Inside

The AMD Ryzen 5 2600 paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is a study in stark generational contrast, pitting a 2018 six-core Zen+ processor against a 2022 Ada Lovelace flagship. In Inside, a 2016 Puzzle Platformer, this combination produces exceptionally high frame rates across all settings, yet the data reveals a persistent bottleneck that shifts with resolution and graphics preset. The measured FPS figures show that the RTX 4090 is rarely allowed to stretch its legs, with the Ryzen 5 2600 often dictating the final performance ceiling.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling from 1080p to 4K clearly exposes where the system's limitations lie. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo achieves 206.5 FPS. Moving to 1440p Low drops that figure to 183.3 FPS, a reduction of approximately 11%. At 4K Low, the average falls further to 156 FPS, which is another 15% decrease from the 1440p result. While these are steep percentage drops, the absolute numbers remain extremely high, suggesting the CPU is the primary constraint even at the lowest resolution.

The scaling pattern becomes more telling when examining the High preset. At 1080p High, the system delivers 159.1 FPS. At 1440p High, it produces 141.4 FPS, an 11% decline. At 4K High, the average drops to 118.7 FPS, another 16% reduction. This consistent pattern of roughly 11-16% declines per resolution step indicates that the GPU is becoming more involved as resolution increases, but the CPU is still holding the system back from what the RTX 4090 could theoretically deliver. The gap between the 1080p and 4K results at Low settings is 50.5 FPS, while the same gap at High settings is 40.4 FPS, showing that the GPU load is scaling as expected but never fully saturating the graphics card.

The Ultra preset tells a similar story. From 155.6 FPS at 1080p, the system drops to 140.3 FPS at 1440p and then to 121.5 FPS at 4K. The incremental declines of 9.8% and 13.4% respectively are less severe than the Low preset drops, which suggests that the added GPU workload is starting to balance out the CPU limitation. However, the fact that the 1080p Ultra score of 155.6 FPS is nearly identical to the 4K Low score of 156 FPS is a strong indicator that the Ryzen 5 2600 is the limiting component in both scenarios, capping performance around the 155-160 FPS mark regardless of GPU load.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 brings overwhelming specifications to this pairing, with 24 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus providing 1.01 TB/s of bandwidth. Its 16,384 shading units and 512 texture mapping units are backed by a boost clock of 2520 MHz, figures that would normally obliterate a 2016 puzzle platformer. The 82.58 TFLOPS of FP32 compute and 1,290.2 GTexel/s texture rate are excessive for Inside, yet the benchmark results show the GPU's role is largely secondary in this configuration.

The data shows that the RTX 4090's performance headroom is only partially utilized. At 4K Ultra, the system produces 121.5 FPS, while at 1080p Low it reaches 206.5 FPS. The difference of 85 FPS between these extremes demonstrates that the GPU can scale with workload, but the CPU prevents it from reaching the multi-hundred-FPS figures one would expect from this card in a lightweight title. The GPU's 91st percentile ranking among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 66,473, places it far above the CPU's 77th percentile ranking, confirming the imbalance.

The memory configuration of the RTX 4090 is vastly overprovisioned for Inside. The 24 GB frame buffer and 1.01 TB/s bandwidth are irrelevant to this game's demands, as even the 4K Ultra preset fails to stress the memory subsystem. The GPU's pixel rate of 443.5 GPixel/s and texture rate of 1,290.2 GTexel/s are similarly untapped resources. The benchmark data indicates that the RTX 4090 is waiting on the CPU to feed it data, with the 2520 MHz boost clock rarely reaching its potential under this processor's constraint.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 2600 is a six-core, twelve-thread processor from the Zen architecture, running at a base clock of 3.40 GHz and a boost clock of 3.90 GHz. Its 16 MB of shared L3 cache and 46.9 GB/s memory bandwidth are modest by modern standards, and its Cinebench R23 scores of 11,186 multi-core and 1,579 single-core place it well behind contemporary processors. The 77th percentile ranking among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 19,616, confirms its mid-range positioning.

In Inside, the CPU's role is to maintain a consistent frame delivery, and the data shows it struggling to keep pace with the RTX 4090. The near-identical 4K Low score of 156 FPS and 1080p Ultra score of 155.6 FPS is the clearest evidence of a CPU bottleneck. Regardless of whether the GPU is lightly or heavily loaded, the system hovers around the 155-160 FPS ceiling, suggesting the Ryzen 5 2600's single-thread performance is the limiting factor.

The CPU's 3.90 GHz boost clock and 6 cores are sufficient for a game like Inside, which likely relies on a few threads for its physics and logic. However, the processor's age is apparent in its Passmark single-thread score of 2,239 and Cinebench R20 single-core score of 663. These figures, while not directly translatable to game performance, indicate that the CPU's per-core throughput is insufficient to fully drive the RTX 4090's frame generation. The 4,800 million transistors on a 12 nm process node produce a 213 mm² die, and that older process technology is reflected in the frame pacing consistency seen in the benchmark results.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete FPS dataset reveals a consistent hierarchy across resolutions and settings. At 1080p, Low settings produce the highest average of 206.5 FPS, followed by Medium at 191.2 FPS, High at 159.1 FPS, and Ultra at 155.6 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra is 50.9 FPS, showing that the game's graphical options have a meaningful impact even at this resolution.

At 1440p, the ordering remains the same: Low at 183.3 FPS, Medium at 167.6 FPS, High at 141.4 FPS, and Ultra at 140.3 FPS. The difference between Low and Ultra narrows to 43 FPS, while the gap between High and Ultra shrinks to just 1.1 FPS, indicating that the Ultra preset's additional effects provide diminishing returns. The 1440p Medium result of 167.6 FPS is notably higher than the 1080p High result of 159.1 FPS, illustrating how CPU limitations can invert expected performance scaling.

At 4K, the results are: Low at 156 FPS, Medium at 147.1 FPS, High at 118.7 FPS, and Ultra at 121.5 FPS. Interestingly, the Ultra preset at 4K produces a higher average than the High preset, a 2.8 FPS difference that falls within typical measurement variance but highlights the CPU's dominant influence. The 4K Low result of 156 FPS is nearly identical to the 1080p Ultra result of 155.6 FPS, reinforcing that the processor is the consistent performance limiter across all tested configurations.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of the AMD Ryzen 5 2600 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 ranks 956th out of 1,671 tested combos in Inside, placing it in the lower-middle portion of the database. The 57th percentile ranking is surprising given the GPU's 91st percentile standing, but it accurately reflects the system's inability to leverage the RTX 4090's full potential. The CPU's 77th percentile ranking among all CPUs is dragged down by the pairing, as the combo rank falls well below what either component achieves individually.

The ranking suggests that many other processor and graphics card combinations, even with less powerful GPUs, outperform this setup in Inside due to more balanced pairings. A modern six-core processor with higher single-thread performance would likely push the RTX 4090 to its limits, but the Ryzen 5 2600's older architecture prevents this. The combo's 956th position out of 1,671 indicates that the RTX 4090 is effectively wasted in this configuration for this particular game, as the measured FPS figures of 118.7 FPS at 4K High and 155.6 FPS at 1080p Ultra fall short of what the GPU alone is capable of producing.