Inside

Inside is a 2016 puzzle platformer with a deliberately restrained visual style, yet the frame rate data for the Intel Core i7-14700F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 combination reveals a surprisingly demanding workload at higher settings. The measured results show how this pairing behaves across three resolutions and four quality presets, and the pattern is not what one might expect from a game of this genre and age.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate drop from 1080p to 4K is steep but not uniform across all settings, which tells a clear story about where the bottleneck sits. At Low settings, the average frame rate falls from 392.1 FPS at 1920x1080 to 295.3 FPS at 3840x2160, a reduction of roughly 25% when moving to 4K. That is a relatively modest decline, suggesting that even at 4K with Low settings, the CPU is still doing a considerable amount of the work to keep the GPU fed.

The scaling becomes much more aggressive at higher quality presets. At High settings, the average drops from 301.6 FPS at 1080p to 235.6 FPS at 1440p, and then to 144.5 FPS at 4K. That 4K figure represents a 52% drop from the 1080p result, which is a far larger penalty than the Low preset showed. The Ultra preset behaves similarly: 292.6 FPS at 1080p falls to 224 FPS at 1440p and then to 138.4 FPS at 4K, a 53% reduction across the resolution range.

What this indicates is that the RTX 4090 is the limiting component at 4K when the visual load is high. The GPU’s pixel and texture throughput—rated at 443.5 GPixel/s and 1,290.2 GTexel/s respectively—is being saturated by the combination of resolution and quality settings. At 1080p, the picture is different: the 392.1 FPS Low result and the 301.6 FPS High result are both high enough that the CPU’s ability to issue draw calls becomes the constraint. The i7-14700F, with its 20 cores and 28 threads, is not a weak link, but even it has limits when frame rates approach 400 FPS.

The Medium preset shows the most interesting scaling curve, moving from 357.3 FPS at 1080p to 324.7 FPS at 1440p and then to 234.4 FPS at 4K. The 1440p result is very close to the 1080p figure, which suggests that at Medium quality, the GPU has enough headroom at 1440p to keep up with the CPU’s output. It is only when resolution jumps to 4K that the render load becomes heavy enough to pull the average down significantly.

How This Combo Ranks

In the database of tested combinations for Inside, this pairing sits at rank 27 out of 1,671 combos. That places it in the top 1.6% of all tested systems, which is a strong showing for a game that is not typically used as a flagship benchmark title. The rank reflects the raw capability of both components, but it also highlights that there are 26 other combinations that manage to outperform this setup in this specific title.

The CPU’s overall standing is solid, with a percentile rank of 94 against all CPUs in the database. Its average benchmark score of 54,097 places it just behind the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X, which scores 54,450 and is only 0.6% faster. The gap to the next rival, the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D, is slightly larger at 1.1%, while the i7-14700F is 1.2% ahead of the Intel Xeon Phi 7290 and 1.7% ahead of the AMD EPYC 7313P. These are tight margins, and they suggest that in CPU-bound scenarios, the i7-14700F trades blows with some very capable alternatives.

The GPU tells a similar story at the component level. The RTX 4090 has a percentile rank of 91 against all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 66,473. Its nearest rival, the NVIDIA Tesla T4, is only 0.4% faster, while the AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56 is 0.9% faster and the NVIDIA Quadro P6000 is 1.3% faster. The NVIDIA Tesla P40 trails by 0.5%. These are workstation-class cards, which makes the comparison somewhat unusual, but it does show that the RTX 4090 is at the top of the consumer heap in synthetic tests.

Within the context of Inside specifically, the rank of 27 out of 1,671 is more meaningful than the raw component percentiles. It means that the combination of a high-end consumer CPU and a flagship GPU is enough to place this system in the upper echelon of results for this game, but not at the very top. The 26 systems ahead likely include combinations with even stronger single-thread performance or more favorable memory configurations.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i7-14700F is a 20-core, 28-thread processor based on the Raptor Lake architecture, built on Intel’s 10 nm process. Its base clock is 2.10 GHz, but the boost clock reaches 5.40 GHz, which is the figure that matters most for a game like Inside. This title is not heavily threaded; it relies more on single-core performance for its physics and logic updates, and the benchmark results reflect that.

In Cinebench R23, the i7-14700F scores 35,443 in multi-core and 5,003 in single-core. The single-core score is the more relevant number for Inside, as the game’s engine is unlikely to scale perfectly across all 28 threads. The single-thread Passmark score of 4,261 and the Geekbench single-core score of 2,711 both confirm that this CPU has strong single-thread capability, which helps explain why it can push frame rates above 300 FPS at 1080p in this game.

The 33 MB of shared L3 cache is also a factor. Inside’s level streaming and object management can benefit from a large cache, and the i7-14700F’s cache configuration is generous for a desktop part. The 2 MB per-core L2 cache and 80 KB per-core L1 cache round out a hierarchy that is well-suited to the game’s data access patterns.

However, the CPU’s role becomes less prominent as resolution and quality increase. At 4K Ultra, the average frame rate of 138.4 FPS is well below the CPU’s ceiling, which means the processor is no longer the limiting factor. The data shows that the CPU is the primary driver of performance at 1080p Low, where the 392.1 FPS result is likely near the engine’s draw call limit, but it cedes control to the GPU at higher resolutions.

FAQ

Q: What is the highest average frame rate recorded for this combination?

A: The highest average is 392.1 FPS, achieved at 1920x1080 with Low settings.

Q: How does the i7-14700F compare to its closest rival in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The i7-14700F scores 54,097 on average, which is 0.6% behind the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X’s 54,450 and 1.1% behind the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D’s 54,681.

Q: Does the RTX 4090’s 24 GB of VRAM make a difference in Inside?

A: The 24 GB of GDDR6X memory is far more than Inside requires, as the game’s visual style is not texture-heavy. The VRAM is not a limiting factor in any of the measured results.

Q: What is the frame rate difference between Low and Ultra at 4K?

A: At 3840x2160, the Low preset averages 295.3 FPS while Ultra averages 138.4 FPS, a difference of 156.9 FPS.

Q: Is this combination more CPU-bound or GPU-bound in this game?

A: The data shows it is CPU-bound at 1080p Low (392.1 FPS) and GPU-bound at 4K Ultra (138.4 FPS), with the crossover occurring somewhere around 1440p High.

Q: How does the combo rank in the database for this game?

A: It ranks 27th out of 1,671 tested combinations, placing it in the top 2% of all results.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is built on the Ada Lovelace architecture and uses the AD102 chip, fabricated on TSMC’s 5 nm process. It carries 16,384 shading units, 512 TMUs, and 176 ROPs, with a base clock of 2235 MHz and a boost clock of 2520 MHz. The memory subsystem is equally formidable: 24 GB of GDDR6X on a 384-bit bus delivers 1.01 TB/s of bandwidth, which is more than enough for any game released in the last decade.

For Inside, the GPU’s raw throughput is the determining factor at higher settings. The pixel rate of 443.5 GPixel/s and texture rate of 1,290.2 GTexel/s are the specifications that govern how quickly the card can fill the screen with the game’s muted color palette and simple geometry. At 4K Ultra, the average frame rate of 138.4 FPS shows that the card is being pushed, but it is still delivering a smooth experience on a high-refresh-rate 4K display.

The synthetic benchmark scores for the RTX 4090 are impressive but not directly indicative of gaming performance. The Passmark G3D score of 38,194 and the 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 9,223 show that the card dominates in compute-heavy workloads. The Geekbench OpenCL score of 317,684 and Vulkan score of 270,615 further confirm its compute capabilities, but Inside does not leverage these features heavily.

The GPU’s role in this pairing is to take over once the CPU has done its job. At 1080p, the CPU can feed the GPU fast enough to produce frame rates above 300 FPS, but at 4K, the GPU’s fill rate becomes the bottleneck. The 234.4 FPS Medium result at 4K versus the 295.3 FPS Low result shows that even modest quality increases have a significant impact on the GPU load. The RTX 4090 is an end-of-life product with a launch MSRP of 1,599 USD, but its performance in Inside remains top-tier, as evidenced by the 27th-place rank out of 1,671 combinations.