Hard West

Settings Recommendations

For Hard West, the measured FPS rows reveal a clear hierarchy across the four presets. At 1920x1080, the High preset delivers 160.3 FPS, which is 39.7 FPS above the Ultra preset's 120.6 FPS, while the Medium preset sits at 211.6 FPS and Low at 256.8 FPS. The gap between High and Ultra is substantial — a 39.7 FPS difference — yet High retains a framerate that comfortably exceeds standard 144Hz display refresh rates. This makes High the optimal choice at 1080p, as it provides a meaningful visual upgrade over Medium while sacrificing far less performance than Ultra demands.

Moving to 2560x1440, the same pattern holds. High produces 100.5 FPS, which is 22.7 FPS faster than Ultra's 77.8 FPS, and still well above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay. Medium reaches 131.5 FPS, and Low hits 164.1 FPS. At this resolution, High again stands out as the best experience-per-frame tradeoff, since it maintains triple-digit performance while Ultra begins to approach the lower 60s territory.

At 3840x2160, the situation changes. High yields 54.7 FPS, barely above playable, while Ultra drops to 38.9 FPS — a 15.8 FPS deficit that makes Ultra feel sluggish. Medium improves to 71.9 FPS, and Low reaches 84.6 FPS. Here, Medium is the recommended preset, as it preserves a fluid experience above 60 FPS while keeping more visual fidelity than Low. The data suggests that the cost of moving from Medium to High at 4K is 17.2 FPS, which is too steep for the marginal visual gain.

Across all resolutions, the pattern is consistent: Ultra is disproportionately expensive relative to High, and High is the sweet spot at 1080p and 1440p, while Medium takes that role at 4K. Users prioritizing maximum smoothness on high-refresh monitors should consider Low at 1440p (164.1 FPS) or 1080p (256.8 FPS), but for balanced quality, the recommendation is High at lower resolutions and Medium at 4K.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 brings 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus, with a bandwidth of 504.2 GB/s. Its memory clock runs at 1313 MHz, translating to 21 Gbps effective, while the GPU core operates at a base clock of 1920 MHz and a boost clock of 2475 MHz. The card is built on the Ada Lovelace architecture with 5888 shading units, 184 texture mapping units, and 64 raster output units, along with 46 RT cores and 184 tensor cores.

In Hard West, a turn-based tactics title from 2015, the RTX 4070's specifications are more than sufficient for the game's demands. The 12 GB VRAM capacity is ample for this title, as the game's visual complexity does not approach the memory requirements of modern AAA releases. The measured FPS data shows that the GPU is not bottlenecked by memory capacity at any resolution or setting, as even the most demanding combination (4K Ultra) still produces 38.9 FPS, indicating the card's compute resources are the limiting factor rather than VRAM allocation.

The boost clock of 2475 MHz is particularly relevant for this game, as Hard West's turn-based nature means that frame generation is often bursty rather than continuous. The GPU's ability to sustain high clocks during these bursts directly influences the average FPS figures. The RTX 4070's FP32 throughput of 29.15 TFLOPS and texture rate of 455.4 GTexel/s provide substantial raw processing power, yet the game's age means that these resources are not fully utilized — instead, the card operates well within its capabilities, as evidenced by the 1080p Low result of 256.8 FPS.

The GPU's PCIe 4.0 x16 interface and DirectX 12 Ultimate support are forward-looking features that do not materially affect Hard West's performance, given the game's 2015 release date. The card's 200 W TDP and dual-slot design indicate a moderately power-hungry component, but the measured framerates suggest it is rarely stressed to its limits in this title.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS progression from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160 reveals how the limiting component shifts as pixel count increases. At 1080p, the High preset delivers 160.3 FPS, which drops to 100.5 FPS at 1440p — a 59.8 FPS reduction — and then to 54.7 FPS at 4K, another 45.8 FPS drop. This scaling is not linear; the percentage decrease from 1080p to 1440p is approximately 37.3%, while the decrease from 1440p to 4K is approximately 45.6%. The steeper decline at higher resolutions indicates that the GPU becomes progressively more dominant as the bottleneck.

The Low preset shows a similar trend: 256.8 FPS at 1080p, 164.1 FPS at 1440p, and 84.6 FPS at 4K. The 1080p-to-1440p drop is 92.7 FPS (36.1%), and the 1440p-to-4K drop is 79.5 FPS (48.4%). Medium follows the pattern with 211.6, 131.5, and 71.9 FPS respectively, representing a 37.9% drop from 1080p to 1440p and a 45.3% drop from 1440p to 4K. Ultra is the outlier: 120.6 FPS at 1080p, 77.8 FPS at 1440p (35.5% drop), and 38.9 FPS at 4K (50.0% drop).

The consistent pattern across all settings — where the 1440p-to-4K percentage drop exceeds the 1080p-to-1440p drop — indicates that the CPU (AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D) is capable of feeding the GPU adequately at lower resolutions, but the GPU's rendering load scales superlinearly with resolution. At 1080p, the high framerates (256.8 FPS on Low) suggest the CPU's single-thread performance is still keeping pace, but the GPU is not fully saturated. At 4K, the GPU is clearly the limiting factor, as evidenced by the 38.9 FPS Ultra result. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D's 96 MB of L3 cache and 4.70 GHz base clock ensure that CPU-side bottlenecks are minimal even at high framerates.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the full settings range demonstrates the GPU's headroom. Low produces 256.8 FPS, Medium 211.6 FPS, High 160.3 FPS, and Ultra 120.6 FPS. The step from Low to Medium costs 45.2 FPS, from Medium to High costs 51.3 FPS, and from High to Ultra costs 39.7 FPS. This near-uniform degradation across settings suggests that each preset tier adds a comparable rendering load, with Ultra being the most demanding but not disproportionately so relative to the High-to-Medium gap.

At 2560x1440, the framerates are 164.1 FPS (Low), 131.5 FPS (Medium), 100.5 FPS (High), and 77.8 FPS (Ultra). The delta between Low and Medium is 32.6 FPS, Medium to High is 31.0 FPS, and High to Ultra is 22.7 FPS. The absolute differences shrink compared to 1080p, but the relative percentages remain similar. Notably, High at 1440p (100.5 FPS) is nearly equivalent to Ultra at 1080p (120.6 FPS) in terms of the performance tier, indicating that resolution and settings trade off in a predictable manner.

At 3840x2160, the results are 84.6 FPS (Low), 71.9 FPS (Medium), 54.7 FPS (High), and 38.9 FPS (Ultra). The Low-to-Medium gap is 12.7 FPS, Medium-to-High is 17.2 FPS, and High-to-Ultra is 15.8 FPS. The 4K results show a compressed range compared to lower resolutions — the spread from Low to Ultra is 45.7 FPS, versus 136.2 FPS at 1080p. This compression is a classic sign of GPU-bound operation, where the rendering pipeline's fixed costs at high pixel counts limit the impact of settings changes.

The data also shows that the 1080p Ultra result (120.6 FPS) is higher than the 1440p High result (100.5 FPS), which in turn exceeds the 4K Medium result (71.9 FPS). This hierarchy allows users to choose between resolution and quality based on their display's native resolution and refresh rate capability.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 ranks 402nd out of 1699 tested combos in Hard West, placing it in the top 23.7% of all configurations. This percentile position is notable given the hardware's specifications — the CPU sits at the 90th percentile against all CPUs, while the GPU is at the 81st percentile against all GPUs. The combo's rank suggests that Hard West's performance is more dependent on the GPU than the CPU, as the GPU's lower percentile ranking pulls the combo's overall position down from what the CPU alone would suggest.

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D's nearest rivals in CPU benchmarks include the Intel Core i5-13600KF (avg score 38028, delta -0.7%), Intel Core i9-13900HK (avg score 38020, delta -0.6%), Intel Core Ultra 5 225 (avg score 37831, delta -0.1%), and Intel Xeon 6353P (avg score 37811, delta -0.1%). These deltas are all minimal, indicating that the 9800X3D's CPU performance is on par with several strong competitors, and none of these CPUs would likely change the combo's rank in a CPU-bound scenario.

For the GPU, the RTX 4070's nearest rivals include the AMD Radeon RX 5300M (avg score 36371, delta 2.5%), AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 (avg score 37507, delta -0.6%), NVIDIA GeForce MX570 A (avg score 38008, delta -1.9%), and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Mobile (avg score 38135, delta -2.2%). The RTX 4070's avg benchmark score of 37283 is within 2.5% of these rivals, yet the combo's rank in Hard West reflects the game's specific rendering demands, which may favor the desktop GPU's sustained performance over mobile or older variants.

Given that the combo ranks 402 out of 1699, there are 1297 tested combos that perform worse, meaning this configuration outperforms roughly 76.3% of all tested systems in Hard West. The rank is respectable for a mid-to-high-end desktop setup, though not exceptional, likely due to the game's age and its relative insensitivity to the CPU's advanced features like 3D V-Cache. The 9800X3D's 96 MB L3 cache and 8-core/16-thread configuration provide ample headroom, but Hard West's turn-based mechanics do not appear to exploit multi-threading heavily, which may explain why the combo does not rank higher despite the CPU's strong single-threaded benchmark scores (e.g., 4800 in Cinebench R23 single-core).