Lockdown Protocol

Lockdown Protocol presents an interesting scaling challenge for the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT combination. The measured data shows a clear progression of performance degradation as resolution increases, but the pattern is not uniform across all settings presets. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo achieves 239.9 FPS, which drops to 180.2 FPS at 1440p and further to 116.7 FPS at 4K. This represents a 51% reduction from 1080p to 4K at the Low preset, indicating that the GPU becomes increasingly the limiting factor as pixel count rises. However, the scaling is more dramatic at the Ultra preset, where 1080p yields 110.8 FPS, 1440p drops to 83.3 FPS, and 4K falls to 51.7 FPS — a 53% total reduction. The fact that even at 4K Ultra the combo maintains above 50 FPS suggests the RX 6800 XT’s 16 GB memory buffer and 512.0 GB/s bandwidth are sufficient to avoid catastrophic frame drops, though the 72 ray accelerators and 128 ROPs are clearly being pushed hard by the game’s visual demands at that extreme preset.

The intermediate presets tell a more nuanced story. At Medium settings, the frame rate drops from 172.3 FPS at 1080p to 126.0 FPS at 1440p, then to 79.2 FPS at 4K. This 54% drop across the resolution range is the steepest relative decline among all presets, suggesting that the Medium preset’s workload transitions from being partially CPU-bound at 1080p to heavily GPU-bound at 4K. The High preset shows a similar but slightly less severe pattern, with 151.3 FPS at 1080p, 110.0 FPS at 1440p, and 68.3 FPS at 4K — a 55% reduction. Interestingly, the gap between Low and Medium at 4K is 37.5 FPS (116.7 vs 79.2), while at 1080p that same gap is 67.6 FPS (239.9 vs 172.3). This compression of the performance delta at higher resolutions is a classic sign that the GPU’s compute throughput, not memory bandwidth or CPU instruction issue, is the primary constraint at 4K.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the benchmark database’s tested combinations, this pairing of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D with the RX 6800 XT holds a rank of 578 out of 1637 combos in Lockdown Protocol. That places it in the 65th percentile of all tested configurations, meaning roughly two-thirds of the 1637 combos deliver higher average frame rates in this title. The CPU alone sits at the 90th percentile among all processors tested, with an average benchmark score of 37780, while the GPU is at the 87th percentile among all graphics cards, with an average score of 49982. The fact that both components are near the top of their respective distributions yet the combo ranks only at the 65th percentile suggests that Lockdown Protocol is particularly sensitive to specific hardware characteristics beyond raw compute — likely the game’s reliance on consistent frame pacing rather than peak throughput.

Looking at the nearest rivals for the CPU, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D’s average score of 37780 is nearly identical to the Intel Xeon 6353P (37811, deltaPct -0.1) and the Intel Core Ultra 5 225 (37831, deltaPct -0.1). The AMD chip slightly trails the Intel Core i9-13900HK (38020, deltaPct -0.6) and the Intel Core i5-13600KF (38028, deltaPct -0.7). These deltas are all within 0.7% of each other, indicating that in synthetic CPU benchmarks, the 9800X3D is effectively tied with these four rivals. For the GPU, the RX 6800 XT’s average score of 49982 is 0.5% above the Intel Arc A550M (49737) and 1.9% above the NVIDIA CMP 50HX (49071), but 1.7% below the NVIDIA RTX A1000 (50826) and 2.6% below the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER (48704 — note this delta is positive, meaning the 4070 Ti SUPER scores lower). These narrow margins reinforce that the combo’s rank is more about how the specific game workload interacts with the hardware than about any individual component’s raw capability.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data points to the Medium preset as the optimal balance for this hardware combination across most resolutions. At 1440p, the Medium preset delivers 126.0 FPS, which is 20.9% higher than the High preset’s 110.0 FPS and 51.3% higher than the Ultra preset’s 83.3 FPS. At 1080p, Medium produces 172.3 FPS, comfortably above the 144 Hz refresh rate common among competitive displays, while High trails at 151.3 FPS and Ultra at 110.8 FPS. Even at 4K, Medium’s 79.2 FPS is playable for an FPS title, whereas High drops to 68.3 FPS and Ultra falls to 51.7 FPS. The Low preset, while achieving 180.2 FPS at 1440p and 239.9 FPS at 1080p, likely sacrifices too much visual fidelity for the small incremental gain over Medium — the difference at 1080p is only 67.6 FPS, and at 1440p it narrows to 54.2 FPS.

For users prioritizing maximum frame rates, the Low preset at 1440p offers 180.2 FPS, which is nearly double the Ultra preset’s 83.3 FPS at the same resolution. However, the data suggests that the Medium preset represents the sweet spot where the game’s visual features remain intact while keeping frame rates above 120 FPS at 1080p and above 75 FPS at 4K. The Ultra preset appears to be a stress-test option rather than a realistic gameplay choice, as it is the only preset that drops below 60 FPS at 4K (51.7 FPS) and barely exceeds 80 FPS at 1440p (83.3 FPS). For a competitive FPS title, the High preset at 1440p (110.0 FPS) could also serve as a viable alternative, but the Medium preset’s 126.0 FPS at that resolution provides a more comfortable margin above typical 100 Hz monitors.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the full settings sweep reveals the following average frame rates: Low hits 239.9 FPS, Medium reaches 172.3 FPS, High achieves 151.3 FPS, and Ultra settles at 110.8 FPS. The progression from Low to Ultra represents a 54% reduction in performance, with the largest single-step drop occurring between Medium and High (21.0 FPS) and the smallest between High and Ultra (40.5 FPS). At 2560x1440, the corresponding numbers are 180.2 FPS for Low, 126.0 FPS for Medium, 110.0 FPS for High, and 83.3 FPS for Ultra. The gap between Low and Medium at 1440p is 54.2 FPS, which is proportionally similar to the 67.6 FPS gap at 1080p, indicating that the game’s settings scaling is relatively consistent across these two resolutions.

At 3840x2160, the performance hierarchy compresses further: Low delivers 116.7 FPS, Medium drops to 79.2 FPS, High falls to 68.3 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 51.7 FPS. The absolute difference between Low and Ultra at 4K is 65.0 FPS, which is smaller than the 129.1 FPS difference at 1080p. This compression is a direct consequence of the GPU’s fill rate and shading capacity becoming the dominant bottleneck at 4K — the 288.0 GPixel/s pixel rate and 20.74 TFLOPS FP32 throughput are what determine the ceiling, not the CPU’s ability to feed draw calls. Notably, the 4K Medium preset (79.2 FPS) performs nearly identically to the 1440p Ultra preset (83.3 FPS), suggesting that users can trade resolution for quality with minimal frame rate penalty at these two settings.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT’s specifications directly explain its behavior in Lockdown Protocol. With a base clock of 1825 MHz, a game clock of 2015 MHz, and a boost clock of 2250 MHz, the GPU’s raw compute throughput of 20.74 TFLOPS FP32 is substantial for a 2020 release. The 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus provides 512.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is more than sufficient for the game’s texture streaming and geometry data at 4K, as evidenced by the fact that the 4K Medium preset maintains 79.2 FPS without evident memory-related stuttering. The 72 ray accelerators and 128 ROPs handle the game’s lighting and rasterization effects, and the 288 TMUs ensure texture filtering doesn’t become a bottleneck at lower resolutions where the CPU can still feed the pipeline.

The GPU’s benchmark percentile of 87 places it above the RTX A1000 (50826 score, -1.7% delta) and below the Intel Arc A550M (49737, +0.5% delta) in synthetic tests, but the actual game data shows that in Lockdown Protocol, the RX 6800 XT’s strengths lie in sustained throughput rather than peak scores. The 4K Low preset’s 116.7 FPS is remarkable for a card from the RDNA 2.0 architecture, and it indicates that the GPU can handle the game’s base render load at 4K without the extra visual effects enabled. The transition from Low to Medium at 4K costs 37.5 FPS, while the transition from Medium to High costs 10.9 FPS, and from High to Ultra costs 16.6 FPS — these non-linear deltas suggest that the Medium preset likely enables memory-intensive effects that scale with bandwidth, while High adds compute-heavy lighting that taxes the 128 ROPs.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D brings 8 cores and 16 threads based on the Zen 5 architecture (Granite Ridge), with a base clock of 4.70 GHz and a boost clock of 5.20 GHz. The 96 MB of shared L3 cache is the standout feature for gaming workloads, as it helps maintain high instruction throughput in scenarios where data fits within the cache hierarchy. The CPU’s 3DMark single-thread score of 1212 and multi-thread score of 10067 indicate strong per-core performance, which is critical for an FPS title like Lockdown Protocol that likely has a dominant main thread for game logic and physics. The Cinebench R23 multicore score of 34004 and single-core score of 4800 further confirm that the CPU is not the limiting factor at 1080p, where the combo achieves 239.9 FPS on Low — a frame rate that would saturate most high-refresh displays.

However, the CPU’s influence diminishes sharply as resolution increases. At 4K, the difference between Low (116.7 FPS) and Ultra (51.7 FPS) is 65.0 FPS, which is primarily attributed to GPU workload rather than CPU capability. The CPU’s 90th percentile ranking among all processors and its average benchmark score of 37780 place it in the top tier, but in Lockdown Protocol, the combo’s 578th rank out of 1637 tested configurations suggests that other CPUs paired with higher-end GPUs outperform this pairing. The nearest rival CPUs — the Intel Xeon 6353P (37811, -0.1%), Intel Core Ultra 5 225 (37831, -0.1%), Intel Core i9-13900HK (38020, -0.6%), and Intel Core i5-13600KF (38028, -0.7%) — all fall within 0.7% of the 9800X3D’s average score, indicating that in this game, the CPU’s cache advantage does not translate into a meaningful FPS lead over these competing processors. The 4 nm process node and 120 W TDP are secondary considerations; what matters for Lockdown Protocol is that the CPU can sustain 5.20 GHz boost clocks without thermal throttling, which the data suggests it does given the consistent frame rates across all measured points.