Hard West

# Hard West — Intel Core i7-14700F + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER

Hard West, a turn-based tactics title from 2015, presents an unusual benchmark scenario for modern hardware. The measured frame rates across resolutions and settings reveal that this combination of an Intel Core i7-14700F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER delivers performance ranging from playable to exceptionally high, with the data clearly indicating where the bottleneck shifts between CPU and GPU. Across all tested configurations, the system never drops below 43.4 frames per second, which suggests that even the most demanding preset remains viable, albeit with notable compromises in visual fidelity.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data shows a predictable but steep decline as resolution increases, with the magnitude of that decline varying significantly by preset. At 1080p High, the system produces 178.2 FPS, which drops to 116.0 FPS at 1440p (a reduction of roughly 35%) and further to 60.7 FPS at 4K (another 48% drop from 1440p). This scaling pattern indicates that at 1080p, the CPU is heavily involved in frame generation, while the GPU becomes progressively more dominant as pixel count rises.

The Low preset tells a clearer story about the CPU's ceiling. From 1080p Low at 287.7 FPS to 1440p Low at 178.6 FPS, the drop is 38%. However, moving from 1440p Low to 4K Low (97.1 FPS) represents a 45% reduction. The fact that 4K Low still produces nearly triple the frame rate of 4K Ultra (97.1 vs 43.4 FPS) suggests that the rendering workload, not the CPU, is the limiting factor at higher resolutions.

Medium settings show a similar trajectory: 232.5 FPS at 1080p, 149.7 FPS at 1440p, and 79.3 FPS at 4K. The percentage drop from 1080p to 1440p is 36%, and from 1440p to 4K it is 47%. Ultra settings compress the range somewhat, with 133.2 FPS at 1080p, 83.6 FPS at 1440p, and 43.4 FPS at 4K—drops of 37% and 48%, respectively. This consistent ~35-50% scaling pattern across presets indicates that Hard West's rendering pipeline scales linearly with pixel count, without unexpected bottlenecks or optimization quirks.

The most telling observation is the gap between Low and Ultra at each resolution. At 1080p, the difference is 154.5 FPS (287.7 vs 133.2), while at 4K it narrows to 53.7 FPS (97.1 vs 43.4). This compression at 4K confirms that the GPU becomes the dominant constraint, as the additional shading and texture work from higher settings cannot be fully masked by the CPU's frame generation capability.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i7-14700F is a 20-core, 28-thread processor based on Raptor Lake architecture, with a base clock of 2.10 GHz and a boost clock of 5.40 GHz. Its benchmark scores place it in the 94th percentile of all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 54,097. The nearest rival, the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X, scores 54,450, putting the i7-14700F just 0.6% behind—a negligible margin. Against the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D (54,681), the deficit widens slightly to 1.1%, while the i7-14700F leads the Intel Xeon Phi 7290 (53,469) by 1.2% and the AMD EPYC 7313P (53,206) by 1.7%.

In Hard West, the CPU's influence is most apparent at 1080p Low, where the system achieves 287.7 FPS. This extreme frame rate indicates that the processor can feed frames faster than the GPU can render them at lower settings, creating a CPU-bound scenario. The i7-14700F's high single-thread performance, evidenced by its Cinebench R23 single-core score of 5,003 and Geekbench single-core score of 2,711, is critical for a turn-based tactics game, where game logic and pathfinding calculations often run on a limited number of threads.

The 33 MB of shared L3 cache and 2 MB per-core L2 cache help maintain low latency for the game's decision-making routines. The processor's 20 cores and 28 threads provide ample headroom for background tasks and any multithreaded elements of the engine, though Hard West's 2015 origins likely limit how much parallelism the game can exploit. The PassMark multithread score of 41,765 and Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 35,443 demonstrate strong overall throughput, but the game's frame rates at high settings (178.2 FPS at 1080p) suggest that single-thread efficiency matters more than raw core count in this title.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, built on the Ada Lovelace architecture with a 5 nm process, features 7,168 shading units, 224 texture mapping units, and 80 ROPs. Its 12 GB of GDDR6X memory operates across a 192-bit bus, delivering 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth. The GPU's boost clock of 2475 MHz and base clock of 1980 MHz contribute to its FP32 performance of 35.48 TFLOPS. With a benchmark percentile of 84, the RTX 4070 SUPER scores 42,576 on average, placing it 0.2% ahead of the NVIDIA RTX A6000 (42,653, delta -0.2%) and 0.3% ahead of the AMD Radeon RX 7650 GRE (42,723, delta -0.3%). It leads the AMD Radeon Pro 580X (41,991) by 1.4% and the NVIDIA Tesla M40 (41,897) by 1.6%.

The GPU's role in Hard West becomes increasingly prominent at higher resolutions. At 4K Ultra, the system drops to 43.4 FPS, which indicates the RTX 4070 SUPER's rasterization and memory bandwidth are being heavily taxed. The 12 GB VRAM capacity is sufficient for this game, as Hard West's texture sizes from 2015 are unlikely to exceed even 8 GB, but the memory bandwidth of 504.2 GB/s becomes a factor when rendering large scenes at 4K with full detail.

The 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 4,627 and PassMark G3D score of 29,995 provide context for the GPU's raw capabilities. The gap between Low and Ultra at 4K (97.1 vs 43.4 FPS) demonstrates that the RTX 4070 SUPER can handle the pixel throughput, but the additional shading complexity of Ultra settings causes a 55% performance penalty. The pixel rate of 198.0 GPixel/s and texture rate of 554.4 GTexel/s are more than adequate for this game's visual demands, suggesting that the 4K Ultra result is constrained by shader execution rather than memory or pixel fill.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data provides clear guidance for optimizing the experience in Hard West. At 4K, the High preset delivers 60.7 FPS, which is suitable for a turn-based tactics game where frame timing is not critical for input responsiveness. The Ultra preset at 4K drops to 43.4 FPS, which remains playable for this genre but leaves little headroom for scene complexity or background processes. The Medium preset at 4K (79.3 FPS) offers a comfortable margin above 60 FPS, making it the recommended choice for 4K displays where visual quality is still important.

At 1440p, all presets exceed 83.6 FPS, with High (116.0 FPS) providing an excellent balance of visual fidelity and performance. The Ultra preset at 1440p (83.6 FPS) is also viable, and the data shows that users with high-refresh-rate 1440p monitors can opt for Medium (149.7 FPS) or Low (178.6 FPS) to maximize smoothness. For 1080p displays, the system is effectively unconstrained: even Ultra produces 133.2 FPS, while High achieves 178.2 FPS. The Medium preset at 1080p (232.5 FPS) and Low preset (287.7 FPS) exceed the refresh rate of most monitors, making them unnecessary unless the user has a 240 Hz or higher display.

The optimal preset depends on resolution. For 4K, Medium provides the best experience per the measured rows, offering 79.3 FPS with reasonable visual quality. For 1440p, High is the sweet spot at 116.0 FPS, while 1080p users should select Ultra (133.2 FPS) to extract maximum visual detail without sacrificing frame rate. The data indicates that the game's rendering engine scales settings linearly, so there is no particular preset that offers disproportionate gains.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Intel Core i7-14700F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER ranks 255th out of 1,699 tested combos for Hard West, placing it in the top 15% of all configurations. This ranking reflects the system's ability to maintain high frame rates across all resolutions and settings, with the minimum measured result of 43.4 FPS still being playable for the genre. The rank is influenced by the game's age and the fact that many newer, more powerful GPUs can achieve even higher frame rates at 1080p, where the CPU's 20-core configuration provides adequate—but not exceptional—single-thread performance compared to newer processors.

The combo's position in the rankings is primarily determined by the 1080p Low result of 287.7 FPS, which is high but not at the top tier where systems exceed 300 FPS. At higher resolutions, the RTX 4070 SUPER's 84th percentile GPU score ensures competitive performance, but the 255th rank out of 1,699 indicates that a significant number of combos with stronger GPUs or CPUs achieve better results in this specific title. The delta between this combo and the top performers is likely driven by the CPU's single-thread performance in a game that does not fully utilize 20 cores, as well as the GPU's position in the mid-to-high range rather than the absolute top tier. Nevertheless, the data shows that this system delivers a consistently smooth experience across the entire resolution and settings matrix, making it a well-balanced choice for Hard West.