Hard West

# Hard West with Intel Core i5-11400F + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER

The data for this combination shows a turn-based tactics title that is heavily GPU-bound at higher resolutions, yet the Intel Core i5-11400F still manages to keep pace even at 1080p where frame rates approach 200 FPS. With the RTX 4070 SUPER delivering 12 GB of GDDR6X memory and a 192-bit bus, the measured results across three resolutions and four settings presets suggest a pairing that is well balanced for this genre, though the CPU's six-core, twelve-thread configuration may become a talking point at lower resolutions. The benchmark rows indicate that the game's visual demands scale sharply with preset selection, and the following sections break down what the numbers mean for practical play.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS rows for this combination reveal a clear hierarchy across presets, with the sweet spot depending on resolution. At 1920x1080, the Ultra preset delivers 135 FPS average, while High reaches 179 FPS and Medium sits at 197 FPS. The Low preset tops out at 211 FPS. Given that turn-based tactics do not require extreme refresh rates for competitive advantage, the High preset at 1080p offers a strong balance—179 FPS is nearly three times the 60 FPS baseline, and the jump from Medium to High costs only 18 FPS. However, if visual fidelity is the priority, Ultra's 135 FPS still comfortably exceeds common 120 Hz displays, so the choice at 1080p is more about preference than necessity.

At 2560x1440, the picture shifts. High produces 114 FPS, Medium 148 FPS, Low 181 FPS, and Ultra drops to 85 FPS. The High preset here is the recommended pick for most users: 114 FPS is smooth, and the gap to Ultra's 85 FPS (a 29 FPS loss) is substantial for what is likely a marginal visual gain in a turn-based context. If the player owns a 144 Hz monitor, Medium at 148 FPS is worth considering, but the jump from High to Medium only adds 34 FPS while reducing quality. For 4K, the situation changes entirely. High at 3840x2160 yields 60 FPS exactly, Medium 78 FPS, Low 95 FPS, and Ultra just 45 FPS. The High preset is the only one that hits the 60 FPS target, making it the clear recommendation for 4K—Ultra is playable but not ideal, and Low sacrifices too much for the extra FPS.

Across all resolutions, the data suggests that High is the default sweet spot for this combo, with Medium as a fallback for higher refresh rate displays at 1440p, and Ultra reserved for 1080p where the headroom is largest. The measured rows show no minimum FPS data for many presets, but where present (Medium at all resolutions), the min-to-max spread is moderate—for example, 167 to 226 FPS at 1080p Medium—indicating stable performance without severe hitches.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is built on the AD104 chip with an Ada Lovelace architecture, fabricated on a 5 nm process by TSMC. It packs 35,800 million transistors on a 294 mm² die, with a transistor density of 121.8M per mm². The GPU's clock speeds are listed as 1980 MHz base and 2475 MHz boost, with memory running at 1313 MHz (21 Gbps effective). The 12 GB of GDDR6X memory sits on a 192-bit bus, providing 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth. This memory configuration is crucial for Hard West, a game that likely loads large texture sets for its isometric environments and character models.

In the measured FPS data, the GPU's role becomes apparent when comparing presets. At 1080p Low, the combo achieves 211 FPS, but at Ultra, it drops to 135 FPS—a 36% reduction. This scaling suggests that the GPU's shading units (7168), TMUs (224), and ROPs (80) are the primary drivers of frame rate as settings increase. The pixel rate of 198.0 GPixel/s and texture rate of 554.4 GTexel/s are high enough to handle the game's demands, but the Ultra preset likely introduces additional lighting or post-processing effects that stress the rasterization pipeline.

The VRAM capacity of 12 GB is more than sufficient for a 2015 title, even at 4K Ultra, where the frame rate drops to 45 FPS—a performance limitation, not a memory one. The GDDR6X memory bandwidth of 504.2 GB/s ensures that texture streaming is not a bottleneck, as evidenced by the fact that the game runs at 95 FPS at 4K Low, which still requires high resolution framebuffers. The GPU's 56 RT cores and 224 tensor cores are present but likely underutilized in this turn-based game, as ray tracing and DLSS are not typical features of this genre. The FP32 throughput of 35.48 TFLOPS (and FP16 at 35.48 TFLOPS 1:1) gives the card headroom for any compute-based effects, but the measured data does not indicate any specific compute-bound scenarios.

How This Combo Ranks

In the database of tested combinations, this specific pairing of Intel Core i5-11400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER holds a rank of 745 out of 3722 combos for Hard West. This places it in the top 20% of all tested systems, which is notable given that the CPU is a mid-range 11th Gen part and the GPU is a high-end 40-series card. The percentile position suggests that the combo outperforms the majority of setups, but the rank also reveals that there are many other pairings that achieve higher frame rates—likely those with newer CPUs or more powerful GPUs.

The GPU's percentile vs all GPUs is 83, meaning it sits above 83% of all GPUs tested in general benchmarks. The CPU's percentile vs all CPUs is 71, which is lower, indicating that the CPU is a relative weak point in this pairing. However, for Hard West specifically, the combo rank of 745 out of 3722 (roughly the 80th percentile) shows that the game is not overly CPU-sensitive, as the combo still lands high despite the CPU's lower general percentile. The nearest rivals for the GPU include the NVIDIA Quadro M6000 24 GB (avg score 43262, delta -0.1%), the GeForce RTX 5050 Mobile (43268, -0.1%), and the Quadro M6000 (43301, -0.2%), with the RTX 4090 Mobile (43667, -1%) being the closest higher performer. For the CPU, the rivals are the AMD EPYC 7H12 (avg score 17120, delta 0.3%), the Intel Core i5-12450H (17239, -0.4%), the AMD Ryzen 3 PRO 8300G (17278, -0.6%), and the Intel Core Ultra 7 164U (17074, 0.6%). These deltas are all within 1%, meaning the CPU's performance is tightly clustered with its peers, while the GPU has more separation.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data is comprehensive, covering three resolutions and four settings, with 12 rows total. At 1920x1080, the Low preset produces 211 FPS average, Medium 197 FPS (with min 167 and max 226), High 179 FPS, and Ultra 135 FPS. The scaling from Low to Ultra is a 76 FPS drop, which is a 36% reduction. The Medium preset's min-max range of 167-226 FPS shows a 59 FPS spread, indicating some variance but no major stuttering.

At 2560x1440, the numbers are: Low 181 FPS, Medium 148 FPS (min 126, max 170), High 114 FPS, and Ultra 85 FPS. The drop from 1080p to 1440p at High is 65 FPS (179 to 114), a 36% reduction. The Medium preset's min-max of 126-170 shows a 44 FPS spread, tighter than at 1080p, suggesting that the GPU is more consistently loaded. The Ultra preset at 1440p (85 FPS) is still playable but shows a significant 29 FPS gap from High.

At 3840x2160, the data is: Low 95 FPS, Medium 78 FPS (min 66, max 89), High 60 FPS, and Ultra 45 FPS. The scaling from 1080p High to 4K High is 179 to 60 FPS, a 66% reduction. This is the largest relative drop across the resolutions, indicating that 4K is where the GPU's limits are most evident. The Medium preset at 4K (78 FPS) is the only non-High preset that stays above 60 FPS, while Ultra (45 FPS) falls below the 60 FPS target. The min-max range at 4K Medium (66-89 FPS) shows a 23 FPS spread, which is the smallest across all resolutions, implying that at higher resolution, the workload is more uniform.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS data across resolutions reveals the limiting component in this combo. From 1080p to 1440p, the average FPS drop across all settings is roughly 36%—for example, High goes from 179 to 114 FPS, and Low from 211 to 181 FPS. This is a substantial reduction that points to the GPU as the primary bottleneck, as the CPU's load does not increase proportionally with resolution. The fact that the i5-11400F can push 211 FPS at 1080p Low but only 181 FPS at 1440p Low (a 14% drop) while the GPU is doing more work suggests that the GPU is being saturated at higher pixel counts.

From 1440p to 4K, the drop becomes even more pronounced. High goes from 114 to 60 FPS (47% reduction), and Low from 181 to 95 FPS (47.5% reduction). This near-halving of frame rates indicates that the RTX 4070 SUPER's memory bandwidth (504.2 GB/s) and pixel fill rate (198.0 GPixel/s) are the limiting factors at 4K. The CPU's role is diminished, as even at 4K Low (95 FPS), the GPU is able to feed frames at a rate that the CPU can handle. The data shows that the combo is GPU-limited at all resolutions, but the severity increases with resolution—at 1080p, the GPU has enough headroom to allow the CPU to matter, but at 4K, the GPU is the clear bottleneck.

The scaling from 1080p to 4K at High is 179 to 60 FPS, a 66% drop. This is a larger reduction than the pixel count increase (1080p has 2.07 million pixels, 4K has 8.29 million, a 4x increase), which suggests that the game's settings at High include effects that scale super-linearly with resolution, such as high-resolution shadows or anisotropic filtering. The Medium preset shows a similar trend: 197 to 78 FPS, a 60% drop. The fact that the drops are not perfectly proportional to pixel count indicates that the GPU's shading units are being taxed more heavily at higher resolutions, not just the memory bandwidth.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-11400F is a six-core, twelve-thread processor based on the Rocket Lake architecture, manufactured on Intel's 14 nm process. It has a base clock of 2.60 GHz and a boost clock of 4.40 GHz, with a 65 W TDP. The CPU features 80 KB of L1 cache per core, 512 KB of L2 per core, and 12 MB of shared L3 cache. It supports dual-channel DDR4 memory with a bandwidth of 51.2 GB/s. The CPU's benchmark scores include a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 14340 and single-core of 2024, a Geekbench multi-core of 7737 and single-core of 1777, and a 3DMark max threads score of 5652.

In Hard West, the CPU's role is likely limited to game logic, AI pathfinding, and unit calculations—all of which are turn-based and not frame-rate dependent. The measured FPS at 1080p Low (211 FPS) suggests that the CPU can handle the game's simulation load without becoming a bottleneck, even at high frame rates. The single-thread performance (3DMark single thread score of 868, Cinebench R20 single-core of 850) is adequate for the game's likely single-threaded engine, as the boost clock of 4.40 GHz provides sufficient per-core throughput.

However, the CPU's lack of integrated graphics means it relies entirely on the discrete GPU, and the 14 nm process node is older compared to the GPU's 5 nm, which could contribute to higher system power draw but does not affect FPS directly. The CPU's 12 MB L3 cache and 51.2 GB/s memory bandwidth are modest by modern standards, but for a 2015 game, they are more than sufficient. The fact that the combo ranks at 745 out of 3722 suggests that the CPU is not holding the GPU back significantly—if it were, the rank would be lower given the GPU's high percentile. The CPU's nearest rivals (e.g., AMD EPYC 7H12 with a delta of 0.3%) show that it is competitive with server-class parts in average benchmarks, but for gaming, the 6-core/12-thread design is adequate for this title.

FAQ

Q: What is the best settings preset for this combo at 1080p?

A: The High preset at 1920x1080 delivers 179 FPS average, which is significantly above the 60 FPS baseline. Ultra provides 135 FPS, but the visual gain may not justify the 44 FPS loss. Medium and Low are higher (197 and 211 FPS) but sacrifice image quality. High is the balanced choice.

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

A: Yes, but only at certain presets. At 3840x2160, High produces 60 FPS, Medium 78 FPS, Low 95 FPS, and Ultra 45 FPS. For a smooth 60 FPS experience, High is the recommended preset. Ultra is not ideal, as it falls below 60 FPS.

Q: How does the RTX 4070 SUPER compare to its nearest GPU rivals?

A: The GPU's average benchmark score is 43223, with a percentile of 83. Its nearest rivals include the NVIDIA Quadro M6000 24 GB (avg 43262, -0.1%), the GeForce RTX 5050 Mobile (43268, -0.1%), and the Quadro M6000 (43301, -0.2%). The RTX 4090 Mobile (43667) is 1% higher, making the 4070 SUPER nearly equivalent to these parts in general benchmarks.

Q: Is the Intel Core i5-11400F a bottleneck for the RTX 4070 SUPER?

A: Based on the measured FPS, the CPU is not a bottleneck at most resolutions. At 1080p Low, the combo achieves 211 FPS, indicating the CPU can feed the GPU. However, the CPU's percentile vs all CPUs is 71, lower than the GPU's 83, suggesting it is the weaker link in general computing, but in Hard West, the game's turn-based nature reduces CPU load.

Q: What memory bandwidth does the GPU have, and does it matter for this game?

A: The GPU has 504.2 GB/s of memory bandwidth from 12 GB of GDDR6X on a 192-bit bus. This is sufficient for the game's textures, as evidenced by the 95 FPS at 4K Low, which still requires high bandwidth. The bandwidth is not a limiting factor at lower settings, but it contributes to the 60 FPS cap at 4K High.

Q: How does the frame rate scale from 1080p to 4K at High settings?

A: At High settings, the FPS drops from 179 at 1920x1080 to 114 at 2560x1440, then to 60 at 3840x2160. This represents a 36% drop from 1080p to 1440p, and a 47% drop from 1440p to 4K. The scaling indicates that the GPU is the limiting factor, as the CPU's performance does not change with resolution.