Inside

The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 delivers an exceptionally strong performance profile in Inside, a 2016 puzzle platformer that is far more demanding on the CPU than most titles in its genre. The measured data shows this combo achieving triple-digit frame rates even at 4K Ultra, placing it in the 304th position out of 1671 tested combinations, which puts it comfortably in the top 18% of all systems evaluated. The combination of a 16-core Zen 5 processor with a 10 GB Ampere graphics card proves to be remarkably well-balanced for this specific workload, though the scaling patterns reveal distinct bottlenecks depending on resolution and settings.

Settings Recommendations

The benchmark results indicate that the High preset offers the most compelling balance between visual fidelity and performance across all resolutions. At 3840x2160, High delivers an average of 101.8 FPS, which is only 6 FPS lower than the Ultra preset’s 95.8 FPS but represents a 6.3% improvement in frame rate. The gap between High and Ultra narrows further at lower resolutions: at 2560x1440, High produces 159.4 FPS against Ultra’s 152.1 FPS (a 4.8% difference), and at 1920x1080 the split is 220.7 FPS versus 209.2 FPS (a 5.5% difference). This consistent 5-6% performance penalty for Ultra settings suggests diminishing returns on visual improvements that are unlikely to be perceptible in a game with Inside’s minimalist art style.

For players prioritizing maximum smoothness, the Medium preset provides a substantial uplift over High without sacrificing the core experience. At 4K, Medium reaches 158.6 FPS, which is 55.8% higher than High, while at 1440p it jumps to 254.7 FPS (a 59.8% improvement) and at 1080p it hits 353 FPS (a 60% improvement). The Low preset pushes frame rates even further—433.4 FPS at 1080p and 197.3 FPS at 4K—but the visual compromises in a game known for its atmospheric lighting and shadow work are likely too severe for most players. The data strongly suggests that High is the optimal default, with Medium serving as an excellent alternative for those with high-refresh-rate displays at 1440p or above.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080’s 10 GB of GDDR6X memory and 320-bit bus width provide 760.3 GB/s of bandwidth, which proves more than sufficient for Inside’s modest texture and geometry demands. The card’s Ampere architecture, built on Samsung’s 8 nm process with 28,300 million transistors, operates at a base clock of 1440 MHz and boosts to 1710 MHz. These specifications translate into a 29.77 TFLOPS FP32 throughput, and the benchmark data indicates this compute headroom is rarely taxed by the game. The GPU sits in the 80th percentile of all graphics cards tested, with an average benchmark score of 35787, placing it within 0.9% of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE and 1% of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Mobile.

The RTX 3080’s role in Inside becomes increasingly important as resolution rises, but even at 4K Ultra, the card maintains 95.8 FPS, demonstrating that its 10 GB frame buffer is not a limiting factor in this title. The GPU’s 68 RT cores and 272 tensor cores are largely irrelevant for a game that does not utilize ray tracing or DLSS, meaning the card’s raw rasterization performance—driven by its 8704 shading units and 96 ROPs—is what carries the load. The pixel rate of 164.2 GPixel/s and texture rate of 465.1 GTexel/s ensure that even the most complex scenes in the game’s 2.5D environments are rendered without issue.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals a workload that transitions from CPU-bound to GPU-bound as resolution increases. At Low settings, the 9950X3D’s dominance is evident: the drop from 433.4 FPS at 1080p to 316.3 FPS at 1440p represents a 27% reduction, while moving to 4K reduces performance to 197.3 FPS—a 54.5% decrease from 1080p. This steep decline at low settings indicates that the CPU is capable of feeding the GPU far more frames than the RTX 3080 can render, particularly at 1080p where the processor’s 128 MB of shared L3 cache and 5.70 GHz boost clock shine.

At High settings, the scaling is more moderate: 220.7 FPS at 1080p falls to 159.4 FPS at 1440p (a 27.8% drop) and then to 101.8 FPS at 4K (a 53.9% drop from 1080p). The consistency of these percentage drops across settings—roughly 27% for the 1080p-to-1440p transition and 54% for the 1080p-to-4K transition—suggests that the GPU becomes the primary bottleneck at 4K, while the CPU maintains its advantage at lower resolutions. The Ultra preset shows the same pattern: 209.2 FPS at 1080p, 152.1 FPS at 1440p (a 27.3% drop), and 95.8 FPS at 4K (a 54.2% drop). This uniformity indicates a well-balanced system where neither component is severely underutilized at any resolution.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo achieves remarkable frame rates across all settings. The Low preset produces 433.4 FPS, which drops to 353 FPS at Medium and 220.7 FPS at High. The Ultra preset records 209.2 FPS, representing a 51.7% reduction from Low. These numbers indicate that at 1080p, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D’s single-thread performance—evidenced by its 3DMark single-thread score of 1292 and Cinebench R23 single-core score of 8430—allows the RTX 3080 to operate near its maximum potential.

Moving to 2560x1440, the data shows 316.3 FPS at Low, 254.7 FPS at Medium, 159.4 FPS at High, and 152.1 FPS at Ultra. The gap between High and Ultra narrows to just 4.8% at this resolution, compared to 5.5% at 1080p, suggesting that the GPU’s 10 GB memory capacity begins to influence performance as pixel count increases. At 3840x2160, the spread tightens further: Low delivers 197.3 FPS, Medium 158.6 FPS, High 101.8 FPS, and Ultra 95.8 FPS. The High-to-Ultra delta at 4K is 6.3%, indicating that the game’s Ultra preset introduces effects that disproportionately tax the GPU at higher resolutions.

The most striking observation is the massive headroom available at Low settings: even at 4K, the system maintains nearly 200 FPS, which is more than double the refresh rate of most high-end monitors. This suggests that players with 4K 120Hz displays could comfortably enable Medium settings and still achieve 158.6 FPS, while those with 1440p 240Hz panels could use Low settings to hit 316.3 FPS.

How This Combo Ranks

The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 combination ranks 304th out of 1671 tested combos in Inside, placing it in the 81.8th percentile of all systems evaluated. This ranking is impressive given that the GPU is from the previous generation, but the CPU’s exceptional performance compensates for the graphics card’s age. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D sits in the 96th percentile of all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 71660, which is 1.8% higher than the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and 2.2% higher than the Intel Core i7-14700KF.

The RTX 3080’s 80th percentile ranking among GPUs, with an average score of 35787, makes it the weaker link in this pairing. However, the benchmark results in Inside show that this imbalance is rarely exposed because the game’s CPU-intensive nature plays to the processor’s strengths. The combo outranks many systems with newer, more powerful GPUs because the 9950X3D’s 16 cores and 32 threads—combined with its 3D V-Cache-optimized design—ensure that frame pacing remains consistent even in the game’s most complex puzzle sequences. The 304th position out of 1671 combos represents a top-tier result for a system using a two-generation-old graphics card, and the data confirms that this pairing delivers an exceptional experience for Inside at any resolution or settings preset.