Inside

The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 pairing presents a stark contrast: a 2024 flagship 12-core processor paired with a 2016 mid-range graphics card. Benchmark data for Inside shows this combination is heavily GPU-bound, with the CPU leaving significant performance on the table at lower resolutions.

Settings Recommendations

The measured frame rates across presets reveal a clear hierarchy, with the most significant performance headroom appearing at 1080p. At 1920x1080, the Ultra preset delivers an average of 112 FPS, while High reaches 113.2 FPS—a negligible difference of just over one percent. However, dropping to Medium increases the average to 186.5 FPS, a 66 percent improvement over Ultra. Low pushes further to 227.4 FPS. The data suggests Ultra and High are nearly identical in cost, but Medium offers a dramatic jump in speed.

At 2560x1440, the pattern shifts slightly. Ultra averages 77.4 FPS, and High delivers 82.1 FPS. Medium jumps to 131.9 FPS, while Low tops out at 167.5 FPS. The delta between Medium and High is substantial—a 60 percent gain—indicating that the GTX 1070 struggles with the higher-fidelity settings at this resolution. For a smooth experience, Medium is the optimal choice here, as it nearly doubles the frame rate of Ultra while likely retaining most visual quality.

The 4K data tells a different story. At 3840x2160, Ultra averages 50.2 FPS, and High is only marginally better at 52.5 FPS. Medium reaches 81.7 FPS, while Low hits 106.6 FPS. The jump from High to Medium is a 55 percent improvement. Given that the game is a puzzle platformer, the visual benefits of Ultra over Medium are likely subtle, but the frame rate penalty is severe. The best experience per the measured rows is Medium across all resolutions, as it provides the largest FPS gain relative to the step up from Low. Low remains an option for high-refresh-rate displays, but Medium strikes the balance between fluidity and fidelity.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 is the primary bottleneck in this configuration. Its 8 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus provides 256.3 GB/s of bandwidth, which is sufficient for Inside's art style but not its high preset costs. The GPU's base clock of 1506 MHz and boost clock of 1683 MHz are modest by modern standards, and the Pascal architecture lacks the dedicated ray tracing or tensor cores found in later generations. The data confirms this: at 1080p, the GPU is so saturated that dropping from Ultra to Medium yields a 66 percent frame rate increase, a sign that shading units (1920) and ROPs (64) are maxed out.

The GPU's benchmark percentile (51st) places it squarely in the midrange, and its nearest rival, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER, is only 1.4 percent faster in aggregate. This explains why the GTX 1070 cannot sustain Ultra settings at 1440p or 4K. The 8 GB VRAM is not the limiting factor here—the game's requirements are modest—but the raw compute throughput of 6.463 TFLOPS FP32 is. The measured FPS drops of 31 percent from 1080p Ultra to 1440p Ultra, and another 35 percent to 4K Ultra, show a linear scaling that points directly at the GPU's fill rate limits.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X is vastly overqualified for this workload. With 12 cores and 24 threads based on Zen 5 architecture, it offers a base clock of 4.40 GHz and a boost clock of 5.60 GHz. Its benchmark scores are exceptional: Cinebench R23 multicore hits 46,438, and single-core reaches 6,555. The CPU's percentile vs. all CPUs is 94, meaning it outperforms nine out of ten processors on the market. Yet in Inside, these capabilities are largely idle.

The data reveals the CPU's headroom. At 1080p Low, the system averages 227.4 FPS, but this is not a CPU limit—the GTX 1070 is still the constraint. The CPU's nearest rivals, such as the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D (-0.4 percent) and Intel Core Ultra 5 245K (-1.5 percent), show that the 9900X is competitive but not dominant in synthetic tests. However, in this game, the delta between the CPU's potential and the GPU's delivery is enormous. The 3DMark max-thread score of 13,929 suggests the CPU could push far beyond 300 FPS in Inside if paired with a faster GPU. The CPU's 64 MB of shared L3 cache and dual-channel DDR5 memory support are irrelevant here, as the game's logic is simple, and the bottleneck is the GPU's pixel throughput.

How This Combo Ranks

This pairing ranks 1398th out of 1671 tested combinations in Inside. That places it in the 16th percentile of all combos, which is low for a system with such a powerful CPU. The rank is dragged down entirely by the GPU. The GTX 1070's aggregate benchmark score of 12,331 and its 51st percentile vs. all GPUs mean that most modern midrange cards would outperform it. For context, the GPU's nearest rival, the NVIDIA Quadro K4200, is 0.7 percent slower, while the GTX 1650 SUPER is 1.4 percent faster.

The combo rank reflects a mismatch. The 9900X alone ranks in the 94th percentile of CPUs, but the system's overall position is near the bottom quartile. This suggests that the CPU is contributing almost nothing to the gaming experience at higher settings, where the GPU is the sole limiting factor. At 1080p Low, the combo could theoretically rank higher, but the data does not isolate CPU performance. The 1398th rank is a holistic measure, and it confirms that this is a GPU-bound pairing. Users with this combo would see massive gains by upgrading the graphics card, as the CPU has ample headroom to support a much faster GPU.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS scaling from 1080p to 4K is a textbook example of GPU limitation. At Ultra settings, the average FPS drops from 112 at 1080p to 77.4 at 1440p (a 31 percent decrease) and then to 50.2 at 4K (a further 35 percent decrease). The total drop from 1080p to 4K is 55 percent. At High settings, the scaling is similar: 113.2 to 82.1 to 52.5, a total drop of 54 percent. This consistent halving of frame rates as pixel count quadruples indicates that the GPU's fill rate is the primary constraint.

The scaling is less severe at lower settings, revealing the CPU's role. At Low settings, the FPS drops from 227.4 at 1080p to 167.5 at 1440p (26 percent) and then to 106.6 at 4K (36 percent). The 4K Low figure of 106.6 FPS is surprisingly high, suggesting that at Low settings, the GPU is still not entirely maxed out—it has enough headroom to handle the reduced pixel load. The fact that 1080p Low yields 227.4 FPS while 4K Low yields 106.6 FPS means the GPU is scaling nearly linearly with pixel count, which is expected for a rasterization-bound workload.

The limiting component is unequivocally the GPU. The CPU's performance is constant across resolutions, and the FPS drops align with the GPU's bandwidth and compute limits. At 1080p Low, the system is likely still GPU-bound, as the CPU could theoretically deliver over 400 FPS given its single-thread score of 1,286 in 3DMark. The data shows that this combo is best suited for 1080p Medium or 1440p Medium, where the frame rates are playable, and the CPU's power remains untapped for future upgrades.