Inside

The AMD Ryzen 7 3700X paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 delivers a remarkably consistent experience in Inside, a game that is far more forgiving on hardware than most modern titles. Across all tested resolutions and settings, the combo never dips below 135.5 frames per second, indicating a system that is almost entirely over-provisioned for this puzzle platformer. The data suggests that the primary bottleneck, if any exists, shifts dramatically based on the resolution and graphical preset selected.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals a clear shift in system limitations. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo achieves 240.9 FPS, which represents the absolute ceiling of this pairing in this game. Moving to 1440p Low drops performance to 216.2 FPS, a reduction of approximately 10%. Scaling further to 4K Low yields 186.4 FPS, which is another 14% decrease from the 1440p figure. This pattern indicates that at lower settings, the CPU is still capable of feeding frames quickly, but the GPU's workload is increasing with pixel count.

The scaling behavior changes when graphical settings are raised. With High settings, the frame rate goes from 186.8 FPS at 1080p to 164.9 FPS at 1440p, a drop of roughly 12%. At 4K High, the combo produces 142.5 FPS, a further 14% reduction. Interestingly, the gap between 1080p and 1440p High is smaller than the gap between 1440p and 4K High, suggesting the GPU begins to take on a more significant role at higher pixel densities. The Ultra preset tells a similar story: 186.6 FPS at 1080p, 167.9 FPS at 1440p, and 135.5 FPS at 4K, with the largest relative drop occurring between 1440p and 4K.

The data shows that the RTX 5080 is never fully saturated by Inside, even at 4K Ultra. The 135.5 FPS floor at maximum settings is still well above display refresh rates for most monitors. The scaling from 1080p to 4K at Ultra settings results in a 27% performance reduction, which is modest compared to more graphically intensive games. This suggests that the limiting component at 4K Ultra is the GPU, but it has so much headroom that the game remains exceptionally smooth. Conversely, at 1080p Low, the 240.9 FPS result appears to be constrained by the CPU, as the GPU could likely render more frames if the processor could supply them.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080, built on the Blackwell 2.0 architecture, brings substantial resources to this title. Its 16 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 256-bit bus provides 960.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is far more than Inside requires given its modest texture and geometry complexity. The GPU operates with a base clock of 2295 MHz and a boost clock of 2617 MHz, and benchmark results indicate it performs in the 89th percentile of all GPUs. Its average benchmark score of 59188 places it in a competitive tier, though the nearest rival data shows a mixed field.

The GPU's role in Inside is best understood through the settings scaling at each resolution. At 4K, the difference between Low and Ultra settings is 50.9 FPS (186.4 vs 135.5), demonstrating that the GPU has enough headroom to absorb the extra load from higher quality shadows, lighting, and post-processing effects. The gap between Medium and High at 4K is 30.5 FPS, while the gap between High and Ultra is just 7 FPS, indicating diminishing returns at the highest preset. This pattern repeats at 1440p and 1080p, where the Ultra preset only costs a few frames over High.

Interestingly, the RTX 5080's raw compute power, measured at 56.28 TFLOPS for FP32, seems almost wasted on Inside. The game's art style and gameplay mechanics do not stress modern GPU features like ray tracing or DLSS, and the card's 84 RT cores and 336 tensor cores remain largely idle. The pixel rate of 293.1 GPixel/s and texture rate of 879.3 GTexel/s are more relevant to this game's 2D-rendered environments, and the data shows the card handles them effortlessly. The GPU sits in the 89th percentile overall, yet in this specific title, its performance is so high that it rarely becomes the primary constraint.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Ryzen 7 3700X and RTX 5080 ranks 663rd out of 1671 tested combos in Inside. This places it in the 60th percentile of all system pairings, which is a notable finding given the GPU's high individual standing. The rank suggests that while the RTX 5080 is a top-tier card, the Ryzen 7 3700X holds the system back from reaching the absolute top tiers of performance in this game.

The CPU's benchmark scores help contextualize this ranking. The Ryzen 7 3700X has an average benchmark score of 28631, placing it in the 85th percentile of all CPUs. Its nearest rivals include the Intel Core i5-12600, which scores 28654 with a delta of -0.1%, and the AMD Ryzen 5 5600XT, which scores 28591 with a delta of 0.1%. These margins are razor-thin, indicating the 3700X is competitively positioned among mid-range processors. However, in Inside, the CPU's single-threaded performance appears to be the limiting factor for achieving the highest frame rates.

The 663rd rank out of 1671 combos implies that many pairings with more modern CPUs, particularly those with higher single-core clocks, achieve better results. The RTX 5080 ranks in the 89th percentile of GPUs, but when paired with the 3700X, the system falls to the 60th percentile of combos in this game. This discrepancy highlights how Inside is more sensitive to CPU performance than typical games, or alternatively, that the GPU is so overpowered that the CPU becomes the sole determinant of final frame rates. The combo rank data suggests that users with this pairing are leaving performance on the table compared to what the GPU alone could achieve.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1080p, the combo produces its highest frame rates across all settings. Low settings yield 240.9 FPS, which is the single highest recorded figure. Medium settings produce 222 FPS, a 7.8% reduction from Low. High settings deliver 186.8 FPS, and Ultra settings achieve 186.6 FPS, showing virtually no difference between High and Ultra at this resolution. The tight grouping of High and Ultra results suggests the CPU is limiting performance once the GPU load is reduced.

Moving to 1440p, the frame rates remain high but show a clear separation between settings. Low settings produce 216.2 FPS, Medium delivers 199.8 FPS, High achieves 164.9 FPS, and Ultra reaches 167.9 FPS. Notably, Ultra scores slightly higher than High at this resolution, which is an anomaly that could be attributed to minor measurement variance or the specific rendering paths used. The gap between Low and Ultra at 1440p is 48.3 FPS, indicating the GPU is beginning to feel the effects of higher pixel counts.

At 4K, the frame rates are still impressive but demonstrate the GPU's growing workload. Low settings produce 186.4 FPS, Medium delivers 173 FPS, High achieves 142.5 FPS, and Ultra drops to 135.5 FPS. The spread from Low to Ultra at 4K is 50.9 FPS, the largest of any resolution, confirming that the GPU is the primary scaling factor here. Across all resolutions, the Medium preset offers a compelling middle ground, with 4K Medium at 173 FPS representing a 7.2% drop from 4K Low while presumably offering better visual quality. The data shows that even the lowest recorded figure, 135.5 FPS at 4K Ultra, is far above playable thresholds, making this combo an overkill solution for Inside.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, a Zen 2 architecture processor codenamed Matisse, provides 8 cores and 16 threads with a base clock of 3.60 GHz and a boost clock of 4.40 GHz. Its 32 MB of L3 cache and dual-channel DDR4 memory support with 51.2 GB/s of bandwidth are adequate for most gaming workloads. The CPU's benchmark scores, including a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 19087 and a single-core score of 2694, place it in the 85th percentile of all CPUs. Its nearest rival, the Intel Core i5-12600, has an average score of 28654, a delta of -0.1%, indicating the 3700X is essentially tied with that processor in overall benchmarks.

In Inside, the CPU's role becomes apparent when examining frame rates at lower resolutions and settings. At 1080p Low, the 240.9 FPS result is likely near the CPU's maximum frame output capability for this game. The fact that High and Ultra settings at 1080p both produce around 186.7 FPS suggests the CPU is the limiting factor once the GPU workload is reduced to a certain level. The CPU's single-threaded performance, measured at 2694 in Passmark's single-thread test, is what matters most in this game, as Inside does not heavily utilize multi-threaded workloads.

The CPU's 16 threads and 3,800 million transistors on a 7 nm process provide sufficient headroom for the game's physics and logic, but the boost clock of 4.40 GHz is modest compared to newer processors. The data implies that a CPU with higher single-core clocks would produce higher frame rates in the 1080p Low scenario, where the GPU is not the bottleneck. However, the 3700X's performance is by no means weak; its 85th percentile ranking and near-tie with the Core i5-12600 in average benchmarks show it remains a capable processor. For Inside, the CPU delivers consistent frame rates above 135 FPS in all scenarios, and the combo rank of 663 out of 1671 reflects that while this CPU is not the fastest for this game, it is far from a weak link.