560x1440 (1440p):

• Low: 96 FPS average
• Medium: 79 FPS average (minimum 67, maximum 90)
• High: 60 FPS average
• Ultra: 45 FPS average

3840x2160 (4K):

• Low: 50 FPS average
• Medium: 41 FPS average (minimum 35, maximum 47)
• High: 32 FPS average
• Ultra: 24 FPS average

The Medium preset rows include minimum and maximum framerate data, revealing frame pacing characteristics. At 1080p Medium, the frame time window spans 105 to 143 FPS, a 38 FPS range that indicates moderate variance — likely caused by CPU-side spikes during enemy turns or map transitions. At 1440p Medium, the range tightens to 67 to 90 FPS (a 23 FPS spread), and at 4K Medium, it narrows further to 35 to 47 FPS (a 12 FPS spread). This progressive tightening as resolution increases is counterintuitive for a GPU-bound scenario — typically higher resolutions produce more variable frame times due to heavier shading workloads. The pattern instead suggests that the CPU bottleneck smooths out at higher resolutions because the frame rate is already so low that CPU-side jitter becomes a smaller fraction of the total frame time. The 1080p Low figure of 151 FPS represents the absolute ceiling for this combo; even with minimal graphical settings, the engine cannot push beyond this, reinforcing the single-thread CPU limit.

GPU Role

The Intel Arc B580 brings substantial hardware resources to this pairing: 2560 shading units, 160 texture mapping units, 80 render output units, and 20 ray tracing cores on the BMG-G21 chip, built on TSMC's 5 nm process with 19,600 million transistors across a 272 mm² die. The GPU operates at a fixed 2670 MHz base and boost clock, with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus delivering 456.0 GB/s of bandwidth. Its compute throughput is rated at 13.67 TFLOPS FP32 and 27.34 TFLOPS FP16 (2:1 ratio), with pixel and texture rates of 213.6 GPixel/s and 427.2 GTexel/s respectively.

In the benchmark database, the Arc B580's average score of 23021 places it at the 68th percentile of all GPUs, with nearest rivals including the AMD Radeon RX 580 2048SP (0.2% slower), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 (0.6% faster), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (0.7% slower), and NVIDIA P106-100 (1.0% slower). These deltas — all within 1% — indicate that the Arc B580 performs on par with a broad range of prior-generation high-end and mid-range cards in synthetic benchmarks. However, in Hard West, the GPU's utilization is clearly suboptimal. At 1080p Low, the 151 FPS ceiling is far below what the B580's 13.67 TFLOPS could theoretically deliver in a lighter title; the GPU is effectively idling while waiting for CPU instructions. The 12 GB VRAM is more than sufficient for Hard West, a 2015 release whose texture budgets are modest by modern standards, so memory capacity is not a constraint. The 456.0 GB/s bandwidth similarly goes underused — the game's static scenes and limited particle effects generate far less memory traffic than a modern open-world title. The GPU's 2670 MHz clock speed is respectable, but it cannot compensate for the engine's inability to feed it enough draw calls per frame. The data shows that the B580's role in this combo is largely wasted; its compute and memory resources are never stressed to anywhere near their limits.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 4600G is a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on the Zen 2 architecture (Renoir codename), fabricated on TSMC's 7 nm process with 9,800 million transistors across a 156 mm² die. It runs at a 3.70 GHz base clock and 4.20 GHz boost clock, with a 65 W TDP, and features 64 KB L1 cache per core, 512 KB L2 per core, and 8 MB shared L3 cache. The CPU supports DDR4 memory in dual-channel configuration, providing 51.2 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and connects via PCIe Gen 3 with 20 lanes.

The CPU's benchmark scores show a clear strength in multi-threaded workloads: 5709 in Cinebench R20 multi-core, 13593 in Cinebench R23 multi-core, and 4863 in 3DMark 16-thread. However, single-thread performance is modest — 726 in 3DMark single-thread, 193 in Cinebench R15 single-core, and 1919 in Cinebench R23 single-core. The 3DMark max-threads score of 4889 is barely higher than the 16-thread score of 4863, indicating that the CPU's scaling plateaus quickly beyond 8 threads. In Hard West, a game from 2015 that predates multi-core rendering pipelines, the single-thread scores are what matter most. The 726 3DMark single-thread figure is low even for this processor class — the nearest CPU rivals (Ryzen 3 PRO 5355GE, Ryzen 3 8300GE, Intel Core 7 150U, Intel Core i3-14100T) all have similar or higher single-thread performance, yet none of them would fare dramatically better in this title. The 4.20 GHz boost clock is competitive, but the Zen 2 architecture's IPC (instructions per clock) is a generation behind newer designs, and Hard West's engine appears to rely heavily on a single thread for game logic and scene management. The 8 MB L3 cache is adequate for the game's asset footprint, but the CPU's 51.2 GB/s memory bandwidth is unlikely to be a factor given the game's modest data requirements. The 65 W TDP and 7 nm process keep thermals in check, allowing sustained boost clocks during extended play sessions, but this does not translate into higher framerates when the engine's single-thread ceiling is the binding constraint. The data strongly indicates that the CPU, not the GPU, is the limiting component in this combo for Hard West.

FAQ

Q: Why does this combo rank so low (2817th out of 3722) when both components have above-average benchmark scores?

A: The CPU sits at the 71st percentile and the GPU at the 68th percentile individually, but Hard West's engine, released in 2015, does not scale with modern hardware. The single-thread CPU performance — 726 in 3DMark single-thread — becomes the bottleneck, capping framerates regardless of GPU capability, which explains the low in-game ranking.

Q: What is the best settings preset for a smooth 60 FPS experience?

A: At 1440p High, the combo achieves exactly 60 FPS average. For a more comfortable margin above the 60 FPS threshold, 1440p Medium delivers 79 FPS. At 1080p, High offers 95 FPS and Ultra drops to 71 FPS, both above 60 FPS.

Q: Can this combo handle 4K resolution in Hard West?

A: Technically yes, but with compromises. The best 4K result is 50 FPS at Low settings, which is playable for a turn-based game but below 60 FPS. Medium drops to 41 FPS, High to 32 FPS, and Ultra to 24 FPS. No 4K preset achieves a consistently smooth framerate.

Q: How does the GPU's performance compare to its nearest rivals in this game?

A: The Arc B580's nearest GPU rivals — AMD Radeon RX 580 2048SP (0.2% slower), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 (0.6% faster), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (0.7% slower), and NVIDIA P106-100 (1.0% slower) — all show deltas within 1% in benchmark scores. In Hard West, the GPU is not the limiting factor, so these differences are unlikely to manifest in meaningful framerate differences.

Q: Is the CPU or GPU the bottleneck in this combo?

A: The CPU is clearly the bottleneck. Evidence includes: framerate drops at higher resolutions outpace pixel count increases (a 78% pixel increase from 1080p to 1440p causes a 37% framerate drop, steeper than expected for GPU-bound scaling), and the 1080p Low ceiling of 151 FPS is far below what the GPU's 13.67 TFLOPS compute could deliver. The CPU's single-thread score of 726 in 3DMark is the limiting factor.

Q: What are the minimum and maximum framerates recorded for this combo?

A: The measured data includes min/max figures only for Medium settings. At 1080p Medium, framerates range from 105 to 143 FPS; at 1440p Medium, from 67 to 90 FPS; and at 4K Medium, from 35 to 47 FPS. The highest average framerate recorded is 151 FPS at 1080p Low, and the lowest is 24 FPS at 4K Ultra.