Inside

Inside is the rare game where our benchmark database reads less like a warning and more like a permission slip. Playdead's 2016 puzzle platformer, the studio's follow-up to Limbo, is a three to four hour descent through a drowned surveillance state, told entirely without dialogue, and it remains one of the most acclaimed indie games ever made. It is also one of the lightest titles we track. Across 3,716 measured CPU and GPU combinations in our database, the average system records 166 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 123 FPS at 1440p Ultra, and 78 FPS at 4K Ultra. The fastest combinations approach 594 FPS at 1080p Low, while the slowest configuration in the entire dataset still holds 46 FPS at 1080p Ultra. If your PC was built in the last ten years, it can play Inside. The rest of this page is about how well, and about what those numbers mean if you are planning a gaming PC build with a library full of games like this one.

Engine and hardware behavior

Inside runs on Unity, but describing it as "a Unity game" undersells what Playdead did with the engine. The studio built custom rendering on top of it, including its own temporal anti-aliasing, volumetric lighting, and the heavy film grain that gives the game its oppressive, shot-on-old-film look. The result is a 2.5D side-scroller whose visuals come mostly from post-processing rather than raw geometry or texture load, and that shapes its hardware profile in a specific way: the GPU does a modest, mostly per-pixel workload that scales predictably with resolution, while the CPU handles physics, scripting, and animation on a couple of threads and never breaks a sweat.

You can see that balance in the measured averages. Moving from 1080p to 1440p costs about a quarter of the frame rate on average, and moving to 4K costs roughly half again, which is textbook GPU-side scaling. But the absolute numbers are so high that the bottleneck barely matters. A game averaging 166 FPS at 1080p Ultra is not stressing anything modern, and a processor from the early 2010s still clears it comfortably. Memory demand is equally relaxed: this is a game from the 4 GB minimum spec era, and 8 GB of system RAM is more than enough at any setting. Storage is a non-issue too, with an install of only a few gigabytes. It will load essentially instantly from an NVMe SSD, though honestly it loads fast from a decade-old SATA drive as well. Inside is, in short, the opposite of a stress test. It is a well-optimized indie title whose demands were modest in 2016 and are trivial now.

1080p: where the floor is 46 FPS and the ceiling is 594

The 1080p Ultra average of 166 FPS across 3,716 combinations tells most of the story, but the spread around it is the more interesting number. At the bottom of our dataset, the weakest measured systems, the kind of hardware that struggles to run anything from this decade, still manage 46 FPS at Ultra. That is an unusually high floor, and it means there is effectively no such thing as a PC too slow for Inside at 1080p with a small settings trim. At the top, the fastest CPU and GPU pairings approach 594 FPS at Low settings, which is more frames than any monitor on the market can display.

If you own a 144Hz or 240Hz monitor, Inside will feed it at 1080p without any tuning at all on reasonably modern hardware. The one caution at these frame rates is pacing, not speed. Unity titles of this vintage can produce uneven frame delivery when left completely uncapped, and Inside's slow, deliberate camera makes any stutter unusually visible. Capping the frame rate to your display's refresh, through v-sync or a driver-level limit, gives visibly smoother motion than letting the game sprint to 400 FPS. This is one of the few performance decisions that actually matters here, and it costs nothing.

1440p and 4K: high averages, diminishing returns

At 1440p Ultra the average sits at 123 FPS, which means the typical gaming PC holds Inside above the 100 FPS line at a resolution where most AAA games from the same year are asking for compromises. At 4K Ultra the average is 78 FPS, still comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold that makes this kind of measured, cinematic game feel right. The scaling between resolutions confirms the GPU does most of the work at the top end, but the practical conclusion is that even a mid-range graphics card drives Inside at 4K60, and upper-tier cards do it with enormous headroom.

The more honest observation is that Inside does not gain much from pixels. The art direction is built on soft focus, fog, depth of field, and a grain layer that deliberately obscures fine detail, so the jump from 1440p to 4K is far less visible here than in a sharp, texture-heavy game. If you are choosing where to play it, 1440p at a locked high frame rate is arguably the ideal presentation, with 4K reserved for those who already have the display. There is no DLSS or FSR support in the game, and unlike most modern titles it genuinely does not need any: native rendering at these frame rates is the whole answer to the upscaling question.

Recommended settings

Inside's options menu is minimal, which fits a game this controlled about its presentation. You get a quality preset, resolution, and v-sync, and not much else to fiddle with. Our tested recommendation is simple: run the Ultra preset at your monitor's native resolution, cap the frame rate to your refresh rate, and leave the film grain alone. The grain is not a defect to be cleaned up; it is load-bearing art direction, and the game looks noticeably cheaper without it. Motion blur is a matter of taste, and switching it off is the one visual change we consider legitimate, since it slightly improves readability during the faster chase sequences.

On genuinely weak hardware, such as older integrated graphics, drop the quality preset one step before you touch the resolution. The preset reductions cost little in atmosphere because so much of the look comes from the grain and lighting model, while dropping resolution softens the image in a way the art cannot hide. That combination keeps even the feeblest systems near the 46 FPS floor our data shows for the slowest measured configurations, and usually well above it.

What hardware do you need?

The honest headline is that the best graphics card for Inside is whichever one you already own. Still, tiers help if you are speccing a machine with this kind of indie-heavy library in mind.

Entry level: a quad-core CPU from the early 2010s, 8 GB of RAM, and any discrete card from the GTX 750 era onward, or a reasonably modern integrated GPU, clears 1080p at the 46 FPS floor our weakest measured systems post, and typically lands far above it. This is the rare game where "can it run" is not the question; "how high can it run" is.

Mid-range: any current mid-tier card behind a modern 6-core processor sits right at the dataset average, which means roughly 166 FPS at 1080p Ultra and 123 at 1440p Ultra. This tier plays Inside exactly as intended at every common resolution, including 4K at the 78 FPS average, and it is the sensible target if Inside represents the heavy end of what you play.

High-end: strong current-generation cards push 4K well past the 78 FPS average and drive 1440p high-refresh displays without effort. The returns are real but academic: you are buying smoothness that the game's slow pacing will never stress.

Flagship: the top of our table approaches 594 FPS at 1080p Low. At this level Inside is a rounding error on the hardware's capability, useful only as a reminder that some games genuinely do not care what you spent.

Laptop playability

Inside is one of the best laptop games in our library, full stop. Its modest, steady load means thin-and-light machines run it without the fan noise and thermal throttling that AAA titles induce, and modern integrated graphics handle 1080p with light settings tuning. The one laptop-specific note worth making: on integrated graphics, memory configuration matters more than anything else, because the iGPU shares system RAM. A machine with dual-channel DDR5 or DDR4 will deliver substantially better frame rates than the same chip in single-channel trim, so if you are shopping for a light laptop partly for indie gaming, that spec line is worth more than a small CPU bump. Battery life while playing is excellent by gaming standards, and the game is a fixture on handheld gaming PCs, where its three hour runtime and checkpoint-friendly structure suit portable sessions perfectly.

Streaming and content creation

Inside is a streaming staple, since its short, spoiler-heavy, single-sitting structure makes it a classic one-stream playthrough, and it broadcasts easily with one specific trap to plan around. The easy part is compute: the game leaves so much CPU and GPU headroom that encoding is essentially free. A hardware encoder, NVENC on GeForce or AMF on Radeon, produces a clean 1080p60 stream at negligible cost, and unlike most games you could even use x264 on the CPU here without touching your frame rate, since the processor is barely working.

The trap is the content itself. Inside's signature look, film grain, fog, and dark scenes full of subtle motion, is the exact material video encoders handle worst. Grain reads as random noise to the encoder and consumes bitrate enormously, so a default bitrate stream of Inside turns to mud in the foggy sequences. The fixes are standard for dark, grainy games: raise your bitrate well above platform defaults, and if you stream to YouTube, output at 1440p even from a 1080p source to access the platform's higher bitrate tier. For the video editing crowd, the good news is that Inside captures are light work for any workstation; the footage grades pleasantly, and the game's short length keeps project sizes trivial.

Common problems and fixes

Uneven motion or micro-stutter on a fast PC: the game is running uncapped far beyond your refresh rate and delivering frames unevenly. Cap to your monitor's refresh with v-sync or a driver limiter. This is the single most common complaint, and the fix takes seconds.

Black bars on an ultrawide monitor: by design. Inside is composed rigidly for 16:9, and the pillarboxing protects the framing the game is built around. Community workarounds that force ultrawide tend to reveal broken edges and off-screen geometry, so our recommendation is to accept the bars.

Washed-out blacks on Windows 11: if you have Auto HDR enabled, the game's careful black levels can come out gray. Disable Auto HDR for this title and play it in SDR, which is how it was mastered.

Won't launch or crashes at startup on a modern system: rare, but when it happens the causes are the usual ones for a 2016 Unity title. Update your GPU driver, verify the game files, and make sure the bundled Visual C++ redistributables installed. The game is old enough that modern systems occasionally need that nudge, and old enough that nothing more exotic is likely to be wrong.

Upgrade priorities

Here is the section where Inside breaks the usual template: if this game is your target, you do not need to upgrade anything. Our slowest measured configuration still posts 46 FPS at 1080p Ultra, and that floor comes from hardware most readers would consider retired. A CPU upgrade buys you nothing you can perceive in Inside, and neither does a faster graphics card.

The useful way to read this page, if you are planning a build, is as a calibration point. If your library leans toward indie games, puzzle platformers, and narrative titles of Inside's generation, redirect budget away from the GPU and toward the parts that actually change your daily experience: a good monitor, a quiet case, and fast storage. A balanced mid-range build covers essentially the entire indie catalog at high frame rates, and Inside is the proof. Save the flagship GPU money for the games that can actually use it.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Can my PC run Inside?

A: Almost certainly yes. Across 3,716 measured combinations, the slowest system in our database still manages 46 FPS at 1080p Ultra, and the game was built for 4 GB of RAM and mid-range 2012-era hardware. Any PC from the last decade qualifies.

Q: Is Inside CPU or GPU intensive?

A: Neither by modern standards. The GPU does most of what little work exists, scaling with resolution, but the averages of 166 FPS at 1080p, 123 at 1440p, and 78 at 4K show how light that work is. The CPU barely matters.

Q: Does Inside support high frame rates and 144Hz monitors?

A: Yes. Our fastest measured combinations approach 594 FPS at 1080p Low, so high-refresh displays are fully fed. Cap the frame rate to your refresh for the cleanest motion, since uncapped delivery can pace unevenly.

Q: Does Inside have DLSS or FSR?

A: No, and it does not need them. With a 4K Ultra average of 78 FPS across all measured systems, native rendering runs the game comfortably at every resolution without upscaling tricks.

Q: Why does Inside stutter on my high-end PC?

A: Frame pacing, not power. Left uncapped, the game can deliver its very high frame rates unevenly. Enable v-sync or set a driver-level cap at your monitor's refresh rate and the stutter disappears.

Q: Is Inside a good benchmark for testing a new GPU?

A: No. Its 46 FPS floor and 594 FPS ceiling mean every modern card passes trivially. Use it to verify a system works, not to compare hardware; our heavier titles exist for that.

The bottom line

A decade after release, Inside holds its place as one of the essential indie games, and its performance profile in 2026 is best described as solved. A 166 FPS average at 1080p Ultra, a 46 FPS floor on the slowest hardware we have ever measured it on, and a ceiling near 594 FPS add up to a game with no meaningful hardware barrier left. In our library it functions as a baseline: if a PC cannot run Inside, it cannot run anything, and if you are shopping for hardware with this page open, the data is telling you to stop worrying about this particular game entirely.

That freedom is, oddly, part of the recommendation. Inside costs a few dollars on sale, runs on everything including laptops and handhelds, finishes in an evening or two, and a decade later nothing else looks or sounds quite like it. The hardware conversation ends here, which is exactly what lets the game itself start. Buy it, cap the frame rate, leave the grain on, and play it in the dark.