Inside

FAQ

Q: What is the average frame rate for this combo at 1080p Ultra settings in Inside?

A: The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X paired with the AMD Radeon RX 580 delivers an average of 72.5 FPS at 1920x1080 with Ultra settings, which is just slightly below the 75.4 FPS achieved at High settings.

Q: How does the RX 580's benchmark score compare to its closest rival?

A: The RX 580's average benchmark score is 13559, which is essentially tied with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 at 13564 (a 0% delta). It also sits within 0.1% of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950, which scores 13549.

Q: What is the CPU's percentile ranking among all processors?

A: The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X ranks in the 94th percentile among all CPUs, indicating it outperforms the vast majority of processors in the benchmark database.

Q: What is the best performance setting for this combo at 4K resolution?

A: At 3840x2160, the Low setting produces the highest average FPS at 71, while Ultra and High both dip below 35 FPS, making Low the only setting that approaches smooth gameplay at this resolution.

Q: How much faster is the 9900X in multi-core rendering compared to single-core?

A: In Cinebench R23, the 9900X scores 46438 in multi-core and 6555 in single-core, meaning multi-core performance is approximately 7 times higher than single-core, reflecting its 12-core/24-thread configuration.

Q: What is the memory bandwidth of the RX 580?

A: The RX 580 features 8 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus, providing a bandwidth of 256.0 GB/s, which is a key factor in its performance at higher resolutions.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 580 is built on the Polaris 20 chip using GCN 4.0 architecture, manufactured on a 14 nm process. It operates with a base clock of 1257 MHz and a boost clock of 1340 MHz, with memory running at 2000 MHz (8 Gbps effective). The GPU has 2304 shading units, 144 texture mapping units, and 32 ROPs, enabling a pixel rate of 42.88 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 193.0 GTexel/s.

The 8 GB GDDR5 frame buffer with 256.0 GB/s bandwidth is critical for Inside's rendering demands. The game's measured FPS shows a clear pattern: at 1080p, the GPU can maintain high frame rates even at Ultra (72.5 FPS), but at 4K, the same setting drops to 34.3 FPS. This indicates that the RX 580's VRAM capacity is sufficient, but its raw compute throughput (6.175 TFLOPS FP32) becomes the limiting factor as pixel count increases.

The GPU's benchmark scores place it at the 53rd percentile among all GPUs, with an average score of 13559. Its nearest rivals include the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 (13564, 0% delta) and the GTX 950 (13549, 0.1% delta), showing that the RX 580 sits in a performance tier roughly equivalent to these older NVIDIA cards. The 14 nm process node and 5,700 million transistors on a 232 mm² die size inform its efficiency characteristics, though the data does not indicate any thermal throttling issues in the measured results.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals how the RX 580's performance scales across resolutions. At 1080p Low, the combo achieves 151.7 FPS, which drops to 111 FPS at 1440p (a 26.8% reduction) and further to 71 FPS at 4K (a 36% reduction from 1440p). This scaling pattern suggests that the GPU becomes progressively more stressed as resolution increases, but the CPU's 12 cores and 24 threads are never the limiting factor at these settings.

At High settings, the progression is 75.4 FPS (1080p) → 56 FPS (1440p) → 33.3 FPS (4K). The drop from 1080p to 1440p is 25.7%, while the drop from 1440p to 4K is 40.5%. This accelerating decline indicates that the RX 580's fill rate and memory bandwidth are being saturated at 4K, where the pixel count is 4 times that of 1080p.

Ultra settings show a similar trend: 72.5 FPS at 1080p, 50.4 FPS at 1440p, and 34.3 FPS at 4K. The fact that the gap between High and Ultra narrows as resolution increases (from 3 FPS at 1080p to only 1 FPS at 4K) suggests that at 4K, the GPU is so resource-bound that additional graphics settings have diminishing impact on frame rate. Conversely, at 1080p, the GPU has enough headroom that settings changes produce more noticeable differences.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo delivers its strongest results. Low settings produce 151.7 FPS, Medium achieves 121 FPS, High reaches 75.4 FPS, and Ultra manages 72.5 FPS. The difference between High and Ultra is only 2.9 FPS, suggesting that Ultra settings add visual fidelity without a proportional performance cost at this resolution.

Moving to 2560x1440, the numbers drop substantially. Low settings yield 111 FPS, Medium delivers 88.8 FPS, High falls to 56 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 50.4 FPS. The transition from 1080p to 1440p represents a 26.8% reduction at Low, but a 30.5% reduction at High, indicating that the GPU's compute resources are more heavily taxed at higher settings.

At 3840x2160, the RX 580 struggles to maintain playable frame rates at most settings. Low achieves 71 FPS, which is still smooth for this puzzle platformer. Medium drops to 56.3 FPS, while High (33.3 FPS) and Ultra (34.3 FPS) fall below the 60 FPS threshold. Interestingly, Ultra outperforms High by 1 FPS at 4K, which may be due to measurement variance or specific rendering paths in the game engine.

The data shows that Medium settings at 4K (56.3 FPS) offer a reasonable balance, while at 1440p, High settings (56 FPS) provide good visual quality without sacrificing smoothness. At 1080p, all settings are playable, with Low exceeding 150 FPS for high-refresh-rate displays.

How This Combo Ranks

This combination of the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and AMD Radeon RX 580 ranks 1526 out of 1671 tested combos in Inside. This places it in the bottom 8.7% of all tested configurations, which is a surprisingly low ranking given the CPU's strength. The data indicates that the RX 580 is the primary bottleneck, as the 9900X's 12 cores and 24 threads provide far more processing capability than this game requires.

The CPU's average benchmark score of 54450 places it at the 94th percentile, with nearest rivals including the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D (54681, -0.4% delta) and the Intel Core i7-14700F (54097, 0.7% delta). In contrast, the GPU's 53rd percentile ranking (avg score 13559) is much lower, and its nearest rivals are older NVIDIA cards like the GTX 570 and GTX 950.

This disparity between CPU and GPU performance explains the low combo rank. Inside is a puzzle platformer that does not heavily utilize multi-threaded CPU performance, so the 9900X's massive compute headroom goes largely unused. The GPU's Polaris architecture, while capable at 1080p, limits the combo to mid-range performance in this title, particularly at higher resolutions where the GPU's 32 ROPs and 256-bit memory bus become constraints.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X is a 12-core, 24-thread processor based on the Zen 5 architecture (Granite Ridge codename), manufactured on a 4 nm process at TSMC. It has a base clock of 4.40 GHz and a boost clock of 5.60 GHz, with a TDP of 120 W. The CPU features 80 KB of L1 cache per core, 1 MB of L2 cache per core, and 64 MB of shared L3 cache, supporting DDR5 memory with dual-channel bandwidth of 89.6 GB/s.

Benchmark results show exceptional multi-threaded performance: Cinebench R23 scores 46438 multi-core and 6555 single-core, while Geekbench reports 19827 multi-core and 3341 single-core. The 3DMark scores scale from 1286 (single-thread) to 13929 (max threads), demonstrating strong scaling across thread counts. PassMark results show 54643 for multithread and 4672 for single-thread, with specific workloads like floating point math (120083) and integer math (181056) indicating robust ALU and FPU capabilities.

In Inside, however, the CPU's role is minimal. The game's measured FPS is primarily GPU-limited, as evidenced by the similar performance at High and Ultra settings (75.4 vs 72.5 FPS at 1080p) despite the GPU being the weaker component. The 9900X's 24 threads provide ample headroom for the game's physics and logic systems, but the RX 580's 6.175 TFLOPS of FP32 compute is the decisive factor in frame rate. The CPU's 94th percentile ranking and average score of 54450 (with a 0.7% advantage over the Intel Core i7-14700F) indicate that it is not the limiting component in this configuration.