Inside

The Intel Core i5-14600KF paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 lands at rank 336 out of 1671 tested combos for Inside, placing it comfortably in the top 20% of all configurations tracked. This is a strong showing for a puzzle platformer, where the combination of a high-end 14th-generation CPU and an Ampere-based GPU ensures headroom across all settings. The combo’s percentile ranking reflects a system that can push this 2016 title far beyond typical display refresh rates, making it a formidable pairing even by modern standards. The data indicates that neither component becomes a bottleneck at the game’s default expectations, though the exact balance shifts as resolution and quality settings change.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo’s position at 336 out of 1671 tested configurations puts it in the 79.9th percentile of all pairings tested for this game. That means it outperforms roughly four out of every five other CPU-GPU combinations in the database for Inside, a notable achievement given the game’s age and modest graphical demands. The CPU alone sits at the 93rd percentile among all processors, with an average benchmark score of 49367, while the GPU ranks at the 80th percentile among all graphics cards with an average score of 35787. The processor’s strong showing is underscored by its nearest rivals: it edges out the Intel Core i5-14600K by 0.4%, trails the AMD EPYC 4345P by 0.5%, and leads the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X by 0.6% and the Intel Xeon Gold 5318H by 1.4%. These margins are tiny, indicating that the i5-14600KF is performance-competitive with a broad swath of high-end server and desktop parts in synthetic workloads.

For the GPU, the RTX 3080’s nearest rivals are a mixed bag: it sits 0.2% behind the AMD Radeon Pro Duo, 0.4% ahead of the AMD Radeon 880M, 0.9% behind the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE, and 1% ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Mobile. These deltas are so small that they fall within measurement noise, meaning the RTX 3080 is effectively tied with those cards in aggregate performance. In the context of Inside, however, the actual frame rates tell a clearer story: the game is so lightweight that even the weakest preset at 4K delivers over 97 FPS, so the ranking is more about theoretical headroom than practical playability. The combo’s overall rank is driven by the CPU’s exceptional single-thread and multi-thread scores, which are critical for a game that relies on consistent frame pacing rather than heavy GPU workloads.

Settings Recommendations

Benchmark results across all four presets at each resolution show that Inside is remarkably forgiving, but the optimal settings depend on the target display. At 1080p, the Low preset delivers a staggering 392.3 FPS, Medium hits 354.5 FPS, High drops to 222.1 FPS, and Ultra still manages 211.9 FPS. Every preset at 1080p exceeds 200 FPS, so the recommendation is to run Ultra without hesitation—there is no measurable benefit to lowering quality given the frame rates remain far above any realistic refresh rate ceiling. At 1440p, the pattern holds: Low produces 313.8 FPS, Medium 252.5 FPS, High 159.7 FPS, and Ultra 151 FPS. Again, even Ultra clears 150 FPS, making it the clear choice for 1440p users. The only scenario where settings matter is 4K, where Ultra drops to 97 FPS, High to 101 FPS, Medium to 159.5 FPS, and Low to 198.4 FPS. For 4K displays with a 120Hz refresh rate, Medium is the sweet spot—it delivers 159.5 FPS, which is comfortably above 120 while still offering better visual fidelity than Low. For 60Hz 4K panels, Ultra at 97 FPS is acceptable, but High at 101 FPS provides a small margin of safety without sacrificing much quality.

The data suggests that this combo is overkill for the game at 1080p and 1440p, where the CPU becomes the primary limiter at lower presets. At 4K, the GPU starts to assert itself, but the RTX 3080’s 10 GB of GDDR6X memory and 760.3 GB/s bandwidth are more than sufficient for this title’s modest texture and shader requirements. The measured frames indicate that the game engine scales almost linearly with resolution, but the gap between Low and Ultra narrows as resolution increases, pointing to a shift in bottleneck behavior. For the best balance of visual quality and performance, Medium at 4K is the standout recommendation, offering a 57% improvement over Ultra while still looking substantially better than Low.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K is dramatic but predictable, revealing how the workload shifts between components. At Ultra settings, the average frame rate falls from 211.9 FPS at 1080p to 151 FPS at 1440p, then to 97 FPS at 4K—a cumulative reduction of 54.2% from the baseline. The drop from 1080p to 1440p is 28.7%, and from 1440p to 4K is another 35.8%, showing that the scaling is not perfectly linear but progressively steeper as pixel count increases. This pattern is classic GPU-bound behavior at higher resolutions: the RTX 3080’s pixel rate of 164.2 GPixel/s and texture rate of 465.1 GTexel/s become the limiting factors as the number of pixels quadruples from 1080p to 4K. At Low settings, the scaling is even more pronounced: 392.3 FPS at 1080p drops to 313.8 FPS at 1440p and then to 198.4 FPS at 4K, a total decline of 49.4%. The fact that Low settings still see a large drop indicates that even at minimal quality, the GPU is still doing meaningful work, while the CPU’s 5.30 GHz boost clock and 20 threads keep the game logic and physics running smoothly.

The limiting component shifts clearly with resolution. At 1080p and 1440p, the frame rates are so high that the CPU’s single-thread performance—evidenced by a Geekbench single-core score of 2778 and a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 4643—is likely the ceiling. At 4K, the GPU takes over as the bottleneck, as evidenced by the narrowing gap between presets: the difference between Low and Ultra at 1080p is 180.4 FPS, but at 4K it shrinks to 101.4 FPS. This compression suggests that at 4K, the GPU is struggling to keep up with even the Low preset’s demands, though the absolute numbers remain high. For a game like Inside, which uses simple 2D-style rendering with minimal particle effects, the RTX 3080’s 8704 shading units and 68 RT cores are massively overprovisioned, so the scaling is more about memory bandwidth than compute. The 760.3 GB/s bandwidth becomes the key factor at 4K, and it delivers admirably, keeping the game well above playable thresholds even at Ultra.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1080p, the measured averages span a wide range. Low settings produce 392.3 FPS, Medium drops to 354.5 FPS, High yields 222.1 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 211.9 FPS. The gap between Medium and High is substantial—132.4 FPS—indicating that the High preset introduces effects that disproportionately tax the GPU, likely related to lighting or post-processing. The jump from High to Ultra is small, just 10.2 FPS, suggesting that Ultra adds only marginal extra work. At 1440p, the same pattern emerges: Low hits 313.8 FPS, Medium 252.5 FPS, High 159.7 FPS, and Ultra 151 FPS. The Medium-to-High drop here is 92.8 FPS, again the largest single-step decline. The 4K results are the most interesting: Low produces 198.4 FPS, Medium 159.5 FPS, High 101 FPS, and Ultra 97 FPS. The High-to-Ultra delta at 4K is just 4 FPS, the smallest of any resolution, implying that Ultra’s extra settings are nearly free at this resolution. Conversely, the Medium-to-High gap at 4K is 58.5 FPS, showing that the High preset’s additional load is disproportionately heavy when the GPU is already stressed.

Across all resolutions, the data shows that the High preset is the outlier—it consistently delivers frame rates closer to Ultra than to Medium, yet the step from High to Ultra is always minor. This suggests that High is a poorly optimized preset for this game, possibly enabling certain effects that are then further refined in Ultra without much additional cost. For players prioritizing frame rate, Medium is the clear winner, offering 354.5 FPS at 1080p, 252.5 FPS at 1440p, and 159.5 FPS at 4K—all of which are more than sufficient for any display. The Low preset, while delivering the highest numbers, does so at the cost of visual fidelity that most players would find unacceptable for a game with atmospheric lighting and shadow play. The measured data confirms that the combo is never below 97 FPS even at the most demanding settings, which confirms the hardware’s capability for this genre.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080’s role in this combo is defined by its 10 GB of GDDR6X memory, which is more than enough for Inside’s modest texture pools. The memory runs at 1188 MHz with 19 Gbps effective speed, delivering 760.3 GB/s of bandwidth across a 320-bit bus. For a puzzle platformer, this bandwidth is overkill—the game’s simple geometry and sparse effects do not stress the memory subsystem. The GPU’s compute capabilities are equally excessive: 8704 shading units, 272 TMUs, and 96 ROPs yield a pixel rate of 164.2 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 465.1 GTexel/s. The FP32 throughput of 29.77 TFLOPS is far beyond what this title requires, yet it explains why the GPU can maintain 198.4 FPS at 4K Low without breaking a sweat. The boost clock of 1710 MHz is modest by modern standards, but the Ampere architecture’s efficiency at lower clocks, combined with the 28,300 million transistors on an 8 nm Samsung process, ensures consistent performance under load.

The GPU’s 68 RT cores and 272 tensor cores are entirely unused by Inside, which has no ray tracing or DLSS support, but their presence does not hurt performance. The card’s 320 W TDP and suggested 700 W PSU are irrelevant for this game’s actual draw, as the measured frame rates suggest the GPU is rarely at full utilization except at 4K Ultra. The 80th percentile ranking among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 35787, reflects its position relative to newer and older cards. Its nearest rival, the AMD Radeon Pro Duo, scores 35860 (0.2% higher), while the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE scores 36101 (0.9% higher)—all within noise. In Inside, this means the RTX 3080’s performance is effectively indistinguishable from those cards, and the combo’s overall rank is more dependent on the CPU’s 14 cores and 20 threads, which handle the game’s physics and logic without issue. The GPU’s role is simply to render the game’s dark, minimalist visuals at high frame rates, and it does so with enormous headroom, as evidenced by the 198.4 FPS at 4K Low.