Inside

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus paired with the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT delivers an exceptional experience in Inside, ranking in the top 20% of all tested combinations for this title. This setup demonstrates overwhelming performance headroom, making it an ideal choice for high-refresh-rate displays even at 4K resolution.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus and AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT secures the 594th position out of 2,887 tested combos in Inside. This places the system firmly in the top 20.6% of all configurations, a strong result for a game that is not particularly demanding by modern standards. This high ranking is not surprising given the components involved, but it confirms that this pairing has no significant bottleneck that would hamper performance in this specific puzzle platformer.

Benchmark results indicate that the CPU is a top-tier performer globally. The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus holds a 96th percentile rank among all CPUs, placing it above 96% of its peers. Its average benchmark score of 84,003 puts it in a tight cluster with its nearest rivals, including the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K (score of 83,807, a 0.2% difference) and the AMD EPYC 4584PX (score of 83,090, a 1.1% difference). The data shows a near-tie at the very top of the CPU performance charts, where a 1% difference in score is negligible in real-world gaming scenarios.

On the graphics side, the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT holds an 85th percentile rank among all GPUs, indicating it is a high-end part. Its average benchmark score is 48,477, which places it in close competition with the NVIDIA RTX A1000 Mobile (score 47,743, 1.5% faster) and the Intel Arc A550M (score 49,737, 2.5% slower). While these scores suggest the RX 6800 XT is slightly outclassed by a few modern rivals in synthetic tests, its actual performance in Inside is so high that this difference is imperceptible. The combined rank of this specific CPU and GPU pairing demonstrates a balanced system that leverages the strengths of both components to achieve a top-tier result in this game.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is the primary driver of the exceptional frame rates seen in Inside. This GPU, based on the RDNA 2.0 architecture with the Navi 21 chip, is a high-end part that excels in this title. Its 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus provides a substantial 512.0 GB/s of bandwidth, ensuring that texture streaming and asset loading are never a bottleneck, even at the highest resolutions.

The card's clock speeds are substantial, with a base clock of 1825 MHz, a game clock of 2015 MHz, and a boost clock of 2250 MHz. These high frequencies allow the GPU to process the game's 2D side-scrolling environments and simple 3D effects with tremendous speed. The sheer compute power is also notable; the GPU offers 20.74 TFLOPS of FP32 performance and a pixel rate of 288.0 GPixel/s. This raw power explains why the GPU is capable of pushing frame rates well beyond the refresh rate of most monitors.

In Inside, the GPU's role is less about navigating complex geometry and more about maintaining consistently high frame output. The data shows that even at 4K Ultra settings, the average frame rate is 92 FPS, a figure that many systems struggle to reach at lower settings. This indicates the RX 6800 XT is never the limiting factor in this pairing. Its performance is so robust that the game becomes CPU-bound or engine-bound at lower resolutions, evidence of the GPU's ability to render the game's relatively simple scenes with incredible efficiency. While it is an end-of-life product, its DirectX 12 Ultimate support and 16 GB frame buffer ensure it is more than capable of handling this 2016 release with maximum settings and massive performance overhead.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals a clear and predictable scaling pattern from 1080p to 4K, with frame rates dropping as resolution increases. This drop is a classic indicator of the GPU's workload growing, but the final numbers remain exceptionally high at every step. The performance deltas between settings are also consistent, showing the game scales well with graphical fidelity.

At 1080p, the system is heavily CPU or engine-bound. With Low settings, the average frame rate is a massive 427 FPS. Moving to Medium settings reduces this to 342 FPS, and High settings further reduce it to 214 FPS. At Ultra settings, the average is 203 FPS. The jump from Low to Medium is a 85 FPS drop, while the jump from Medium to High is a 128 FPS drop. This suggests that even at 1080p, the GPU is still doing significant work, but the CPU's 5.80 GHz boost clock is likely the ceiling for this game's single-threaded logic.

Scaling to 1440p shows a proportional decrease in performance. The Low setting average is 307 FPS, Medium is 246 FPS, High is 154 FPS, and Ultra is 146 FPS. The drop from 1080p Low to 1440p Low is 120 FPS, a 28% decrease. The drop from 1080p Ultra to 1440p Ultra is 57 FPS, also a 28% decrease. This consistent percentage drop indicates the system is scaling predictably with the increased pixel count.

At 4K (3840x2160), the GPU's workload becomes the dominant factor. The Low setting average is 193 FPS, Medium is 154 FPS, High is 97 FPS, and Ultra is 92 FPS. The scaling from 1440p to 4K shows a larger absolute drop, especially at lower settings. The 1440p Low to 4K Low drop is 114 FPS (37%), while the 1440p High to 4K High drop is 57 FPS (37%). The similarity in these percentage drops across resolutions demonstrates that the RX 6800 XT is scaling as expected, with the performance cost of 4K being substantial but still resulting in playable, high-refresh-rate frame rates.

FAQ

*Q: Is the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus a bottleneck for the RX 6800 XT in Inside?*

A: No. The data shows this combo ranks 594th out of 2,887 tested. The CPU's 96th percentile ranking and the GPU's 85th percentile ranking create a balanced system. At 1080p, the frame rates are so high (up to 427 FPS on Low) that the game is likely CPU-limited, but this is not a negative bottleneck; it simply means the GPU has more than enough headroom.

Q: How does this CPU compare to its closest rival, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K?

A: The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus has an average benchmark score of 84,003, which is a mere 0.2% higher than the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K's score of 83,807. In practical terms, this is a negligible difference, and the two CPUs should perform identically in Inside.

Q: What is the best settings preset for 4K gaming with this combination?

A: The data shows that even at 4K Ultra settings, the system achieves an average of 92 FPS. This is well above the 60 FPS standard. If a player has a 144Hz 4K display, the High preset at 97 FPS is the closest to maximizing refresh rate, while the Medium preset at 154 FPS would exceed the capacity of most 4K 120Hz displays.

*Q: Does the RX 6800 XT's 16 GB of VRAM provide an advantage in Inside?*

A: Yes, but it is not necessary for this game. The 16 GB of GDDR6 memory is far more than Inside requires, even at 4K Ultra. The high memory bandwidth of 512.0 GB/s ensures there is no texture streaming stutter, but the game's simple art style would likely run well on a card with far less memory.

*Q: How does the GPU's performance in Inside compare to its synthetic benchmark score?*

A: The RX 6800 XT's average benchmark score is 48,477, placing it 3% behind the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. However, in Inside, the card's performance is so high that this 3% deficit in theoretical compute is irrelevant. The game is not demanding enough to differentiate between these high-end cards.

*Q: Is the CPU's 24-core configuration utilized by Inside?*

A: No. Inside is a 2D puzzle platformer that primarily relies on single-thread performance. The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus's 5.80 GHz boost clock is far more important than its 24 cores for this game. The high core count is a benefit for multithreaded applications, but it is not the reason for this combo's high rank in this specific game.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The following is the complete measured FPS data for this component combination in Inside:

1920x1080 (1080p)

• Low: 427 FPS average
• Medium: 342 FPS average (min 291, max 393)
• High: 214 FPS average
• Ultra: 203 FPS average

2560x1440 (1440p)

• Low: 307 FPS average
• Medium: 246 FPS average (min 209, max 283)
• High: 154 FPS average
• Ultra: 146 FPS average

3840x2160 (4K)

• Low: 193 FPS average
• Medium: 154 FPS average (min 131, max 178)
• High: 97 FPS average
• Ultra: 92 FPS average

The data shows that the gap between High and Ultra settings is small at every resolution, suggesting that Ultra settings add only a minor graphical effect with a small performance cost. For example, at 4K, the difference between High and Ultra is just 5 FPS. Conversely, the gap between Medium and High is significant, often a drop of over 50% in frame rate. This indicates that High settings introduce a significant graphical feature, likely related to shadow quality or post-processing, that has a large performance impact.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus serves as the central processing powerhouse, and while its role in Inside is less demanding than the GPU's, it is crucial for achieving the maximum frame rates seen at 1080p. This CPU, from the Core Ultra Series 2 with the Arrow Lake Refresh codename, is built on a 3 nm process and features an impressive 24 cores and 24 threads. For a game like Inside, which is not heavily multithreaded, the high 5.80 GHz boost clock is the most critical specification for maintaining high minimum frame rates and ensuring the game logic runs without hiccups.

The CPU's memory support includes DDR5 with dual-channel bandwidth of 115.2 GB/s. This fast memory subsystem ensures that the CPU can quickly feed data to the GPU, preventing any stutters. The cache hierarchy, with 36 MB of shared L3 cache, is also substantial. This large cache helps keep frequently accessed data close to the cores, reducing latency and improving the responsiveness of the game's physics and AI calculations.

In this benchmark, the CPU's performance is measured by its synthetic scores. Its Cinebench R23 multicore score is 51,731, and single-core score is 7,303. These scores are exceptionally high, placing the CPU in the 96th percentile. This raw processing power means that even if the game engine were to spawn complex interactions, the Ultra 9 290K Plus would handle them with ease. The nearest rival, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, has a nearly identical average score, confirming that the 290K Plus is at the very top of the consumer desktop heap. Its performance in Inside is so strong that the game's frame rate is entirely governed by the GPU's render speed at higher resolutions, and only the engine's single-threaded limits at 1080p.