Inside

How This Combo Ranks

The Intel Core i5-10400F paired with the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT ranks 777th out of 1,671 tested combos in Inside, placing it in the upper-middle tier of the database. That percentile position reflects a system that is far from the top of the charts but still delivers a thoroughly playable experience in this puzzle platformer. The ranking is driven by the GPU's substantial compute resources rather than the CPU's modest standing; the i5-10400F sits at the 73rd percentile among all CPUs, while the RX 7900 XT commands an 82nd-percentile position among all GPUs. The gap between those two percentile figures is the first clue that this pairing leans heavily on the graphics card to carry frame rates.

In the context of the CPU's nearest rivals, the i5-10400F's average benchmark score of 14,168 is nearly indistinguishable from the AMD EPYC 7552 at 14,115, a delta of just 0.4 percent. It trails the AMD Ryzen 3 7320C (14,277) by 0.8 percent and the Intel Core i5-8500 (14,332) by 1.1 percent, while edging out the AMD Ryzen Embedded V2546 (14,336) by 1.2 percent. These are all sub-two-percent swings, meaning the processor is competitively positioned within its direct peer group. For a game like Inside, which is not heavily threaded, the CPU's 6-core, 12-thread configuration with a 4.30 GHz boost clock is sufficient to avoid becoming the primary constraint in most scenarios, but the benchmark data suggests it is not delivering headroom far beyond what those rivals offer.

The GPU side tells a different story. The RX 7900 XT's average benchmark score of 38,358 places it in a dead heat with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Mobile (38,349, 0 percent delta) and the NVIDIA CMP 70HX (38,225, 0.3 percent ahead). It also runs 0.4 percent ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce MX570 (38,494) and 0.6 percent ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Mobile (38,135). That clustering indicates the Radeon card is performing exactly where its specs suggest it should, with no anomalous uplift or deficit relative to comparable parts. The combo's overall rank, then, is a function of the GPU's high-end positioning pulling the entire system upward, even as the CPU sits in a more pedestrian bracket.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT is the dominant component in this pairing, and its memory subsystem is a key reason why. The card carries 20 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 320-bit bus, yielding a bandwidth of 800.0 GB/s. For Inside, a game with a restrained visual palette of silhouettes and atmospheric lighting, that bandwidth is far beyond what the engine can saturate, but it ensures that texture streaming and high-resolution rendering never stall. The GPU's 5 nm Navi 31 chip, built by TSMC, houses 57,700 million transistors across a 529 mm² die, and its RDNA 3.0 architecture delivers 51.48 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. Those raw numbers translate into a card that can brute-force even the most demanding settings in this title.

Clock speeds reinforce that impression. The GPU runs at a base clock of 1387 MHz, a game clock of 2025 MHz, and a boost clock of 2394 MHz, with memory clocked at 2500 MHz (20 Gbps effective). The gap between base and boost—over 1,000 MHz—shows how aggressively the card can ramp up under load, and the benchmark results confirm that it does so consistently. In the measured FPS data, the RX 7900 XT never drops below 106.4 average FPS at any resolution or setting in this game, which confirms its ability to maintain high clocks even when pixel throughput demands spike.

Memory capacity also plays a role. The 20 GB frame buffer is overkill for Inside, which is a 2016 release with relatively modest asset sizes, but it means there is zero risk of VRAM-related stutter. Combined with 84 ray accelerators and 192 ROPs, the GPU has the architectural resources to handle the game's occasional full-screen effects and lighting transitions without breaking a sweat. The card's DirectX 12 Ultimate support (12_2) and Vulkan 1.4 compatibility ensure it can use the most efficient rendering paths available in the engine, though Inside is not a title that pushes modern API features hard.

FAQ

*Q: Does the Intel Core i5-10400F bottleneck the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT in Inside?*

A: The data does not show a significant bottleneck. At 1080p Ultra, the combo delivers 176.9 FPS, and at 4K Ultra it drops to 106.4 FPS, a scaling pattern that indicates the GPU is the limiting factor at higher resolutions rather than the CPU.

Q: What is the best settings preset for this combo at 1440p?

A: At 2560x1440, the Low preset yields 205.9 FPS, Medium yields 193.6 FPS, High yields 157.6 FPS, and Ultra yields 160 FPS. The High and Ultra presets are statistically tied, so High is the better choice for identical performance with lower rendering cost.

Q: How does the RX 7900 XT compare to its nearest GPU rivals?

A: The RX 7900 XT's average benchmark score of 38,358 is essentially identical to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Mobile (38,349, 0 percent delta) and sits 0.3 percent above the NVIDIA CMP 70HX (38,225). It is 0.4 percent behind the NVIDIA GeForce MX570 (38,494) and 0.6 percent ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Mobile (38,135).

*Q: Is this combo overkill for Inside?*

A: At 1080p Low, the system hits 230.5 FPS, and even at 4K Ultra it maintains 106.4 FPS. For a puzzle platformer with no competitive multiplayer component, these numbers far exceed the 60 FPS target that most displays use, indicating significant headroom.

Q: What does the CPU's 73rd percentile ranking mean for gaming performance?

A: The i5-10400F sits above 73 percent of all CPUs in the database, but its nearest rivals—all within 1.2 percent in average score—show that it is not a standout part. For Inside, its 6-core, 12-thread design with a 4.30 GHz boost is adequate, but it does not lift the combo's rank.

Q: How much performance is lost going from 1080p to 4K at Ultra settings?

A: The drop is 70.5 FPS, from 176.9 FPS at 1920x1080 Ultra to 106.4 FPS at 3840x2160 Ultra. This 39.8 percent reduction is consistent with a GPU-bound workload where pixel count scales faster than compute.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data for this combo covers three resolutions and four settings presets, providing a complete picture of how the system behaves across the performance envelope. At 1920x1080, the lowest tested resolution, the system is firmly in high-refresh-rate territory. The Low preset produces 230.5 FPS, Medium drops to 213.5 FPS, High comes in at 181.7 FPS, and Ultra closes the gap to 176.9 FPS. The spread from Low to Ultra is 53.6 FPS, which indicates that the GPU's compute resources are barely strained at this resolution; even the heaviest settings leave substantial headroom above 144 Hz displays.

Moving to 2560x1440, the numbers remain strong but begin to show more differentiation between presets. Low yields 205.9 FPS, Medium delivers 193.6 FPS, High drops to 157.6 FPS, and Ultra rebounds slightly to 160 FPS. The curious inversion between High and Ultra—where Ultra is 2.4 FPS faster—is within measurement noise, but it suggests that the High preset may use a different rendering path that is slightly less optimized for this GPU. The overall pattern is a gentle decline from Low to High, with the gap between Low and Ultra widening to 45.9 FPS.

At 3840x2160, the GPU finally starts to feel the load. Low produces 177.9 FPS, Medium drops to 166.7 FPS, High falls to 112.5 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 106.4 FPS. The jump from Medium to High is a steep 54.2 FPS loss, indicating that the High preset introduces a significant rendering cost—likely higher-resolution shadows or post-processing effects—that the GPU must absorb. Ultra adds only a marginal additional load over High, with a 6.1 FPS difference. The 4K Low result of 177.9 FPS is remarkable, nearly matching the 1080p High result of 181.7 FPS, which shows that the RX 7900 XT has enough raw throughput to maintain high frame rates even at 8.3 million pixels.

Resolution Scaling

The resolution scaling behavior of this combo reveals a system that is firmly GPU-limited as pixel count rises. From 1080p Ultra (176.9 FPS) to 1440p Ultra (160 FPS), the drop is 16.9 FPS, a 9.6 percent reduction. From 1440p Ultra to 4K Ultra (106.4 FPS), the drop is 53.6 FPS, a 33.5 percent reduction. The total decline from 1080p to 4K is 70.5 FPS, or 39.8 percent. This scaling curve is steeper than the pixel-count ratio would suggest—4K has 4 times the pixels of 1080p—which indicates that the GPU is not purely fill-rate limited but is also constrained by memory bandwidth and shader throughput at higher resolutions.

The Low preset shows a different pattern. At 1080p Low, the system hits 230.5 FPS; at 1440p Low, it drops to 205.9 FPS (a 10.7 percent decline); and at 4K Low, it falls to 177.9 FPS (a 13.6 percent decline from 1440p). The total drop from 1080p to 4K is 52.6 FPS, or 22.8 percent, which is much shallower than the Ultra preset's 39.8 percent loss. This discrepancy suggests that at Low settings, the rendering pipeline is simpler, and the GPU's 800.0 GB/s of memory bandwidth can keep up with the increased pixel load more efficiently. The CPU's role becomes more apparent at Low settings, where the i5-10400F's 4.30 GHz boost clock has to feed frames faster; the fact that 1080p Low hits 230.5 FPS shows the CPU can handle that pace without becoming a hard bottleneck.

The limiting component is clearly the GPU at higher resolutions and settings. At 4K Ultra, the system drops to 106.4 FPS, which is still playable but represents a 53.6 FPS loss from 1440p Ultra. If the CPU were the constraint, we would expect to see frame rates plateau at 1080p and 1440p regardless of resolution, but the consistent declines across all presets point to the GPU's rendering workload as the primary driver. The RX 7900 XT's 51.48 TFLOPS of FP32 compute is substantial, but Inside's lighting and shadow effects at Ultra settings demand enough pixel shader work to bring even this high-end card down to triple-digit frame rates. The system's overall rank of 777th out of 1,671 combos reflects this balance: strong enough to dominate most titles, but not the absolute top tier when paired with a mid-range CPU.