Inside

Inside is a restrained puzzle-platformer, but the benchmark data for the Intel Core Ultra 7 265HX paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 shows anything but restraint. Across the measured resolution and settings matrix, this combination delivers high frame rates that range from a floor of 71 FPS at 4K Ultra to a ceiling of 328 FPS at 1080p Low. The data indicates a system capable of exploiting high-refresh-rate displays at standard resolutions, while still maintaining smooth gameplay at 4K with maximum settings. The measured rows provide a clear view of how this specific CPU and GPU combo scales with both visual fidelity and resolution, revealing a system where the GPU often becomes the primary performance arbiter, but the CPU’s capabilities are never far from the equation.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS data for this combo across the four quality presets at each resolution allows for a clear recommendation on the optimal settings. At 3840x2160, the Ultra preset yields an average FPS of 71, which is technically playable but sits just above the threshold where frame pacing can become a concern for some users. High at 4K provides a more comfortable 74 FPS average, a marginal improvement that does not meaningfully change the experience. The Medium preset at 4K delivers a substantial leap to 118 FPS, while Low jumps to 148 FPS. For a game like Inside, which relies on atmospheric visuals and smooth animation, the Medium preset at 4K appears to be the sweet spot, offering a 60% performance increase over Ultra (from 71 to 118 FPS) with a visual step down that is less critical in this art style.

At 2560x1440, the situation becomes more fluid. The Ultra preset achieves 112 FPS, which is ideal for high-refresh-rate monitors. High settings reach 118 FPS, Medium hits 189 FPS, and Low tops out at 236 FPS. The data suggests that 1440p Ultra is the best experience at this resolution, as it provides a frame rate that exceeds the refresh rate of most standard 144Hz displays, while retaining the maximum visual fidelity the game offers. The jump from Ultra to High is negligible in performance (112 to 118 FPS), so there is little reason to compromise visual quality. The Medium and Low presets, while faster, are unnecessary for a smooth experience and sacrifice the game’s atmospheric shadow and lighting work.

At 1920x1080, the CPU and GPU combo shows its raw strength. Ultra settings run at 156 FPS, High at 164 FPS, Medium at 262 FPS, and Low at 328 FPS. Here, the recommendation is straightforward: use the Ultra preset. The 156 FPS average is well within high-refresh-rate territory, and the performance difference between Ultra and High is just 8 FPS (a 5% delta). The massive gains from dropping to Medium (262 FPS) or Low (328 FPS) are only relevant for competitive play, which is not a factor in a puzzle-platformer. The Ultra preset at 1080p provides the best balance of visual quality and performance, as the data shows the system has ample headroom to run the game at its highest settings without dropping below 156 FPS on average. Across all resolutions, the data consistently shows that the Medium preset offers a significant performance uplift over Ultra, but the Ultra preset is generally the best choice for this game due to the high baseline performance.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 is the primary driver of the frame rate differences seen across settings. The GPU’s 12 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 192-bit bus provides a memory bandwidth of 672.0 GB/s, which is more than sufficient for Inside’s demands, even at 4K Ultra. The measured data shows that increasing settings from Low to Ultra at any given resolution causes a notable FPS drop, which is the expected behavior of a GPU-bound scenario. For instance, at 3840x2160, the average FPS falls from 148 at Low to 71 at Ultra, a 52% reduction. This substantial scaling indicates that the RTX 5070’s compute resources, not the memory subsystem, are being taxed by the higher-detail presets.

The GPU’s clock speeds are listed as a base of 2325 MHz and a boost of 2512 MHz. These clocks, combined with the 6144 shading units, allow the card to achieve a pixel rate of 201.0 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 482.3 GTexel/s. In the context of Inside, these figures explain why the card can deliver 74 FPS at 4K High and 118 FPS at 4K Medium. The performance gap between Medium and High at 4K is 44 FPS (118 vs 74), which is a 37% drop. This suggests that the High preset introduces additional shading and post-processing effects that heavily utilize the GPU’s pixel and texture throughput. The card’s FP32 performance of 30.87 TFLOPS is a strong indicator of its raw compute ability, and the benchmark results reflect this, as the GPU is able to maintain high frame rates even at the most demanding settings.

Looking at the GPU’s broader benchmark scores, the RTX 5070 achieves a Passmark G3D score of 29137 and a 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 5077. Its percentile ranking of 82 vs all GPUs places it in the upper echelon of available hardware. The nearest rivals in the data are professional and mobile workstation cards, such as the AMD Radeon Pro 580 (avg score 40318, deltaPct 0.1) and the NVIDIA RTX A500 Mobile (avg score 39568, deltaPct 2). The RTX 5070’s average benchmark score of 40377 is effectively on par with these, showing that its performance class is well-established. In Inside, the GPU’s role is clear: it is the component that determines the absolute ceiling of frame rates at higher settings. The data shows that the GPU is powerful enough to push 4K Ultra to 71 FPS, but the CPU must be capable of feeding it at lower resolutions, which is where the Core Ultra 7 265HX comes into play.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 7 265HX is a 20-core, 20-thread processor based on the Arrow Lake-HX architecture. Its base clock of 2.60 GHz and boost clock of 5.30 GHz provide the single-thread speed necessary for game logic and physics. In a game like Inside, which is not heavily multi-threaded, the CPU’s high boost clock is more relevant than its core count. The processor’s L3 cache is 30 MB (shared), which helps with data locality for the game’s assets. The CPU’s benchmark results show strong multi-core and single-core performance: a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 40642 and a single-core score of 5737. These numbers place the CPU in the 93rd percentile vs all CPUs, indicating top-tier performance.

The CPU’s role in the measured FPS data becomes apparent when examining the scaling from 1080p to 4K at a fixed setting. At Low settings, the 1080p average FPS is 328, which drops to 236 at 1440p and 148 at 4K. This steep decline is a classic sign of the GPU becoming the bottleneck as resolution increases. However, at 1080p Low, the massive 328 FPS figure suggests that the CPU is capable of feeding the GPU far more frames than the GPU can render at higher resolutions. The CPU’s Passmark single-thread score of 4500 and multithread score of 47985 support this, showing that it has both the single-core speed and multi-core throughput to avoid being a limiting factor in most scenarios.

The CPU’s nearest rivals, according to the data, include the Intel Core i7-13790F (avg score 63080, deltaPct 0.1) and the AMD Ryzen AI 7 450G (avg score 63331, deltaPct -0.2). The Core Ultra 7 265HX has an average benchmark score of 63173, which places it within 0.2% of these chips. This near-identical performance means that in CPU-limited scenarios, such as very low-resolution gaming, the frame rates would be comparable to these rivals. However, the data for Inside shows that even at 1080p Low (328 FPS), the CPU is not the primary limiter, as the GPU is still producing a substantial frame rate. The CPU’s 20 cores and 20 threads, while not fully utilized by Inside, ensure that background tasks and the game’s logic do not cause frame hitches. The boost clock of 5.30 GHz is the key specification for this game, as it allows for rapid single-thread execution, which is what puzzle-platformers rely on for responsive input and physics calculations.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo of the Intel Core Ultra 7 265HX and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 achieves a rank of 1474 out of 2887 tested combos in Inside. This places it in the 51st percentile of all combinations tested, meaning that just over half of the other CPU-GPU pairings in the database deliver higher average frame rates in this game. The rank of 1474 is interesting because it is lower than one might expect given the individual component strengths. The CPU’s 93rd percentile ranking and the GPU’s 82nd percentile ranking suggest that both are high-performing parts, yet the combined result in Inside is middle-of-the-pack. This indicates that the game’s performance is not entirely dependent on raw hardware power, and that other combos with different balances of CPU and GPU may yield higher frame rates.

The data shows that the combo ranks in the middle, which is a function of the game’s relatively low system requirements. Inside is a 2016 puzzle-platformer with a stylized art style, so even mid-range hardware can achieve high frame rates. The measured FPS of 328 at 1080p Low is extremely high, but many other combos in the database likely achieve similar or higher numbers, pushing this combo’s rank down. In contrast, a more demanding game would likely see this combo rank much higher due to the GPU’s strength. The rank of 1474 does not mean the combo is weak; it simply reflects that the performance ceiling for Inside is high enough that many systems can hit it. The Intel Core Ultra 7 265HX and RTX 5070 combo is clearly capable of playing the game at maximum settings with high frame rates, but the database shows that there are 1473 other combos that do it faster, likely due to having more powerful GPUs or CPUs with higher clock speeds. The combo’s performance is consistent with its component specs, but the game’s ease of rendering means that the rank is more about the extremes of the high-end hardware pool than about any deficiency in this pairing.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals a clear pattern of scaling as resolution increases from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160. At the Ultra preset, the average FPS drops from 156 at 1080p to 112 at 1440p, a 28% reduction, and then further to 71 at 4K, a 37% reduction from 1440p. This consistent decline indicates that the GPU is the limiting component at higher resolutions, as the workload on the pixel and texture units increases significantly. The RTX 5070’s 80 ROPs and 192 TMUs are being taxed more heavily as the resolution grows, which is expected given the higher number of pixels to fill.

At the Low preset, the scaling is even more pronounced. The average FPS falls from 328 at 1080p to 236 at 1440p (a 28% drop) and then to 148 at 4K (a 37% drop from 1440p). This shows that even at low settings, where the GPU’s compute load is minimal, the resolution increase still causes a significant performance hit. This suggests that the GPU’s memory bandwidth or pixel throughput is the limiting factor, not the shading or compute units. The 12 GB of GDDR7 memory with 672.0 GB/s bandwidth is sufficient, but the 192-bit bus width means that at 4K, the memory access patterns become more demanding, potentially causing the observed frame rate drops.

The scaling from 1080p to 4K at Medium settings shows a similar trend: 262 FPS at 1080p, 189 FPS at 1440p, and 118 FPS at 4K. The percentage drops are 28% and 38%, respectively, which is nearly identical to the Low and Ultra presets. This consistency across all settings strongly suggests that the GPU is the primary bottleneck at 4K, as the CPU’s frame generation capability is likely far higher than what the GPU can render at that resolution. The data indicates that at 1080p and 1440p, the combo is often CPU-bound or balanced, but at 4K, the GPU is definitively the limiting component. The frame time data for 4K Medium shows a minimum of 101 FPS and a maximum of 136 FPS, indicating some variance but overall stable performance. For 1440p Medium, the minimum is 160 FPS and the maximum is 217 FPS, showing a wider spread but still high average. This resolution scaling analysis confirms that for the best experience, users should target 1440p or 1080p for high refresh rates, or accept 4K with the understanding that the GPU is working at its limit.

FAQ

Q: What is the highest average frame rate this combo achieves in Inside?

A: The highest measured average FPS is 328, achieved at the 1920x1080 resolution with Low settings.

Q: Can this system run Inside at 4K with maximum settings smoothly?

A: The data shows an average of 71 FPS at 3840x2160 with Ultra settings, which is above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay, though it is the lowest measured average across all tested configurations.

Q: How does the GPU’s memory capacity affect performance in Inside?

A: The GPU has 12 GB of GDDR7 memory with a bandwidth of 672.0 GB/s, which is more than sufficient for Inside’s requirements, as the data shows no memory-related bottlenecks even at 4K.

Q: Does the CPU limit performance at 1080p?

A: At 1080p Low, the combo reaches 328 FPS, but the CPU’s high boost clock and single-thread performance allow it to keep pace, though the data suggests the GPU is still the primary limiter even at lower resolutions.

Q: What is the combo’s ranking compared to other tested systems in Inside?

A: The combo ranks 1474 out of 2887 tested combinations, placing it in the middle of the database, despite the individual components being high-performing.

Q: Which settings preset offers the best balance of visual quality and performance at 1440p?

A: At 2560x1440, the Ultra preset achieves 112 FPS, which is ideal for high-refresh-rate monitors, making it the recommended choice over High (118 FPS) since the performance gain is minimal.