Inside

The Intel Core Ultra 7 265K paired with the AMD Radeon RX 6600 delivers a highly capable Inside experience, though the data reveals a significant imbalance between the CPU's immense processing headroom and the GPU's more modest rendering limits. This combination ranks in the 1366th position out of 1671 tested combos, placing it in the lower-middle tier of the database, a position that reflects the GPU's constraints more than the processor's capabilities.

CPU Role — cores, clocks, and how they relate to this game's results

The Intel Core Ultra 7 265K is a 20-core, 20-thread processor based on the Arrow Lake architecture, built on a 3 nm process at TSMC. It operates with a base clock of 3.90 GHz and a boost clock of 5.50 GHz, with a 125 W TDP. The CPU's cache hierarchy includes 192 KB of L1 per core, 3 MB of L2 per core, and 30 MB of shared L3. This configuration places it in the 97th percentile of all CPUs tested, with an average benchmark score of 79102. Its nearest rivals in overall CPU performance include the Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF (deltaPct -0.2), the Intel Core i9-14900KF (deltaPct -0.2), and the Intel Core i9-14900K (deltaPct -0.9), showing that this chip is essentially at parity with some of Intel's most powerful recent desktop processors.

For a puzzle platformer like Inside, the CPU's workload is relatively light — the game's physics and logic do not stress multi-threaded performance heavily. However, the 265K's single-thread capabilities, demonstrated by a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 7060 and a Passmark single-thread score of 4904, ensure that frame pacing and minimum frame times remain consistent. The data shows that at 1080p Low settings, the combo achieves 254.7 FPS, which is primarily CPU-bound territory. The processor's 20 cores are far more than needed for this title, but the high boost clock of 5.50 GHz ensures that the game's main thread never becomes a bottleneck at any resolution tested. The CPU's Passmark multi-thread score of 58838 and data compression score of 668420 indicate substantial parallel processing power, yet these resources sit largely unused in Inside, as the game's demands are modest.

Settings Recommendations — which preset gives the best experience per the measured rows

Analyzing the measured FPS across all settings and resolutions reveals that the "High" preset offers the most balanced experience, but the "Medium" preset provides the best performance-per-visual-quality tradeoff for most users. At 1080p, the High preset delivers 127.2 FPS, while Medium jumps to 204.6 FPS — a substantial 60% improvement. The Ultra preset at 1080p drops to 121 FPS, which is still smooth but offers diminishing returns over High. The Low preset at 1080p reaches 254.7 FPS, but this sacrifices the game's atmospheric lighting and shadow effects, which are integral to the title's moody aesthetic.

At 1440p, the Medium preset achieves 148.3 FPS, which is excellent for a 144 Hz monitor, while High sits at 89.7 FPS — still playable but noticeably lower. The Ultra preset at 1440p yields 86.3 FPS, representing a modest drop from High that may not justify the additional visual load. At 4K, the Medium preset produces 92.2 FPS, while High drops to 61.1 FPS. The data suggests that Medium is the sweet spot across all three resolutions: it maintains frame rates above 90 FPS even at 4K, while preserving enough visual fidelity for a game where environmental storytelling matters. The Low preset at 4K reaches 118.5 FPS, but this level of performance is unnecessary for a puzzle platformer, and the visual cost is too high. For a locked 60 FPS experience at 4K, High is viable, but Medium provides headroom for dips in more complex scenes.

Resolution Scaling — how FPS drops from 1080p to 4K and what it says about the limiting component

The scaling behavior across resolutions clearly identifies the GPU as the limiting component in this pairing. From 1080p to 1440p at High settings, the average FPS drops from 127.2 to 89.7, a reduction of approximately 29%. Moving from 1440p to 4K at High, the FPS falls further from 89.7 to 61.1, another 32% drop. This pattern is consistent with a GPU-bound scenario: as pixel count increases, the rendering load scales nearly linearly, and the RX 6600's compute resources become the bottleneck.

At Low settings, the scaling is even more pronounced. The 1080p Low result of 254.7 FPS drops to 183.9 FPS at 1440p (a 28% reduction) and then to 118.5 FPS at 4K (a 36% reduction from 1440p). This steeper decline at higher resolutions with Low settings indicates that even minimal graphical effects are enough to saturate the GPU's capabilities. The CPU's role in this scaling is negligible; the 265K's high single-thread performance means it can feed frames far faster than the RX 6600 can render them. The fact that the 1080p Low result exceeds 250 FPS suggests the CPU is operating well within its limits, while the GPU's fill rate and shader throughput are the primary constraints. At Medium settings, the 1080p score of 204.6 FPS drops to 148.3 at 1440p and then to 92.2 at 4K, showing a consistent 28% and 38% decline respectively. This behavior confirms that the RX 6600, with its 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus and 224.0 GB/s bandwidth, is the element that determines the upper bound of performance as resolution increases.

How This Combo Ranks — use comboRankInGame vs other tested combos

The combo's rank of 1366 out of 1671 tested combinations places it in the 82nd percentile of all configurations — meaning roughly 18% of tested combos perform worse, and 82% perform better. This ranking is surprisingly low for a system featuring a top-tier CPU, and the data indicates why. The GPU's average benchmark score is 25235, placing it in the 69th percentile of all GPUs. Its nearest rivals are the AMD Radeon 890M (deltaPct 0), the AMD Radeon RX 580 2048SP (deltaPct -0.2), the AMD Radeon RX 6700M (deltaPct 0.2), and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (deltaPct 0.5). These rivals are a mix of integrated graphics, older discrete cards, and mobile parts, which illustrates that the RX 6600 sits at the lower end of mainstream desktop GPUs.

The combination of a 97th-percentile CPU with a 69th-percentile GPU creates a significant mismatch. In Inside, the game's low CPU demands mean the 265K's advantages are largely wasted, while the GPU's limitations are fully exposed. The combo rank of 1366 suggests that many systems with weaker CPUs but stronger GPUs would outperform this pairing in this specific title. For context, the CPU's nearest rival, the Intel Core i9-14900K, scores 79824 on average, just 0.9% higher, yet pairing it with a faster GPU would likely yield a much better combo rank in this game. This ranking underscores that for Inside, the GPU selection matters far more than CPU choice, and the 265K's processing power is not a meaningful contributor to the game's frame rates.

GPU Role — VRAM, clocks, and how they relate to this game's results

The AMD Radeon RX 6600 is built on the RDNA 2.0 architecture using the Navi 23 chip, manufactured on a 7 nm process at TSMC. It features 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus, providing 224.0 GB/s of bandwidth. The GPU's clocks are specified with a base of 1626 MHz, a game clock of 2044 MHz, and a boost clock of 2491 MHz. Its 1792 shading units, 112 texture mapping units, and 64 raster operation units deliver a pixel rate of 159.4 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 279.0 GTexel/s, with FP32 performance of 8.928 TFLOPS. The card supports DirectX 12 Ultimate, Vulkan 1.4, and OpenGL 4.6, and its 28 ray tracing cores are available, though Inside does not utilize ray tracing.

The measured FPS data shows that the RX 6600's performance in Inside is strong at lower resolutions but degrades predictably at 4K. At 1080p, even Ultra settings achieve 121 FPS, indicating that the GPU has sufficient raw throughput for this title at standard resolutions. The 8 GB VRAM is more than adequate for a puzzle platformer, as the game's textures and geometry are not demanding. The boost clock of 2491 MHz is the key factor in the GPU's 1080p performance; the high clock speed compensates for the relatively narrow 128-bit memory bus. At 4K Ultra, the frame rate drops to 54.8 FPS, which is just below the 60 FPS threshold, suggesting that the GPU's shading units and memory bandwidth become saturated at this resolution. The memory bandwidth of 224.0 GB/s is sufficient for the game's needs at 1080p and 1440p, as evidenced by the 86.3 FPS at 1440p Ultra, but the 4K Ultra result of 54.8 FPS indicates that the GPU's compute resources are the limiting factor rather than VRAM capacity. The GPU's Passmark G3D score of 15096 and 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 1492 place it firmly in the mainstream segment, which aligns with the observed performance in Inside.