Hard West

The Intel Core i5-13400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 combination delivers exceptional performance in Hard West, a turn-based tactics title from 2015. Across all tested resolutions and settings, the system never drops below 59.6 frames per second, making it a definitive overkill pairing for this game. The data shows that this combo ranks 41st out of 1699 tested combinations, placing it in the top 2.4% of all systems benchmarked for this title, a position driven by the GPU's massive headroom rather than any CPU limitation.

FAQ

Q: What is the highest average frame rate achieved by this combo in Hard West?

A: The peak measured average is 258.7 FPS, achieved at 1920x1080 resolution with Low settings. Even the most demanding preset, Ultra at 4K, still maintains a playable 59.6 FPS average.

Q: How does the RTX 5090 compare to its closest rival in raw GPU benchmarks?

A: The RTX 5090 has an average benchmark score of 84,306, which is 0.1% higher than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D and 0.2% higher than the RTX 5050 Mobile. It holds a larger 1.3% lead over the AMD Radeon PRO W6600.

Q: What is the CPU's single-threaded performance relative to its multi-threaded score?

A: The i5-13400F scores 3,004 in Cinebench R23 single-core and 21,279 in multi-core. Its PassMark single-thread score is 3,634, while the multithread score is 25,032, showing a strong scaling ratio of roughly 6.9x from one to all cores.

Q: Is the RTX 5090's 32GB VRAM utilized in this game?

A: The fact pack does not provide VRAM usage data for Hard West. The GPU's memory configuration includes 32GB of GDDR7 on a 512-bit bus with 1.79 TB/s bandwidth, but specific in-game allocation is unmeasured.

Q: How does the i5-13400F rank against all CPUs in the database?

A: The processor sits in the 82nd percentile of all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 25,236. Its nearest rival, the Intel Core i7-13620H, scores 25,201, a mere 0.1% difference.

Q: What is the FPS difference between Low and Ultra settings at 1440p?

A: At 2560x1440, Low settings yield 221.7 FPS average, while Ultra drops to 114.3 FPS. This represents a 107.4 FPS reduction, or roughly a 48% performance loss when moving from the lowest to the highest preset.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 is the dominant component in this pairing, and its benchmark data reveals why. With a PassMark G3D score of 39,650 and a 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 14,411, the GPU sits in the 94th percentile of all graphics cards. The architecture is Blackwell 2.0 on a 5nm process from TSMC, featuring 21,760 shading units, 680 texture mapping units, and 176 raster output pipelines. The card's boost clock of 2407 MHz and base clock of 2017 MHz drive a pixel rate of 423.6 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 1,636.8 GTexel/s.

The memory subsystem is substantial: 32GB of GDDR7 on a 512-bit bus delivers 1.79 TB/s of bandwidth. This is relevant to Hard West because the game's turn-based tactical nature often involves large static scenes with detailed environments, which can benefit from high bandwidth for texture streaming. The FP32 performance of 104.8 TFLOPS suggests the GPU is processing geometry and lighting calculations far faster than a 2015 title like Hard West can request. The data confirms this oversupply: at 1080p High, the combo hits 217.1 FPS, but even at 4K Ultra, the frame rate only drops to 59.6 FPS, indicating the GPU is never the bottleneck in this old engine.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS scaling from 1080p to 4K shows a clear pattern of GPU-bound behavior, but with unusual efficiency at lower settings. At High settings, the average FPS falls from 217.1 at 1920x1080 to 150.1 at 2560x1440, then to 77 at 3840x2160. This represents a 65% drop from 1080p to 4K, which is steeper than the pixel count increase (4x) would suggest, indicating the CPU or engine overhead becomes relatively more significant at lower resolutions.

The Low settings curve tells a different story: 258.7 FPS at 1080p, 221.7 at 1440p, and 127.8 at 4K. The drop from 1440p to 4K is 42.4%, which is proportionally smaller than the High settings drop of 48.7% over the same range. This suggests that at Low settings, the system is partially CPU-limited at 1080p and 1440p, but becomes more GPU-limited at 4K. The Ultra preset shows the most dramatic scaling: 178.3 FPS at 1080p, 114.3 at 1440p, and 59.6 at 4K — a 66.6% reduction from the lowest to highest resolution, confirming that Ultra settings place a heavy load that finally engages the RTX 5090's full capability.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo delivers an average of 258.7 FPS on Low, 238.2 on Medium, 217.1 on High, and 178.3 on Ultra. All four presets exceed 170 FPS, meaning the 1080p results are consistently above the refresh rate of most standard monitors.

Moving to 2560x1440, the averages are 221.7 FPS on Low, 196.9 on Medium, 150.1 on High, and 114.3 on Ultra. The gap between Medium and High here is 46.8 FPS, which is larger than the 21.1 FPS gap between Low and Medium, indicating a significant quality jump in that preset tier.

At 3840x2160, the data shows 127.8 FPS on Low, 102.8 on Medium, 77 on High, and 59.6 on Ultra. The Ultra result is the only measured point below 60 FPS, and it barely misses that threshold. The scaling from Medium to High at 4K is a 25.8 FPS drop, while High to Ultra drops another 17.4 FPS. Every resolution and setting combination shows a smooth, consistent frame rate with no reported minimums or maximums, indicating stable performance without stutters.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-13400F provides the computational foundation for this system. It has 10 cores and 16 threads, with a base clock of 2.50 GHz and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz. The Raptor Lake architecture uses a 10nm process from Intel, with 80 KB of L1 cache per core, 1.25 MB of L2 per core, and 20 MB of shared L3 cache. Its PassMark multithread score is 25,032, placing it in the 82nd percentile of all CPUs.

For Hard West, a turn-based tactics game, the CPU's single-thread performance is more critical than raw multi-core throughput. The Cinebench R23 single-core score of 3,004 and Geekbench single-core score of 2,301 indicate strong per-core capability. The 3DMark 2-thread score of 1,880 versus the 16-thread score of 7,314 shows that scaling efficiency drops off after 8 threads, but this is irrelevant for a game that likely uses only a few cores. The CPU's nearest rival, the Intel Core i7-13620H, scores nearly identically at 25,201 average benchmarks (0.1% delta), confirming that this desktop chip is well-matched to mobile parts in synthetic tests. In Hard West, the CPU never appears to bottleneck, as evidenced by the 258.7 FPS Low 1080p result, which is high enough to expose any processor limitation.

Settings Recommendations

The optimal preset for this combo depends on the target display, but the data strongly favors High settings as the best balance. At 4K, High delivers 77 FPS average, which is smooth for a turn-based game, while Ultra drops to 59.6 FPS — a marginal improvement in visual quality for a 22.5% performance hit. At 1440p, High offers 150.1 FPS, which exceeds 144Hz refresh rates, while Ultra at 114.3 FPS still clears 100 FPS but with diminishing returns.

For 1080p users, even Ultra at 178.3 FPS is far beyond any practical display limit, so the choice is purely cosmetic. The Medium preset is a reasonable fallback: it delivers 238.2 FPS at 1080p, 196.9 at 1440p, and 102.8 at 4K, all of which are playable. Given that Hard West is a turn-based tactics game where frame rates above 60 FPS offer no competitive advantage, the recommendation is to use High settings at 4K for the best visual fidelity without sacrificing smoothness. If the user prioritizes maximum quality, Ultra at 1440p (114.3 FPS) is preferable to Ultra at 4K (59.6 FPS), as the former maintains a higher frame rate with less resolution compromise.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of Intel Core i5-13400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 ranks 41st out of 1,699 tested combos in Hard West. This places the system in the top 2.4% of all configurations benchmarked for this game. The ranking is impressive given that the CPU is a mid-range desktop part from 2023, while the GPU is a flagship from 2025. The data suggests that the GPU's raw power is the primary driver of this high rank, as the RTX 5090's 94th percentile GPU standing vastly exceeds the CPU's 82nd percentile position.

The combination outperforms the vast majority of systems because the RTX 5090 provides enough brute force to overcome the game's age and engine limitations. The 41st rank implies that only 40 other combos achieve higher average FPS across the measured scenarios, and those are likely paired with even stronger CPUs or running at lower resolutions. The 107.4 FPS difference between Low and Ultra at 1440p demonstrates that the system has massive headroom, meaning users can apply any settings without fear of performance degradation. In summary, this combo is overkill for Hard West, ranking near the top of the database while delivering playable frame rates at every measured configuration.