Inside

# Inside — Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus + AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT

The pairing of Intel's 24-core Core Ultra 9 290K Plus with AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT produces a striking split in Inside's performance profile: at 1080p the system obliterates every refresh-rate target, while at 4K Ultra the frame rate drops to nearly a quarter of that peak. This benchmark set, spanning three resolutions and four quality presets, reveals a combo that is simultaneously overkill for low-resolution play and merely adequate for maxed-out 4K. The measured data shows a 337 FPS ceiling at 1080p Low and a 72 FPS floor at 4K Ultra — a range that tells a clear story about where each component's headroom begins and ends.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K is dramatic and consistent across all settings. At High quality, the system delivers 168 FPS at 1080p, 121 FPS at 1440p, and 76 FPS at 4K — a step-down of 28% from 1080p to 1440p, then another 37% from 1440p to 4K. The Low preset shows an even steeper relative decline: 337 FPS at 1080p falls to 242 FPS at 1440p (a 28% drop) and then to 152 FPS at 4K (a 37% drop from 1440p). This pattern — near-identical percentage losses regardless of settings — points to a resolution-bound bottleneck that scales predictably with pixel count.

The Medium preset's min/max data reinforces this interpretation. At 1080p Medium, the range spans 229 to 310 FPS; at 1440p Medium, it narrows to 165-223 FPS; at 4K Medium, it compresses further to 103-140 FPS. The shrinking spread at higher resolutions suggests that frame time variance is being smoothed out by the GPU's increasing workload — as pixels multiply, the limiting factor shifts from the CPU's ability to feed frames to the GPU's raw throughput. The fact that the 4K Medium average (122 FPS) sits closer to its minimum (103 FPS) than its maximum (140 FPS) indicates the GPU is spending more time near its saturation point.

What does this scaling imply about the limiting component? The consistent 28%/37% two-step pattern across all four presets is the fingerprint of a GPU-bound scenario at higher resolutions. If the CPU were the constraint, the FPS drop from 1080p to 1440p would be far smaller than the drop from 1440p to 4K, since the CPU's workload barely changes with resolution. Instead, both steps are nearly identical in percentage terms, which means the rendering pipeline is being stretched uniformly — a classic sign that the RX 6700 XT's pixel-pushing capacity, not the 290K Plus's geometry or draw-call processing, is the ceiling above 1080p.

GPU Role

The RX 6700 XT's specifications explain much of this behavior. With 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus delivering 384.0 GB/s of bandwidth, the card has ample memory capacity for Inside's art style but a bandwidth figure that becomes increasingly taxed as resolution climbs. The GPU's boost clock of 2581 MHz and game clock of 2424 MHz are high for the RDNA 2.0 architecture, and the 2560 shading units working at those frequencies produce 13.21 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. These numbers place the card at the 72nd percentile among all GPUs in the benchmark database, with an average benchmark score of 27425.

The data suggests the RX 6700 XT is the primary performance governor in this pairing. At 4K Ultra, the 72 FPS average represents a 79% drop from the 1080p Low result — a collapse that cannot be attributed to anything other than the GPU's fill-rate and memory-bandwidth limits. The card's nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks include the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (scoring 27565, just 0.5% higher) and the RTX 4070 Mobile (27435, statistically identical at 0% delta). Yet in Inside, the RX 6700 XT's real-world 4K performance of 72-76 FPS across High and Ultra shows that synthetic parity does not always translate to identical gaming behavior — the card's RDNA 2.0 architecture handles this particular game's rendering load with efficiency that its raw specs might not suggest.

The memory configuration deserves scrutiny. At 4K, the 192-bit bus and 384.0 GB/s bandwidth become the likeliest bottleneck, as texture fetch and framebuffer traffic scale with pixel count. The measured 4K Medium result of 122 FPS — nearly double the 4K Ultra figure — indicates that reducing texture quality and shading complexity disproportionately relieves pressure on the memory subsystem. The 12 GB capacity is never a constraint in Inside (a 2016 title with modest VRAM requirements), but the bandwidth ceiling asserts itself clearly at 3840x2160.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus brings formidable processing resources to this pairing: 24 cores and 24 threads running at a 3.70 GHz base clock and 5.80 GHz boost clock. This Arrow Lake Refresh chip, built on a 3 nm TSMC process with 17,800 million transistors, achieves a 96th percentile ranking among all CPUs with an average benchmark score of 84003. Its Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 51731 and single-core score of 7303 demonstrate exceptional capability in both throughput and latency-sensitive tasks.

However, the measured frames in Inside show this CPU is rarely the constraint. At 1080p Low, the 337 FPS result is likely approaching the upper bound of what any processor can feed to the GPU in this game, but the 290K Plus handles it without evident strain — the lack of min/max data for Low settings suggests no frame-time anomalies were recorded. The CPU's nearest rivals in overall benchmark scores include the Core Ultra 9 285K (83807, just 0.2% behind) and the AMD EPYC 4584PX (83090, 1.1% behind), but these comparisons reflect general compute workloads, not Inside-specific behavior.

The 24-core configuration is massively over-provisioned for a puzzle platformer. Inside's gameplay mechanics — physics-based interactions, lighting transitions, and streaming environments — are unlikely to scale beyond a handful of threads. This means the 290K Plus is effectively idle during most frame rendering, with its single-core performance (Cinebench R23 single-core score of 7303) doing the heavy lifting for game logic and draw-call submission. The 36 MB of shared L3 cache and 3 MB per-core L2 cache provide ample buffering for the game's asset streams, but these advantages manifest only in the 1080p and 1440p results where the GPU is not saturated.

The data implies that swapping the 290K Plus for a far less powerful CPU would yield nearly identical frame rates at 4K, where the RX 6700 XT is the clear bottleneck. Conversely, at 1080p Low, the CPU's headroom is what enables the 337 FPS result — a slower processor might fail to feed the GPU fast enough to reach that figure. The CPU's percentile ranking (96th) versus the GPU's (72nd) quantifies this imbalance: the processor is a top-4% part while the graphics card is a top-28% part, creating an inherent asymmetry in this pairing.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the system delivers its most extreme results. Low settings produce 337 FPS, Medium drops to 269 FPS (with a 229-310 FPS range), High settles at 168 FPS, and Ultra manages 160 FPS. The gap between Low and Medium (68 FPS) is larger than the gap between High and Ultra (8 FPS), suggesting diminishing returns in GPU workload as settings approach maximum — the jump from Low to Medium likely enables significant visual features that cost performance, while High to Ultra is a smaller incremental step.

Moving to 2560x1440, the pattern holds but with compressed numbers. Low delivers 242 FPS, Medium 194 FPS (range 165-223), High 121 FPS, and Ultra 115 FPS. The Low-to-Medium gap narrows to 48 FPS, while High-to-Ultra remains a modest 6 FPS. Notably, the 1440p Ultra result (115 FPS) is only 3% lower than the 1080p Ultra result (160 FPS) in relative terms when accounting for resolution — actually, the absolute drop is 45 FPS, a 28% reduction that mirrors the High preset's scaling perfectly.

At 3840x2160, the system's limits become apparent. Low delivers 152 FPS, Medium 122 FPS (range 103-140), High 76 FPS, and Ultra 72 FPS. The Medium preset's min/max spread of 37 FPS is the tightest of any measured configuration, indicating stable frame delivery even at this demanding resolution. The High-to-Ultra gap shrinks to just 4 FPS — the smallest of any resolution — suggesting that at 4K, the GPU is so saturated that additional quality settings have minimal incremental cost because the card is already at its throughput ceiling.

The settings scaling at each resolution reveals an interesting inversion: at 1080p, the difference between Low and Ultra is 177 FPS (337 vs 160); at 1440p, the spread is 127 FPS (242 vs 115); at 4K, it compresses to 80 FPS (152 vs 72). This diminishing gap with rising resolution confirms that the GPU's performance envelope narrows as pixel count grows — the card's absolute performance ceiling at 4K Ultra (72 FPS) is only 47% of its 1080p Low ceiling (337 FPS), but the relative cost of Ultra settings falls from 53% at 1080p to 53% at 4K as well, showing proportional scaling.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus and RX 6700 XT ranks 1367th out of 2887 tested combos in Inside, placing it in the 53rd percentile of all configurations in the database. This mid-pack ranking is notable given the individual components' strong positions — the CPU sits at the 96th percentile and the GPU at the 72nd percentile, yet their combined gaming performance lands only slightly above average. This discrepancy suggests that Inside is either highly optimized for mainstream hardware or that the specific pairing disadvantages are real.

The rank implies that many less-expensive or more-balanced combinations outperform this setup in this specific game. A combo with a weaker CPU but a stronger GPU would likely rank higher, since Inside's frame rates are GPU-limited at most settings. Conversely, the 290K Plus's massive compute resources contribute little to the measured FPS beyond ensuring no CPU-induced frame drops. The combination's 1367th position out of 2887 means roughly 1520 other pairings achieve better or comparable results in Inside — a humbling outcome for a processor that ranks in the top 4% of all CPUs.

The data suggests this combo is best suited for users who run multiple tasks alongside gaming or who prioritize other workloads over Inside specifically. For this game alone, the pairing is over-provisioned on the CPU side and under-provisioned on the GPU side at 4K, creating a mismatch that the benchmark ranking captures. The 72 FPS 4K Ultra result, while smooth, leaves no headroom for future game updates or more demanding scenes, and the 1367th rank reflects that fragility.

FAQ

*Q: What is the maximum FPS this combo achieves in Inside?*

A: The highest measured average is 337 FPS at 1920x1080 with Low settings. The lowest measured average is 72 FPS at 3840x2160 with Ultra settings.

Q: How much FPS is lost when going from 1080p to 4K at High settings?

A: The average drops from 168 FPS at 1080p High to 76 FPS at 4K High — a reduction of 92 FPS, or roughly 55% of the 1080p performance.

Q: Is the CPU or GPU the bottleneck at 4K Ultra?

A: The GPU is the limiting factor. The RX 6700 XT delivers 72 FPS at 4K Ultra, while the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus's 24 cores and 5.80 GHz boost clock are more than sufficient to feed frames at that rate. The consistent FPS scaling with resolution confirms GPU-bound behavior.

Q: Does the Medium preset offer better frame consistency than other presets?

A: Yes. The Medium preset is the only one with min/max data, showing a tight range of 103-140 FPS at 4K, 165-223 FPS at 1440p, and 229-310 FPS at 1080p. The 37 FPS spread at 4K is the narrowest measured, indicating stable frame delivery.

Q: How does this combo rank among all tested configurations?

A: It ranks 1367th out of 2887 combinations, placing it near the middle (53rd percentile) of the database for Inside performance, despite the CPU being in the 96th percentile and the GPU in the 72nd percentile individually.

Q: What is the FPS difference between High and Ultra settings at each resolution?

A: At 1080p, High delivers 168 FPS and Ultra 160 FPS (8 FPS difference). At 1440p, High gives 121 FPS and Ultra 115 FPS (6 FPS difference). At 4K, High produces 76 FPS and Ultra 72 FPS (4 FPS difference). The gap narrows with increasing resolution.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data points to Medium as the optimal preset for most users. At 4K Medium, the system delivers 122 FPS average with a narrow 103-140 FPS range — a 46 FPS improvement over Ultra's 72 FPS while maintaining frame rates well above 100. The 4K Ultra result of 72 FPS is playable but leaves no margin for demanding scenes, while 4K High's 76 FPS is barely better at a higher visual cost. At 1440p, Medium's 194 FPS (range 165-223) offers nearly double the frame rate of Ultra's 115 FPS, making it the clear choice for high-refresh displays.

For 1080p users, the decision is less critical. Even Ultra achieves 160 FPS, which exceeds most monitors' refresh rates, while Low's 337 FPS is only useful for extreme high-refresh displays or competitive scenarios. The Medium preset's 269 FPS (range 229-310) represents a balanced sweet spot — it delivers more than enough headroom for any current display technology while preserving visual quality. The High preset at 168 FPS might appeal to those prioritizing image fidelity over raw speed, but the 8 FPS gap between High and Ultra at 1080p suggests that High offers most of Ultra's visual benefits at a marginal cost.

The data's most telling recommendation emerges from the 4K results: if you must play at 3840x2160, Medium is the only preset that consistently stays above 100 FPS. The 122 FPS average with a 103 FPS minimum ensures smooth gameplay without drops below the triple-digit threshold. Given that 4K Ultra's 72 FPS is 41% slower than 4K Medium, and the visual differences between Medium and Ultra in a puzzle platformer like Inside are unlikely to justify that sacrifice, Medium at 4K is the clear analytical choice. At lower resolutions, the abundance of performance makes any preset viable, but Medium's combination of high frame rates, stable frame pacing (evidenced by its min/max data), and balanced visual features makes it the most defensible recommendation across all three resolutions.