Inside

The AMD Ryzen 7 9700X paired with the AMD Radeon RX 580 delivers a playable experience in Inside, but the data shows a clear trade-off between visual fidelity and frame rate. Across all tested resolutions, the Medium preset offers the most balanced performance, providing a substantial frame rate uplift over High settings while maintaining a level of graphical quality that suits the game's atmospheric presentation. At 1080p, Medium delivers 117.8 FPS, which is 55.6% higher than the High preset's 75.7 FPS. This margin widens at higher resolutions, making Medium the recommended starting point for users seeking a smooth experience without sacrificing the game's core visual mood. The Low preset achieves the highest frame rates at every resolution, but it is unnecessary for a game of this pace, as the Medium preset already clears the 60 FPS threshold at 4K.

Settings Recommendations

The benchmark data presents a consistent hierarchy across all resolutions: Low, Medium, High, and Ultra, in ascending order of visual demand. The performance deltas between these presets are significant, indicating that Inside is highly sensitive to graphics settings. The Medium preset stands out as the optimal choice because it essentially doubles the frame rate of the Ultra preset while remaining visually respectable for a 2D puzzle platformer. At 1440p, Medium produces 87.5 FPS, which is 64.5% higher than Ultra's 53.2 FPS. At 4K, Medium's 55.1 FPS is just shy of the 60 FPS mark, while High and Ultra fall to 32.8 FPS and 30.6 FPS, respectively. For users with displays that support variable refresh rates, the Medium preset at 4K is viable, but for a locked 60 FPS experience at 4K, the Low preset is the only option, delivering 70.7 FPS. The Ultra preset is only recommended for users who prioritize image quality over frame rate consistency, as it provides the lowest measured scores in every resolution.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 580 is the primary bottleneck in this configuration, as evidenced by the frame rate scaling across settings. The GPU's 8 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus with 256.0 GB/s bandwidth is sufficient for Inside's modest texture requirements, as even the 4K Ultra preset does not appear to be memory-limited. The Polaris 20 chip, built on the 14 nm process, operates at a base clock of 1257 MHz and a boost clock of 1340 MHz, with memory running at 2000 MHz (8 Gbps effective). These clocks are modest by modern standards, and the data confirms that the GPU is the limiting factor when moving from Medium to High or Ultra settings. The 6.175 TFLOPS of FP32 compute is the defining specification here, as it directly correlates with the pixel and texture fill rates of 42.88 GPixel/s and 193.0 GTexel/s. The RX 580's percentile ranking of 53 among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 13559, places it in the mid-range, and its nearest rival, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570, shows a delta of 0.0%, indicating near-identical synthetic performance. This mid-tier position explains why the GPU struggles with the highest presets at 4K, where the pixel throughput demands exceed its capabilities.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of the Ryzen 7 9700X and the RX 580 ranks 1551 out of 1671 tested combos for Inside. This placement, in the bottom 7% of all combinations, is a direct consequence of the GPU's age and performance class relative to the CPU. The CPU is an exceptionally strong performer, with a percentile rank of 89 among all CPUs and an average benchmark score of 36029. Its nearest rivals, the Intel Core i5-14500HX and the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H, show deltas of 0.2% and -0.4%, respectively, indicating that the 9700X is competitively matched with these high-end mobile parts. In contrast, the GPU's percentile rank of 53 places it firmly in the middle of the pack. This massive disparity between the CPU's high-end status and the GPU's mid-range status results in a system that is heavily unbalanced for gaming. The CPU's 16 threads and high single-thread performance (4459 in Cinebench R23 single-core) are more than capable of feeding the GPU, but the RX 580 cannot translate that CPU potential into high frame rates at the Ultra preset. The data shows that the combo's rank is almost entirely dictated by the GPU, as the CPU would rank much higher if paired with a more modern graphics card.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured frame rates provide a detailed picture of the system's performance envelope. At 1920x1080, the Low preset achieves 149.3 FPS, which is the highest score recorded in the entire dataset. Medium produces 117.8 FPS, High produces 75.7 FPS, and Ultra drops to 71.8 FPS. The gap between Medium and High is particularly pronounced, representing a 35.7% performance loss for a single step up in quality. At 2560x1440, the same pattern emerges: Low achieves 106 FPS, Medium 87.5 FPS, High 53.8 FPS, and Ultra 53.2 FPS. The difference between High and Ultra at 1440p is negligible (0.6 FPS), suggesting that the Ultra preset's additional effects are not fully utilizing the GPU's resources. At 3840x2160, the results show a significant degradation: Low produces 70.7 FPS, Medium 55.1 FPS, High 32.8 FPS, and Ultra 30.6 FPS. The 4K High and Ultra results are below the 33.3 FPS threshold for a smooth cinematic experience, indicating that these presets are not viable at this resolution. The data consistently shows that the RX 580 can handle Low and Medium presets at any resolution, but High and Ultra are only suitable for 1080p.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate drop from 1080p to 4K is substantial and reveals the GPU's limitations. At the Low preset, the transition from 1080p (149.3 FPS) to 1440p (106 FPS) represents a 29.0% decrease, and the drop to 4K (70.7 FPS) is another 33.3% decrease from the 1440p score. This scaling pattern is typical for a GPU that is compute-bound, as the pixel count increases geometrically. However, the scaling is not uniform across presets. For the Ultra preset, the drop from 1080p (71.8 FPS) to 1440p (53.2 FPS) is a 25.9% decrease, but the drop to 4K (30.6 FPS) is a 42.5% decrease from the 1440p score. This non-linear scaling suggests that the GPU's memory bandwidth of 256.0 GB/s becomes a more critical constraint at 4K, as the higher resolution demands more data to be fetched from VRAM. The data indicates that the system is not CPU-limited at any point; the Ryzen 7 9700X's 32 MB of shared L3 cache and 89.6 GB/s of DDR5 memory bandwidth are more than sufficient to keep the GPU fed. Instead, the RX 580's fill rate and compute throughput are the limiting factors. The analysis shows that for a smooth 60 FPS experience, the system can handle 4K only at Low settings, while 1440p allows for Medium settings, and 1080p permits High settings. The Ultra preset remains a 1080p-only option, and even then, it only achieves 71.8 FPS.