Lockdown Protocol

The data for Lockdown Protocol shows a pairing of AMD’s Ryzen 5 5500 with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5090 producing a wide range of frame rates, from 82.6 FPS at 4K Ultra to 237.3 FPS at 1080p Low. The measured results indicate a system where the GPU is the dominant force, but the CPU’s capabilities become increasingly relevant as resolution drops and settings are lowered. This analysis breaks down the performance characteristics across settings, resolutions, and component roles.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS rows for Lockdown Protocol show a clear hierarchy across the four tested presets. At 1920x1080, the jump from Low to Medium costs only 27.8 FPS (237.3 down to 209.5), while the jump from Medium to High costs another 9 FPS (209.5 down to 200.5). The most significant drop at 1080p occurs when moving from High to Ultra, which falls to 175.8 FPS—a reduction of 24.7 FPS. Given that the High preset at 1080p still delivers 200.5 FPS, it represents the best balance of visual fidelity and performance for this combo at that resolution.

At 2560x1440, the pattern shifts slightly. Low delivers 214.6 FPS, Medium drops to 189.3 FPS, and High settles at 172.9 FPS. The Ultra preset at 1440p produces exactly 130 FPS—a significant 42.9 FPS penalty over High. For users prioritizing smooth gameplay, Medium at 1440p (189.3 FPS) offers a substantial margin over the 144Hz threshold, while High at 172.9 FPS still provides headroom. The data suggests that High is the optimal preset at 1440p, as it maintains a frame rate well above typical high-refresh displays without the steep cost of Ultra.

At 3840x2160, the situation becomes more constrained. Low produces 181.2 FPS, Medium drops to 130.2 FPS, and High falls to 109.5 FPS. Ultra at 4K yields only 82.6 FPS, which is the lowest measured result in the entire dataset. The difference between High and Ultra at 4K is 26.9 FPS, representing a 24.6% reduction in performance. The Medium preset at 130.2 FPS appears to be the sweet spot for 4K, as it stays comfortably above 60 FPS while offering a meaningful improvement over Low. High at 109.5 FPS is also viable, but the data indicates that Medium provides the most efficient balance between image quality and frame rate at this resolution.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 is a massive piece of silicon—the GB202 chip on a 5 nm TSMC process contains 92,200 million transistors on a 750 mm² die. Its memory configuration is equally substantial: 32 GB of GDDR7 on a 512-bit bus delivers 1.79 TB/s of bandwidth. The GPU’s clock behavior shows a base of 2017 MHz and a boost of 2407 MHz, with memory running at 1750 MHz (28 Gbps effective). These specifications translate into a pixel rate of 423.6 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 1,636.8 GTexel/s.

The 32 GB frame buffer is particularly relevant for Lockdown Protocol. At 4K Ultra, the game demands enough memory bandwidth and capacity that the GPU’s 512-bit bus becomes a critical asset. The measured performance at 4K Ultra (82.6 FPS) suggests that the RTX 5090 is operating near its limits in this scenario, but the 1.79 TB/s bandwidth ensures that texture streaming and memory allocation do not become bottlenecks. The GPU’s percentileVsAllGpus score of 94 indicates it sits in the top 6% of all tested graphics cards, and its avgBenchmarkScore of 84306 places it just 0.1% ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D (84241) in the nearestRivals data.

The RTX 5090’s compute capabilities—104.8 TFLOPS of FP32 and FP16 (1:1)—are substantial, but the benchmark results show that raw compute is not the limiting factor in Lockdown Protocol. The GPU’s 21760 shading units and 680 TMUs provide ample geometry processing power, while its 176 ROPs handle pixel output efficiently. The measured FPS at 1080p Low (237.3 FPS) approaches the practical ceiling for this engine, indicating that the GPU is not being fully utilized at lower settings, leaving room for the CPU to become the constraining factor.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals how the balance of power shifts across resolutions. Moving from 1080p to 1440p at High settings, the frame rate drops from 200.5 FPS to 172.9 FPS—a reduction of 27.6 FPS or 13.8%. The drop from 1440p to 4K at High is more severe: 172.9 FPS down to 109.5 FPS, a loss of 63.4 FPS (36.7%). This non-linear scaling pattern is consistent with a GPU that becomes progressively more burdened as pixel count increases.

At Ultra settings, the scaling is even more pronounced. The 1080p Ultra result of 175.8 FPS falls to 130 FPS at 1440p (a 26.1% reduction), then plummets to 82.6 FPS at 4K (a 36.5% reduction from 1440p). The cumulative drop from 1080p Ultra to 4K Ultra is 93.2 FPS, representing a 53% performance loss. This steep decline indicates that the RTX 5090 is the primary compute engine at higher resolutions, with each additional pixel requiring proportional GPU work.

The Low preset shows a different pattern. At 1080p Low, the system achieves 237.3 FPS. At 1440p Low, it drops to 214.6 FPS (a 9.6% reduction), and at 4K Low, it falls to 181.2 FPS (a 15.6% reduction from 1440p). The relatively smaller percentage drops at Low settings suggest that the CPU is playing a more significant role in limiting performance at lower resolutions and settings. The Ryzen 5 5500’s maximum 3dmark score of 5411 across all threads provides sufficient throughput to feed the GPU at 1080p Low, but as resolution increases, the GPU’s workload grows and the CPU becomes less of a constraint.

How This Combo Ranks

The AMD Ryzen 5 5500 + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 combination holds a comboRankInGame of 101 out of 1637 tested combos. This places it in the top 6.2% of all configurations measured for Lockdown Protocol. The ranking reflects the GPU’s dominant influence—the RTX 5090’s percentileVsAllGpus of 94 is the primary driver, while the CPU’s percentileVsAllCpus of 79 is a secondary factor.

The CPU’s nearestRivals data provides context for its contribution to this combo’s ranking. The AMD Ryzen 5 5500 has an avgBenchmarkScore of 20875, which is 0.1% behind the Intel Core i5-12500 (20897) and 0.1% behind the AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4655GE (20900). It sits 0.1% ahead of the AMD EPYC 7J13 (20845) and 0.2% ahead of the Intel Core i5-12600T (20917). These minuscule deltas mean that swapping the CPU for any of these rivals would produce nearly identical performance in Lockdown Protocol, confirming that the CPU is not a differentiator in this combo’s ranking.

The GPU’s nearestRivals tell a similar story. The RTX 5090’s avgBenchmarkScore of 84306 is 0.1% above the RTX 5090 D (84241) and 0.2% above the RTX 5050 Mobile (84171). It outperforms the AMD Radeon PRO W6600 (83209) by 1.3% and trails the NVIDIA CMP 40HX (85637) by 1.6%. The ranking of 101st place out of 1637 combos is therefore driven almost entirely by the GPU’s position, with the CPU contributing negligible variance.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 5500 is a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on the Zen 3 architecture, manufactured on TSMC’s 7 nm process. It operates with a base clock of 3.60 GHz and a boost clock of 4.20 GHz, with a 65 W TDP. The CPU features 16 MB of L3 cache, 512 KB of L2 per core, and 64 KB of L1 per core. Its memory support is DDR4 with dual-channel configuration, providing 51.2 GB/s of bandwidth. The PCIe Gen 3 interface is a notable limitation for this CPU, as the RTX 5090 is designed for PCIe 5.0 x16; however, the measured FPS data suggests that this does not create a major bottleneck in Lockdown Protocol.

The CPU’s single-thread performance is modest—its 3dmark_single_thread score is 836, and its cinebench_r23_singlecore score is 2319. Multi-threaded performance is more respectable, with cinebench_r23_multicore reaching 16429 and passmark_multithread scoring 19330. The Ryzen 5 5500’s avgBenchmarkScore of 20875 places it in the 79th percentile of all CPUs, indicating it is above average but not exceptional.

In Lockdown Protocol, the CPU’s role is most evident at lower resolutions and settings. At 1080p Low, the system achieves 237.3 FPS, which is the highest measured result across the entire dataset. This suggests that the CPU can sustain frame delivery up to this point, but the diminishing returns as settings increase—237.3 at Low, 209.5 at Medium, 200.5 at High, 175.8 at Ultra—indicate that the GPU workload is scaling with visual complexity. The CPU’s 12 threads are sufficient to handle the game’s logic and physics at these frame rates, but the 6 physical cores may limit performance in scenarios with heavy multi-threaded workloads.

The 16 MB L3 cache is adequate for Lockdown Protocol’s data access patterns, and the 51.2 GB/s memory bandwidth ensures that the CPU can feed the GPU without stalling. However, the PCIe Gen 3 interface—which provides half the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 and a quarter of PCIe 5.0—could theoretically constrain data transfer to the RTX 5090. The measured FPS at 4K High (109.5 FPS) versus 1440p High (172.9 FPS) shows that the GPU is handling the increased resolution without obvious CPU-induced penalties, suggesting that the PCIe Gen 3 link is not a significant bottleneck in this game.