Inside

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700X and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 pairing delivers a dominant performance in Inside, a 2016 Puzzle Platformer that is anything but demanding on modern hardware. The measured data shows this combination not only crushes every resolution and settings preset but also reveals a system where the GPU is rarely the limiting factor, with frame rates often soaring past the refresh rates of even the fastest displays.

Resolution Scaling

The scaling from 1080p to 4K is remarkably shallow, a clear indicator that Inside is heavily CPU-bound at lower resolutions. At High settings, the average frame rate only drops from 235.5 FPS at 1920x1080 to 212.2 FPS at 2560x1440, a mere 9.9% reduction. The jump to 3840x2160 brings the average down to 147.2 FPS, a more substantial 37.5% decline from the 1080p figure. This pattern suggests that while the RTX 4090’s immense rendering power starts to become a factor at 4K, the Ryzen 7 5700X’s 8 cores and 16 threads are still able to feed it sufficient data to maintain a high frame rate.

The trend is consistent across all quality presets. At Low settings, the system produces 309.2 FPS at 1080p, which drops to 276.2 FPS at 1440p and finally to 238.4 FPS at 4K. The gap between 1080p and 1440p is again minimal, underscoring that the processor is the primary bottleneck until the pixel count increases significantly. The data indicates that even at 4K with Ultra settings, the 137.7 FPS average is well above the threshold for smooth gameplay, meaning users with high-refresh-rate 4K displays will still see a fully utilized panel. The fact that the frame rate does not collapse at 4K proves the RTX 4090, with its 24 GB of GDDR6X memory and 1.01 TB/s bandwidth, has ample headroom to handle the game's visual load.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, built on the Ada Lovelace architecture, is overkill for Inside, but its specifications explain why it performs so effortlessly. The GPU’s massive 24 GB VRAM pool is far beyond what this game requires, ensuring zero texture swapping or memory-related stutters even at 4K Ultra. Its boost clock of 2520 MHz and 16384 shading units provide the raw compute power to push the game’s simple 2.5D visuals at extreme speeds. The benchmark results show a clear hierarchy: Low settings at 1080p yield 309.2 FPS, while Ultra settings at the same resolution produce 236.1 FPS, a 23.6% performance penalty for the visual upgrade.

This performance ceiling is not a limitation of the GPU but rather the game’s engine. The RTX 4090’s 82.58 TFLOPS of FP32 performance is effectively idling in many scenes, waiting on the CPU to deliver draw calls. The GPU’s percentile ranking of 91 among all tested GPUs, while high, does not reflect its true dominance in this specific title, as the game is too light to stress its capabilities. The 1.01 TB/s of memory bandwidth means that even at 4K, the data transfer rate is not a bottleneck, allowing the 147.2 FPS average at High settings to be sustained without frame-time spikes.

How This Combo Ranks

In the context of all tested combinations, this pairing ranks 216th out of 1671 combos. This places it in the top 12.9% of all systems tested, a strong showing that underscores the high level of performance on offer. However, the rank is more a reflection of the CPU’s position in the overall hierarchy than the GPU’s, as many other pairings with faster processors will score higher in this CPU-bound title. The Ryzen 7 5700X, with an average benchmark score of 26214 and a percentile of 83 against all CPUs, is a solid mid-range performer, but it is not the absolute fastest available.

The RTX 4090, on the other hand, holds a 91st percentile ranking among all GPUs, indicating it is near the top of the performance stack. Yet, its massive lead in raw graphics power is mitigated in Inside because the game’s frame rate is so heavily dependent on the processor. The combination’s rank of 216 suggests that while it is an exceptionally fast system, there are still 215 other configurations in the database that can produce higher frame rates in this specific game, likely those with newer, higher-clocked CPUs like the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X’s direct rivals, which include the Intel Core i9-11900KF and AMD Ryzen 5 7600X, both of which have similar average scores within 0.2% of the 5700X.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured frame rates provide a complete picture of the system's capabilities. At 1920x1080, the lowest resolution tested, the system is entirely CPU-limited. The Low preset produces 309.2 FPS, which is the highest average recorded for this configuration. Medium settings reduce this to 283.5 FPS, while High and Ultra presets deliver 235.5 FPS and 236.1 FPS, respectively. The negligible difference between High and Ultra suggests that the Ultra preset’s additional effects are handled entirely by the GPU with no extra CPU overhead.

Moving to 2560x1440, the results show a slight shift toward GPU dependency. The Low preset yields 276.2 FPS, a 10.7% drop from 1080p. Medium, High, and Ultra presets produce 255.6 FPS, 212.2 FPS, and 209.4 FPS, respectively. The 4K resolution at 3840x2160 shows the most significant scaling. Low settings still manage an impressive 238.4 FPS, but High and Ultra presets fall to 147.2 FPS and 137.7 FPS. The gap between Medium (219.4 FPS) and High (147.2 FPS) is the largest in the entire dataset, a 32.9% drop, indicating that the High preset at 4K introduces a significant increase in GPU load, likely through higher-resolution textures and more complex lighting, which finally begins to tax the RTX 4090.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700X, part of the 5000 series built on the Zen 3 architecture, is the defining component in this system’s performance. Its 8 cores and 16 threads, running at a base clock of 3.40 GHz and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz, provide more than enough processing power for a game like Inside. The data shows that at 1080p, the CPU is the clear bottleneck, as frame rates plateau around 300 FPS regardless of the GPU’s potential. The processor’s 32 MB of shared L3 cache helps keep core-to-core communication fast, which is critical for maintaining high frame times in a physics and logic-heavy puzzle game.

The CPU’s single-threaded performance is a key factor. With a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 3193, it has sufficient power to handle the game’s main game logic thread, but it is not as fast as newer processors. This is why the combo ranks 216th overall; the Ryzen 7 5700X is not the absolute top-tier CPU for gaming, as evidenced by its nearest rivals, the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X and Intel Core i9-11900KF, which score within 0.2% of its average. In a game with a low thread count, the Ryzen 7 5700X’s 3.40 GHz base clock is sufficient, but its boost clock of 4.60 GHz is what allows it to push the high frame rates seen at 1080p. The data clearly shows that upgrading this CPU to a newer, higher-clocked model would yield even higher frame rates in Inside, while the RTX 4090 would remain vastly underutilized.