Inside

The Intel Core i7-14700F paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti delivers a broad performance envelope in Inside, a game that is by no means a strenuous load for modern hardware. The measured frame rates across the three primary resolutions and four quality presets show a system that scales predictably, with the GPU becoming the dominant constraint only at the highest fidelity settings. This analysis breaks down the data to show where the bottleneck lies and how the combo ranks against the broader field of tested configurations.

Resolution Scaling

The transition from 1080p to 4K reveals a classic shift in system bottleneck behavior. At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo produces an average of 390.4 FPS. Moving to 2560x1440 Low drops that figure to 287.1 FPS, a 26.5% reduction. At 3840x2160 Low, the average falls to 178.8 FPS, which represents a 54.2% drop from the 1080p result. This steep decline at lower preset levels indicates that the CPU is capable of pushing far more frames than the GPU can render as pixel count rises, even in a lightweight title like Inside.

When the preset is set to High, the scaling pattern tightens. The 1080p High average is 196.4 FPS, dropping to 141 FPS at 1440p (a 28.2% reduction) and then to 88.3 FPS at 4K (a 55.1% reduction from 1080p). The similarity in percentage drops between Low and High settings suggests that the rendering pipeline is consistently limited by the GPU’s fill rate and shading throughput as resolution increases, rather than by any sudden change in CPU workload. The fact that 4K High still holds above 88 FPS shows that the RTX 3070 Ti’s 608.3 GB/s of memory bandwidth and 21.75 TFLOPS of FP32 compute are sufficient to keep this game fluid even at the highest pixel density tested.

The most telling data point for bottleneck analysis is the Ultra preset. At 1080p Ultra, the average is 186.4 FPS, which is only 5.1% lower than the High preset at the same resolution. At 1440p Ultra, the average is 133.3 FPS, and at 4K Ultra, it falls to 83.6 FPS. The narrow gap between High and Ultra at 1080p (196.4 vs 186.4 FPS) indicates that the CPU is still providing enough headroom to feed the GPU, but the GPU is beginning to saturate. The drop from 1440p Ultra to 4K Ultra is 37.3%, which is a smaller relative decline than the Low preset’s 54.2% drop from 1080p to 4K, suggesting that the Ultra preset’s additional shading work is keeping the GPU more consistently busy across all resolutions.

Settings Recommendations

The measured rows provide a clear hierarchy for the best experience per preset. At 1080p, the Low preset’s 390.4 FPS is excessive for any practical display, while the Ultra preset’s 186.4 FPS is already far above the refresh rate of most monitors. The Medium preset at 317.3 FPS and High at 196.4 FPS both offer diminishing returns in terms of visual fidelity versus raw frame rate. For a 144Hz display, the High preset at 1080p delivers 196.4 FPS, which comfortably exceeds the refresh ceiling and provides a 5.4% improvement over the Ultra preset’s 186.4 FPS while likely reducing visual load.

At 2560x1440, the High preset’s 141 FPS is the sweet spot for a 144Hz panel, as it sits just under the refresh limit and offers a meaningful visual upgrade over Medium’s 226.3 FPS. The Ultra preset at 133.3 FPS is also viable, but the 5.5% frame rate cost over High (141 vs 133.3 FPS) may not justify the additional graphical features for a game that is primarily a puzzle platformer with a muted art style. The Low preset at 287.1 FPS is only useful for extreme competitive scenarios, which are rare in this genre.

At 4K, the situation changes. The High preset’s 88.3 FPS is the only preset that approaches a smooth 60 FPS target, while the Ultra preset’s 83.6 FPS is still playable but requires a VRR display to avoid judder. The Medium preset at 146.2 FPS is overkill for 60Hz panels but provides headroom for high-refresh 4K monitors, which remain uncommon. The Low preset at 178.8 FPS is the best choice for a 120Hz or 144Hz 4K display, as it provides a 21.1% frame rate advantage over Medium (178.8 vs 146.2 FPS) while sacrificing visual quality that may be less noticeable in Inside’s dark, atmospheric scenes.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i7-14700F is a 20-core, 28-thread processor with a base clock of 2.10 GHz and a boost clock of 5.40 GHz. In Inside, a game that is not known for heavy multi-threaded workloads, the CPU’s role is primarily to maintain a high single-thread frame ceiling. The benchmark data shows that at 1080p Low, the system reaches 390.4 FPS, which is a strong indicator that the CPU can feed the GPU with minimal latency. The Cinebench R23 single-core score of 5003 and multi-core score of 35443 confirm that this processor has both high per-core performance and ample aggregate throughput.

The fact that the 1080p Low result (390.4 FPS) is more than double the 4K Low result (178.8 FPS) suggests that the CPU is not the limiting factor at lower resolutions. If the CPU were the bottleneck, the frame rate would plateau regardless of resolution. Instead, the data shows a consistent decline as resolution rises, which points to the GPU as the primary constraint. The CPU’s 33 MB of shared L3 cache and 2 MB per-core L2 cache provide sufficient data locality for the game’s physics and logic, which are unlikely to stress the 28 threads.

The i7-14700F’s 65 W TDP is notably low for a 20-core part, but the benchmark scores indicate that power efficiency does not come at the cost of performance. In comparison to its nearest rivals, the i7-14700F’s average benchmark score of 54097 is 0.6% below the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X (54450) and 1.1% below the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D (54681), while being 1.2% above the Intel Xeon Phi 7290 (53469) and 1.7% above the AMD EPYC 7313P (53206). These margins are small enough that in a game like Inside, the CPU choice is unlikely to produce a visible difference in frame rates, especially at 4K where the GPU is the clear bottleneck.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo ranks 537th out of 1671 tested combinations, placing it in the 67.9th percentile of all configurations. This is a strong result for a mid-range CPU paired with a high-end GPU from the previous generation. The rank reflects that the RTX 3070 Ti, despite being end-of-life, still delivers competitive frame rates in Inside when paired with a capable processor. The 537th position out of 1671 means that there are 1134 combos that perform worse, which confirms the efficiency of this pairing.

The ranking is likely influenced by the GPU’s 8 GB of GDDR6X memory and 256-bit bus, which provide 608.3 GB/s of bandwidth. In Inside, memory capacity is not a concern, as the game is not texture-heavy, but the bandwidth helps maintain consistent frame pacing at higher resolutions. The CPU’s 94th percentile ranking among all CPUs (percentileVsAllCpus: 94) means that it is in the top 6% of processors, which helps ensure that the combo’s overall rank is not dragged down by CPU-limited scenarios. The data shows that at 1080p High, the combo achieves 196.4 FPS, which is within 5.5% of the 4K Ultra result (83.6 FPS) when scaled for resolution, indicating a balanced system.

The nearest rival combos for the GPU, based on average benchmark scores, include the AMD Radeon RX 590 GME (0.3% lower score) and the AMD Radeon RX 6700 (0.8% higher score). These small deltas in synthetic benchmarks do not translate to meaningful differences in Inside’s measured frame rates, as the game’s engine is not sensitive to raw compute throughput. The combo’s rank of 537 suggests that there are many systems with higher-end GPUs (such as RTX 40-series or Radeon RX 7000-series) that will outperform it, but for a 2021-era GPU, this pairing remains highly capable.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is built on the Ampere architecture with a GA104 chip, featuring 6144 shading units, 192 texture mapping units, and 96 ROPs. Its base clock is 1575 MHz with a boost clock of 1770 MHz, and it has 8 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 256-bit bus, yielding 608.3 GB/s of bandwidth. In Inside, the GPU’s role is to handle the game’s 2.5D rendering, which includes dynamic lighting and particle effects. The 48 RT cores and 192 tensor cores are largely unused in this title, as it does not support ray tracing or DLSS, so the performance is driven by pure rasterization throughput.

The measured frame rates show that the GPU is the primary limiter at 4K, where even the Low preset (178.8 FPS) cannot match the 1080p Low result (390.4 FPS). This is expected given that 4K has 4 times the pixel count of 1080p, and the GPU’s pixel rate of 169.9 GPixel/s is the relevant metric. The texture rate of 339.8 GTexel/s and FP32 performance of 21.75 TFLOPS are sufficient to maintain high frame rates, but the data indicates that the 3070 Ti is not overprovisioned for this game at 4K Ultra (83.6 FPS). The GPU’s 74th percentile ranking among all GPUs (percentileVsAllGpus: 74) places it above the median, but its end-of-life status means it is outclassed by newer parts.

The 8 GB VRAM capacity is more than adequate for Inside, as the game’s art style does not require large texture sets. The GPU’s benchmark scores, such as the Passmark G3D score of 23356 and Geekbench OpenCL score of 137518, confirm its overall capability, but in this specific game, the bottleneck is clearly the GPU’s shading throughput at higher resolutions. The gap between 1080p High (196.4 FPS) and 4K High (88.3 FPS) is 55.1%, which aligns with the pixel count increase, showing that the GPU scales linearly with resolution and has no unexpected architectural inefficiencies in Inside. The 3070 Ti’s 290 W TDP and 600 W suggested PSU are not relevant to performance, but the data shows that this GPU is well-matched to a 20-core CPU for this game, as neither component is severely underutilized.