Hard West

Hard West is a turn-based tactics title from 2015, and the benchmark results for the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 reveal a system that is heavily constrained by the game's engine and CPU performance at lower resolutions, while the GPU's immense power becomes the deciding factor only at 4K with maximum settings. The data indicates that this combination delivers a wide performance envelope, ranging from extremely high frame rates at 1080p to more moderate, yet still very playable, results at 4K Ultra.

Resolution Scaling

The performance scaling from 1080p to 4K is telling. At 1920x1080 with Ultra settings, the combo produces 171.4 FPS, but when the resolution is increased to 2560x1440, the frame rate drops to 109.4 FPS, a significant reduction. Pushing further to 3840x2160 at Ultra yields 58.6 FPS, which is a substantial decline from the 1440p figure. This pattern strongly suggests that the CPU is the primary limiting factor at 1080p, as the frame rate is capped by the processor's ability to feed the GPU with draw calls and game logic updates. The Ryzen 7 5700X, with its 8 cores and 16 threads, is a capable processor, but the older game engine appears unable to fully utilize it, creating a bottleneck.

The scaling between resolutions is not linear, which supports this interpretation. The jump from 1080p to 1440p incurs a 36% performance hit at Ultra settings, while the jump from 1440p to 4K incurs a 46% hit. This indicates that as resolution increases, the load shifts from the CPU to the GPU. At 4K, the RTX 4090's rendering workload becomes more dominant, and the frame rate drops are more directly tied to the GPU's fill rate and pixel processing capabilities. In essence, at lower resolutions, the system is "CPU-bound," but at 4K, it transitions to being "GPU-bound," which is the opposite of what is typically seen with modern, more multithreaded games. The data clearly shows that the game's engine is not scaling well with the high core count of the CPU, as the performance gap between the two resolutions is too large to be purely a GPU limitation.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is a monster of a graphics card, with 24 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus delivering 1.01 TB/s of bandwidth. Its 16384 shading units and 512 texture mapping units provide immense compute power. However, in Hard West, this power is not fully utilized until the resolution reaches 4K. At 1080p and 1440p, the GPU is often waiting for the CPU, meaning its vast resources are underutilized. The card's boost clock of 2520 MHz is high, but it cannot compensate for a CPU bottleneck.

The role of the GPU becomes more apparent when looking at the 4K results. The difference between Low and Ultra settings at 3840x2160 is a massive 60.6 FPS (119.2 vs 58.6), demonstrating that the GPU is being exercised heavily at this resolution. The 24 GB VRAM is more than sufficient for this game, and the memory bandwidth ensures that there are no frame delivery issues even at 4K. The RTX 4090's performance here is not about a lack of raw power, but rather about the game's inability to create enough work for it at lower resolutions. The card's 91st percentile ranking among all GPUs in synthetic benchmarks, with an average score of 66473, confirms its top-tier status, yet in this specific title, its dominance is only fully expressed at the highest resolution and settings. The card's architecture is designed for high throughput, which is wasted when the CPU is the limiting factor.

How This Combo Ranks

In the database of tested combinations, this specific pairing of the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 holds the 82nd position out of 1699 combos for Hard West. This places it in the top 5% of all tested configurations, which is an impressive rank, but it also highlights that there are 81 other combinations that perform better in this specific game. Given that the RTX 4090 is one of the most powerful consumer GPUs available, this ranking is more a reflection of the CPU's limitations in this title than the GPU's capabilities.

The fact that this combo does not rank higher suggests that other CPUs, perhaps with higher single-thread performance or better compatibility with the game's engine, are able to extract more frame rate from the RTX 4090. The CPU's nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks, such as the Intel Core i9-11900KF and AMD Ryzen 5 7600X, have average scores within 0.2% of the 5700X, indicating they are all in the same performance tier. However, in a game like Hard West, which appears to be sensitive to single-thread performance, even a small difference in CPU architecture can have a noticeable impact on the final frame rate. The 82nd rank is a strong result, but it shows that even with a top-tier GPU, the CPU choice is critical for maximizing performance in this particular title.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a detailed picture of the system's performance across different settings and resolutions. At 1920x1080, the frame rates are exceptionally high, with Low settings producing 237.9 FPS and Medium achieving 225.2 FPS. High settings yield 204.2 FPS, and even Ultra manages a very smooth 171.4 FPS. These numbers indicate that at 1080p, the system is severely CPU-limited, as the frame rate does not drop significantly even when settings are increased. The performance headroom is massive.

Moving to 2560x1440, the frame rates remain high but show a more pronounced difference between settings. Low settings deliver 204.7 FPS, while Medium and High produce 190.7 and 142.4 FPS, respectively. Ultra at 1440p drops to 109.4 FPS. This shows that the GPU is starting to become more involved, but the CPU is still a significant factor, as the drop from Low to Ultra is 95.3 FPS. At 3840x2160, the GPU takes over as the primary bottleneck. Low settings still provide 119.2 FPS, but Medium drops to 98.2 FPS, High to 73.5 FPS, and Ultra to 58.6 FPS. This is a clear demonstration of the GPU's workload scaling with resolution. The frame rate at 4K Ultra is still playable, but it is a far cry from the triple-digit figures at lower resolutions.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700X is a Zen 3 architecture processor with 8 cores and 16 threads, running at a base clock of 3.40 GHz and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz. Its 32 MB of shared L3 cache is a key feature. In synthetic benchmarks, it posts a strong multi-core score of 22620 in Cinebench R23 and a single-core score of 3193. However, Hard West, being a 2015 title, is likely designed for older, lower-core-count CPUs and may not efficiently utilize the 5700X's multi-threading capabilities.

The benchmark results suggest that the game is heavily dependent on single-thread performance, which is where the 5700X is decent but not exceptional compared to newer processors. The data shows that at 1080p, the frame rate is nearly identical between Low and High settings (237.9 vs 204.2 FPS), which is a classic sign of a CPU bottleneck. The game engine is probably limited by a single main thread that handles game logic and scene management, and that thread cannot be sped up by having more cores available. The CPU's 83rd percentile ranking among all CPUs is respectable, but in this specific game, its architecture and clock speed are the limiting factors, preventing the RTX 4090 from reaching its full potential at resolutions below 4K. The CPU's boost clock of 4.60 GHz is high, but it is not enough to overcome the engine's limitations, resulting in the performance ceiling observed in the 1080p and 1440p benchmarks.