Inside

Inside is a 2016 puzzle platformer that places minimal stress on even mid-range hardware, so the combination of an AMD Ryzen 7 5800XT and an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is exceptionally overpowered for this title. The measured frame rates confirm this pairing delivers extreme performance across all tested settings, with the data showing that the GPU is rarely the limiting factor at lower resolutions. This analysis breaks down the measured performance, settings behavior, and resolution scaling to determine the best way to experience this game with this specific hardware configuration.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS data for this combo reveals that the Ultra preset provides the most compelling experience for Inside, despite not being the absolute fastest option. At 1920x1080, the Ultra preset delivers an average of 243.7 FPS, which is only 78.7 FPS behind the Low preset’s 322.4 FPS but offers the full visual fidelity of the game’s atmospheric lighting and shadow effects. The gap between settings narrows considerably at higher resolutions, making Ultra the clear choice for visual quality without sacrificing smoothness.

At 2560x1440, the Ultra preset averages 179.5 FPS, while the High preset reaches 190 FPS, a difference of just 10.5 FPS. Given that both are far above the 60 FPS threshold, the Ultra preset is recommended for 1440p gaming, as the visual enhancements come at a negligible performance cost. The Medium preset at 1440p hits 267.9 FPS, but this is unnecessary headroom; the game’s art direction benefits significantly from the higher shadow and texture quality found in Ultra.

For 4K resolution, the Ultra preset drops to an average of 112.5 FPS, which is still comfortably playable on high-refresh-rate displays. The High preset at 4K reaches 118 FPS, a marginal 5.5 FPS improvement over Ultra. Since both remain above 100 FPS, the Ultra preset is again the recommended choice, as the performance delta is too small to justify reducing visual quality. The Low preset at 4K achieves 240.2 FPS, but this is an extreme sacrifice of graphical fidelity for a game that does not require competitive frame rates.

The data indicates that the Ultra preset is the optimal choice across all three resolutions tested. The performance headroom is so vast that even at 4K, the system maintains over 100 FPS with maximum settings. Players with 144Hz or 165Hz monitors can confidently enable Ultra at 1440p, while those with 120Hz 4K displays will also be satisfied with the Ultra preset, as the measured average of 112.5 FPS is within striking distance of that refresh rate.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX brings substantial resources to this game, including 24 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 384-bit bus with 960.0 GB/s of bandwidth. For a puzzle platformer like Inside, this memory configuration is vastly over-provisioned, as the game’s textures and geometry are not demanding enough to stress even a fraction of this capacity. The GPU’s clock speeds—a base of 1929 MHz, game clock of 2365 MHz, and boost up to 2498 MHz—ensure that the card operates at high frequencies, but the game’s lightweight rendering pipeline means these clocks are rarely pushed to their limits.

The GPU’s 6144 shading units and 192 ROPs deliver a theoretical pixel rate of 479.6 GPixel/s, which explains why the card can push 322.4 FPS at 1080p Low settings. However, the benchmark results show that the CPU begins to play a more significant role as resolution decreases. At 1080p, the difference between Low and Ultra settings is 78.7 FPS (322.4 vs 243.7), indicating that the GPU is still the primary driver. But at 4K, the same settings gap shrinks to 127.7 FPS (240.2 vs 112.5), showing that the GPU’s workload scales more predictably with resolution.

The Radeon RX 7900 XTX’s RDNA 3.0 architecture, built on a 5 nm process with 57,700 million transistors, provides ample compute throughput for this game’s simple shaders. The FP32 performance of 61.39 TFLOPS is irrelevant for Inside, which does not utilize heavy compute effects. The GPU’s 96 ray accelerators are also unused, as the game relies on pre-baked lighting rather than real-time ray tracing. The data suggests that the GPU is operating at a fraction of its capability, with the bottleneck shifting to the CPU’s ability to feed frames at lower resolutions.

How This Combo Ranks

In the benchmark database, this specific combination of the AMD Ryzen 7 5800XT and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX ranks 260 out of 1671 tested combos for Inside. This places the pairing in the top 15.6% of all configurations, which is a strong result given that the game is not graphically intensive. The rank reflects the CPU’s strong single-thread performance, which is critical for this type of game that relies on straightforward physics and scripting.

The Ryzen 7 5800XT sits at the 86th percentile among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 29774. Its nearest rivals include the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5755GE (0.1% faster), the AMD Ryzen 7 6800HS (0.3% slower), and the AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 (0.3% faster). These tiny deltas indicate that the 5800XT is performance-neutral relative to its closest competitors, meaning the CPU is not a differentiator in this game. The 8-core, 16-thread Zen 3 design with a 4.80 GHz boost clock provides more than enough processing power for Inside’s modest threading requirements.

The Radeon RX 7900 XTX ranks at the 85th percentile among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 44019. Its nearest rivals show a wider spread: the AMD Radeon Pro 580 is 0.4% slower, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile is 0.8% faster, and the NVIDIA Quadro M6000 is 1.6% faster. The GPU’s raw performance is clearly sufficient for this game, as the combo rank of 260 is more likely limited by other factors such as driver overhead or CPU frame pacing than by the GPU’s compute capabilities.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the measured average FPS values are 322.4 for Low, 300.7 for Medium, 251.1 for High, and 243.7 for Ultra. The step from Low to Medium costs 21.7 FPS, while the step from Medium to High costs 49.6 FPS, and High to Ultra costs only 7.4 FPS. This pattern suggests that the High to Ultra transition is relatively cheap, making Ultra the sensible choice for 1080p.

Moving to 2560x1440, the averages are 288 for Low, 267.9 for Medium, 190 for High, and 179.5 for Ultra. The drop from Low to Medium is 20.1 FPS, but the jump from Medium to High is a significant 77.9 FPS, indicating that the High preset introduces heavier visual effects that impact performance more than the Ultra preset’s incremental additions. At 1440p, the GPU is still delivering 179.5 FPS on Ultra, which is excellent for a puzzle platformer.

At 3840x2160, the averages are 240.2 for Low, 192.7 for Medium, 118 for High, and 112.5 for Ultra. The Low to Medium transition costs 47.5 FPS, while Medium to High costs 74.7 FPS, and High to Ultra costs only 5.5 FPS. The 4K results show that the GPU is finally being exercised, but the card still maintains over 110 FPS on the highest settings. The data reveals that the High preset is a poor value at 4K, as it delivers only 5.5 FPS more than Ultra while reducing visual quality.

Resolution Scaling

The performance scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals important insights about the limiting component. For the Ultra preset, the average FPS drops from 243.7 at 1080p to 179.5 at 1440p (a 26.3% reduction) and then to 112.5 at 4K (a 53.8% reduction from 1440p). This scaling is steeper than the pixel count increase, which suggests that the GPU is becoming the primary bottleneck at higher resolutions, as expected for a game with simple geometry.

For the Low preset, the scaling is much flatter: 322.4 FPS at 1080p, 288 at 1440p (a 10.7% drop), and 240.2 at 4K (a 16.6% drop from 1440p). This relatively shallow decline indicates that at Low settings, the CPU is the limiting factor at 1080p, and the GPU has enough headroom to handle the resolution increase without substantial frame rate losses. The gap between Low and Ultra at 1080p is 78.7 FPS, but at 4K that gap widens to 127.7 FPS, confirming that the GPU’s workload scales more aggressively with resolution when higher settings are enabled.

The Medium preset shows intermediate scaling: 300.7 FPS at 1080p, 267.9 at 1440p (an 11% drop), and 192.7 at 4K (a 28.1% drop from 1440p). The High preset follows a similar trajectory to Ultra, with 251.1 FPS at 1080p, 190 at 1440p (a 24.3% drop), and 118 at 4K (a 37.9% drop from 1440p). The data indicates that the CPU is the limiting factor at 1080p across all settings, while the GPU becomes increasingly dominant as resolution rises to 4K. This behavior is typical for a game with low graphical complexity, where the CPU’s frame generation capability caps performance at lower resolutions.