Hard West

The AMD Ryzen 5 7500F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER combination delivers a compelling performance profile in Hard West, a turn-based tactics title from 2015. The data indicates a system that scales predictably across resolutions, with the GPU becoming the primary bottleneck only at the highest settings and pixel counts. This analysis breaks down the measured frame rates, placing them in the context of the hardware's broader benchmark standings.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals a classic scaling pattern where the performance cost of higher resolutions is significant but not uniform across quality settings. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo achieves an average of 273.4 FPS. Moving to 1440p Low drops this to 182.7 FPS, a reduction of approximately 33%. At 4K Low, the average further falls to 97.9 FPS, which represents a 46% drop from the 1440p figure. This steep decline indicates that even at the lowest visual fidelity, the rendering workload at 4K is substantial.

The scaling behavior changes character when the settings are increased. At High settings, the transition from 1080p (182.7 FPS) to 1440p (111.3 FPS) is a 39% reduction, while the move from 1440p to 4K (60.4 FPS) is a 46% drop. The pattern is similar at Ultra settings, where 1080p yields 135.4 FPS, 1440p yields 85 FPS, and 4K yields 45.6 FPS. The consistent ~45-46% penalty for the 1440p-to-4K step across all settings strongly suggests that the GPU’s pixel throughput and memory bandwidth are the limiting factors at this resolution. The RTX 4070 SUPER’s 504.2 GB/s memory bandwidth and 198.0 GPixel/s pixel rate are being saturated. In contrast, the smaller penalty from 1080p to 1440p at Low settings (33%) versus the larger penalty at High settings (39%) hints that the CPU is still contributing to performance at lower resolutions, but its influence wanes as the GPU load intensifies.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the database of tested combinations for Hard West, this specific pairing holds a strong position. The combo rank of 263 out of 1699 tested combos places it in the top 15.5% of all systems evaluated. This is a notable achievement considering the game’s age and the wide array of hardware configurations that have been benchmarked.

This ranking is consistent with the individual component standings. The CPU sits at the 82nd percentile among all tested processors, while the GPU is at the 84th percentile among all tested graphics cards. The system’s overall performance in this game aligns closely with these component-level scores, indicating a balanced pairing that extracts near-expected performance from both parts. The data shows that in Hard West, this combo outperforms the vast majority of alternatives, making it a high-tier configuration for this specific title.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 7500F is a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on the Zen 4 architecture, with a base clock of 3.70 GHz and a boost clock of 5.00 GHz. For a turn-based tactics game like Hard West, the workload is typically not heavily multi-threaded, but the processor’s strong single-thread performance is crucial for game logic, AI pathfinding, and frame pacing.

The benchmark data supports this. The CPU’s single-thread score in Cinebench R23 is 3218, and its 3DMark 2-thread score is 1902. These figures indicate robust per-core performance. In the game’s measured FPS, the gap between 1080p Low (273.4 FPS) and 1440p Low (182.7 FPS) is 90.7 FPS. While the GPU is clearly the main driver of this drop, the fact that the 1080p Low result is so high suggests the CPU is capable of feeding frames well beyond typical display refresh rates. The 3DMark 16-thread score of 6376 and the multi-thread Cinebench R23 score of 22799 show that the CPU has substantial headroom for any background tasks or lightly threaded game systems. The CPU’s 32 MB of shared L3 cache is also beneficial for keeping game data close at hand, reducing latency in turn-based calculations. This processor does not bottleneck the RTX 4070 SUPER in this title, as evidenced by the near-linear scaling of FPS with resolution changes that would stress the GPU.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete dataset provides a granular view of performance across four settings presets and three resolutions.

1920x1080: The system is exceptionally fast here. Low settings average 273.4 FPS. Medium settings reduce this to 232 FPS, a 15% performance cost. High settings yield 182.7 FPS, a further 21% reduction from Medium. Ultra settings produce an average of 135.4 FPS. This represents a 26% drop from High to Ultra, which is the largest relative penalty between consecutive settings at this resolution. All results are far above the 60 FPS threshold, indicating the CPU and GPU are both operating well within their limits.

2560x1440: Performance remains very high. Low settings average 182.7 FPS. Medium settings average 147.4 FPS, a 19% reduction. High settings average 111.3 FPS, a 24% drop from Medium. Ultra settings average 85 FPS, a 24% reduction from High. The consistent ~24% penalty for the final two settings steps at this resolution suggests a smooth, predictable scaling curve. The 85 FPS result at Ultra is still highly playable.

3840x2160: This is where the GPU begins to show strain. Low settings average 97.9 FPS. Medium settings drop to 77.7 FPS, a 21% reduction. High settings average 60.4 FPS, a 22% drop from Medium. Ultra settings yield 45.6 FPS, a 25% reduction from High. The data shows that 4K Ultra is the only configuration that falls below 60 FPS. The progression from High to Ultra at 4K costs 14.8 FPS, which is the largest absolute FPS drop for any single settings change in the entire dataset. This highlights that the Ultra preset at 4K demands the most from the GPU’s memory system and compute units.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is the dominant component in this pairing for Hard West. Its specifications, including 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus, are more than ample for a game released in 2015. The GPU’s 7168 shading units and 224 texture mapping units provide immense fill rate capabilities. The benchmark results show that the GPU is the primary determinant of performance at 4K, where it is clearly the limiting factor.

At 4K Ultra, the average FPS of 45.6 is a direct consequence of the GPU’s rendering workload. The pixel rate of 198.0 GPixel/s is being pushed hard at this resolution. The data reveals that the gap between Low and Ultra settings at 4K is 52.3 FPS (from 97.9 to 45.6). This is a dramatic 53% performance swing driven entirely by the GPU’s ability to handle the increased shader complexity and texture detail. The GPU’s 504.2 GB/s memory bandwidth is also a key factor; at 4K, the larger framebuffer demands and texture streaming require this high bandwidth to maintain frame rates. While the GPU’s Passmark G3D score of 29995 and its 84th percentile ranking confirm its overall prowess, the Hard West data specifically illustrates that the RTX 4070 SUPER is fully capable of delivering high refresh rate experiences at 1080p and 1440p, but is taxed by the demands of 4K Ultra. The combination of the GPU’s 35.48 TFLOPS FP32 compute and high bandwidth ensures that the system is never held back by the CPU, but the 4K results clearly show the GPU’s performance ceiling for this title.