Inside

The Intel Core i7-14700F paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 4 GB delivers a playable experience in Inside, but the performance curve reveals a system heavily constrained by the graphics card. At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo produces an average of 199.6 FPS, which is more than enough for high-refresh-rate displays. However, this figure plunges to 96.6 FPS at High settings and 96.9 FPS at Ultra, showing that even a modest quality increase cuts frame rates by more than half in this puzzle platformer. The scaling from 1080p to 4K is severe: at High settings, the average FPS drops from 96.6 at 1080p to 71.1 at 1440p, and finally to 45.3 at 3840x2160. This progression indicates that the RTX 3050's 4 GB memory buffer and 128-bit bus become the limiting factor as pixel count rises, since the CPU has ample headroom to feed frames at lower resolutions.

Resolution Scaling

The measured data shows a predictable but steep decline in performance as resolution increases across all four quality presets. At Low settings, the system achieves 199.6 FPS at 1080p, which falls to 143.2 FPS at 1440p—a 28% reduction—and then to 89.5 FPS at 4K, representing a 55% drop from the 1080p baseline. The Medium preset follows a similar trajectory: 155.4 FPS at 1080p, 111.5 FPS at 1440p, and 73.5 FPS at 4K. High settings yield 96.6 FPS at 1080p, 71.1 FPS at 1440p, and 45.3 FPS at 4K, while Ultra starts at 96.9 FPS at 1080p, drops to 68.1 FPS at 1440p, and bottoms out at 43.3 FPS at 4K. The ratio between 1080p and 4K performance is roughly 2.2x for Low, 2.1x for Medium, 2.1x for High, and 2.2x for Ultra, which is consistent with a GPU-bound scenario. The fact that the 1440p numbers sit almost exactly halfway between the 1080p and 4K results—both in absolute terms and percentage drops—confirms that the rendering pipeline is scaling linearly with pixel count, leaving no doubt that the RTX 3050 is the primary bottleneck. The CPU's role is negligible here; the i7-14700F with 20 cores and 28 threads can easily outpace the GPU's output at every resolution tested.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 4 GB is the decisive component in this combo, and its specifications explain the performance ceiling. The card features a GA107 chip built on Samsung's 8 nm process, with 2,048 shading units, 64 texture mapping units, and 32 ROPs. Its boost clock of 1740 MHz and base clock of 1545 MHz are modest, but the real constraint is the memory subsystem: 4 GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus, yielding 192.0 GB/s of bandwidth. In Inside, a game with relatively simple geometry but atmospheric lighting and shadow effects, the 4 GB capacity is sufficient at 1080p, but the bandwidth becomes taxed as resolution increases. The measured FPS at Ultra settings—96.9 at 1080p, 68.1 at 1440p, 43.3 at 4K—shows that the card's pixel rate of 55.68 GPixel/s and texture rate of 111.4 GTexel/s are adequate for lower resolutions but cannot sustain smooth frame rates at 4K. The RTX 3050's 7.127 TFLOPS of FP32 performance and 16 RT cores are underutilized in this title, which is not graphically demanding by modern standards, yet the card still struggles to maintain 60 FPS at 4K on any preset above Low. The 90 W TDP and 1x 6-pin power connector indicate this is a low-power part, but the data shows that thermal headroom is not the issue—raw memory bandwidth is.

Settings Recommendations

Given the measured rows, the optimal balance between visual fidelity and frame rate for this combo is the Medium preset at 1440p, where the system delivers 111.5 FPS. This is comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold and nearly double the 4K High result of 45.3 FPS. For players targeting 1080p, the High preset at 96.6 FPS is the sweet spot, as it provides a significant visual upgrade over Low (199.6 FPS) while maintaining smooth gameplay; the jump to Ultra at 96.9 FPS offers no measurable benefit in average FPS, suggesting the preset is either not well-optimized or the GPU hits a hard limit regardless of the extra settings. At 4K, the data recommends Low settings exclusively, since the 89.5 FPS average is the only playable option—Medium drops to 73.5 FPS, High to 45.3 FPS, and Ultra to 43.3 FPS, all of which fall below the smoothness standard for a platformer that requires precise timing. The 1440p Medium result of 111.5 FPS is particularly noteworthy because it nearly matches the 1080p High result of 96.6 FPS while rendering 78% more pixels, indicating that the Medium preset is the most efficient use of the GPU's resources. In summary, the data suggests 1080p High or 1440p Medium for balanced play, with 4K reserved for Low settings only.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo ranks 1511th out of 1671 tested combinations in Inside, placing it in the bottom 10% of all systems measured. This percentile position is striking because the game itself is not technically demanding, yet the RTX 3050 4 GB drags the overall ranking down significantly. The CPU's individual performance is strong—the i7-14700F scores 35,443 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 5,003 in single-core, with a 94th percentile ranking among all CPUs—but the GPU's 50th percentile standing among all graphics cards means the pair is mismatched for this title. The data implies that many other combos, likely those with older mid-range GPUs or even integrated graphics, achieve higher FPS in Inside because the game favors CPU throughput over raw GPU power. The rank of 1511 suggests that the 4 GB VRAM is a liability even in a game with modest textures, as the card's memory bandwidth of 192.0 GB/s becomes a bottleneck at higher resolutions. In practical terms, this combo performs worse than 90% of others in the database, which is a poor result for a CPU that sits within 0.6% of the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X in average benchmark score—the i7-14700F trails that rival by just 0.6% and leads the Intel Xeon Phi 7290 by 1.2%. The CPU is clearly not the issue; the GPU's 4 GB frame buffer is the weak link.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i7-14700F provides overwhelming computational headroom for Inside, and the benchmark data confirms that it is never the limiting factor. The processor features 20 cores and 28 threads based on the Raptor Lake architecture, with a base clock of 2.10 GHz and a boost clock of 5.40 GHz. Its cache hierarchy includes 80 KB of L1 per core, 2 MB of L2 per core, and 33 MB of shared L3, which is more than sufficient for a game with small asset sizes. In synthetic tests, the CPU achieves 35,443 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 5,003 in single-core, along with a Geekbench multi-core score of 16,571 and single-core score of 2,711. The PassMark single-thread score of 4,261 and multithread score of 41,765 further demonstrate that the CPU can process game logic, physics, and AI tasks without breaking a sweat. The measured FPS differences across resolutions—for example, 199.6 FPS at 1080p Low versus 89.5 FPS at 4K Low—show a 2.2x drop that is entirely attributable to GPU load, not CPU limitations. Even at 4K Ultra, where the GPU produces just 43.3 FPS, the CPU is likely idle waiting for frames, as evidenced by the fact that the 1080p Ultra result of 96.9 FPS is still far below the CPU's theoretical maximum output. The i7-14700F's 65 W TDP and support for DDR4 and DDR5 memory make it a versatile pairing, but in this specific combo, its capabilities are wasted on a game that barely stresses even half of its 28 threads. The data strongly suggests that swapping the RTX 3050 for a more capable GPU would unlock substantially higher frame rates across all settings, since the CPU would have no trouble keeping up with any graphics card in this title.