Lockdown Protocol

# Lockdown Protocol with AMD Ryzen 9 7900X + AMD Radeon RX 9060

Lockdown Protocol, a 2024 FPS title, presents a demanding workload that scales significantly with both CPU and GPU resources. This analysis examines the measured performance of the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X paired with the AMD Radeon RX 9060 across three resolutions and four quality presets. The data reveals a system that delivers playable frame rates at 1080p and 1440p, while 4K Ultra pushes the GPU to its limits, resulting in a combination that ranks in the 58th percentile of all tested pairings for this game.

FAQ

Q: What is the highest average frame rate achievable with this combo in Lockdown Protocol?

A: The highest measured average FPS is 175, achieved at 1920x1080 resolution with Low settings. This represents the absolute ceiling for this configuration, with the same resolution at Medium producing 124 FPS and High producing 109 FPS.

Q: Can this system handle 4K gaming in Lockdown Protocol?

A: At 3840x2160, the combo delivers 83 FPS on Low, 59 FPS on Medium, 51 FPS on High, and 39 FPS on Ultra. While Low and Medium settings are playable, the Ultra preset falls below the 40 FPS threshold, indicating the GPU becomes the limiting factor at this resolution.

Q: How does the Ryzen 9 7900X compare to its nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The CPU scores 53,288 on average, placing it in the 91st percentile of all CPUs. It is 0.2% ahead of the AMD EPYC 7313P (53,206), 0.6% ahead of the Intel Xeon 634 (52,974), but 0.3% behind the Intel Xeon Phi 7290 (53,469) and 0.6% behind the Intel Core i7-14700F (53,620).

Q: What is the GPU's performance ranking relative to other graphics cards?

A: The Radeon RX 9060 scores 16,014 on average, placing it in the 59th percentile of all GPUs. It trails the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti by 0.7% (16,129) but leads the AMD Radeon R9 370X by 1% (15,862) and the AMD Radeon RX 7700 by 1% (15,852).

Q: What frame rates can be expected at 1440p with balanced settings?

A: At 2560x1440, the Medium preset yields 91 FPS average with a minimum of 77 FPS and maximum of 105 FPS. High settings produce 80 FPS, while Ultra drops to 60 FPS. The Low preset reaches 128 FPS.

Q: Does the system maintain consistent frame pacing at 1080p High?

A: The measured data shows 109 FPS average at 1920x1080 High, but only the Medium preset includes min/max values (106 minimum, 143 maximum). The lack of min/max data for High suggests the database recorded only the average, though the Medium spread of 37 FPS indicates some frame time variance exists.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS data across all resolution and preset combinations provides clear guidance for optimizing the Lockdown Protocol experience with this hardware. At 1920x1080, the Medium preset offers the best balance, delivering 124 FPS average with a recorded minimum of 106 FPS and maximum of 143 FPS. This 37 FPS range between minimum and maximum is the tightest of any preset at this resolution, suggesting more consistent frame delivery compared to the High preset's 109 FPS average, which lacks min/max data but likely has a wider spread given the higher visual workload.

For 2560x1440, the Medium preset again emerges as the recommended choice. With 91 FPS average, 77 FPS minimum, and 105 FPS maximum, it maintains playability above 60 FPS even in the worst case. The High preset at 80 FPS may appeal to users prioritizing visual fidelity, but the 28 FPS gap between Medium and High settings is substantial, and the Medium preset's minimum of 77 FPS provides a safer buffer against drops below 60 FPS. The Low preset at 128 FPS offers no advantage in this resolution unless maximum refresh rate utilization is the primary goal.

At 3840x2160, the situation becomes more constrained. The Medium preset produces 59 FPS average with 50 FPS minimum and 68 FPS maximum, which is the only 4K preset with full min/max data. The Low preset at 83 FPS is the only setting that provides comfortable headroom above 60 FPS, though it sacrifices significant visual quality. The High preset at 51 FPS is borderline, while Ultra at 39 FPS falls below acceptable playability thresholds. For 4K gaming, Medium is the practical ceiling, with Low serving as the recommended preset for sustained 60+ FPS performance.

The overall recommendation is to prioritize the Medium preset across all resolutions. It consistently delivers the best compromise between visual quality and performance headroom, with the measured minimum FPS values indicating the system can handle demanding scenes without dropping below playable thresholds. Users with high refresh rate 1080p monitors may consider Low at 175 FPS, but the Medium preset's 124 FPS average is already sufficient for smooth gameplay.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 9 7900X brings substantial processing power to Lockdown Protocol, featuring 12 cores and 24 threads based on the Zen 4 architecture. With a base clock of 4.70 GHz and boost clock of 5.60 GHz, this Raphael-die CPU provides the single-thread performance that FPS titles typically leverage for game logic and physics calculations. The 64 MB of shared L3 cache and 1 MB L2 per core help maintain high hit rates for frequently accessed game data, while the dual-channel DDR5 memory interface with 83.2 GB/s bandwidth ensures the CPU can feed data to the GPU without bottlenecks.

Synthetic benchmarks confirm the CPU's strength in both single-threaded and multithreaded workloads. The Cinebench R23 scores of 2,016.5 single-core and 29,300 multi-core demonstrate strong per-core efficiency, while Geekbench results of 2,617 single-core and 19,267 multi-core reinforce this profile. The 3DMark results show scaling from 2,137 at 2 threads to 12,536 at max threads, indicating the 12-core design can be fully utilized by multithreaded game engines.

In Lockdown Protocol, the CPU's role becomes evident when examining FPS scaling across resolutions. At 1080p Low, the system reaches 175 FPS, which suggests the CPU is capable of driving very high frame rates when the GPU is not heavily burdened. As resolution increases, the FPS drops proportionally to GPU workload, indicating that the CPU is not the primary bottleneck in this configuration. The 91st percentile CPU ranking, with an average benchmark score of 53,288, places it well above most competing processors.

The nearest CPU rivals show interesting comparisons. The Intel Core i7-14700F scores 53,620, just 0.6% higher, while the Intel Xeon Phi 7290 leads by 0.3%. These marginal differences suggest that any of these CPUs would deliver nearly identical performance in Lockdown Protocol, with the Ryzen 9 7900X's advantage lying in its 5.60 GHz boost clock and modern architecture rather than raw benchmark superiority.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Ryzen 9 7900X and Radeon RX 9060 achieves a combo rank of 1,647 out of 2,828 tested configurations in Lockdown Protocol. This places the pairing in the 58th percentile, meaning 58% of tested combos perform better and 42% perform worse. This mid-pack ranking reflects the GPU's 59th percentile position, indicating the graphics card is the more limiting component in this pairing.

The CPU's 91st percentile ranking versus the GPU's 59th percentile creates an imbalance. The Ryzen 9 7900X is a high-end processor that can drive much faster graphics cards, while the RX 9060's 8 GB of VRAM and 128-bit memory bus constrain its performance in demanding titles like Lockdown Protocol. This becomes apparent in the 4K Ultra result of 39 FPS, which falls below playable thresholds.

The combo rank suggests that users would benefit more from upgrading the GPU than the CPU. A faster graphics card would likely move this combo significantly higher in the rankings, as the CPU has demonstrated headroom through its 175 FPS 1080p Low result. Conversely, upgrading the CPU would yield minimal gains since the GPU is already operating near its limits in most presets.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 9060, based on the Navi 44 chip with RDNA 4.0 architecture, serves as the rendering engine for this configuration. With 1,792 shading units, 112 texture mapping units, and 64 render output units, the GPU provides solid rasterization throughput. The 28 ray tracing cores support hardware-accelerated RT effects, though the 8 GB GDDR6 memory capacity may limit texture quality at higher resolutions.

Clock speeds are a notable strength: the 1,700 MHz base clock boosts up to 2,990 MHz, with a game clock of 2,400 MHz. This 2.99 GHz boost represents aggressive binning, translating to a pixel rate of 191.4 GPixel/s and texture rate of 334.9 GTexel/s. The 21.43 TFLOPS FP32 compute performance provides ample raw processing power for modern game engines.

Memory bandwidth of 288.0 GB/s, delivered through a 128-bit bus at 18 Gbps effective, is the GPU's most apparent limitation. This bandwidth constrains performance at higher resolutions where texture streaming demands increase. The 8 GB VRAM capacity also becomes a factor at 4K Ultra, where the 39 FPS result suggests the GPU is both bandwidth and capacity limited.

Synthetic benchmarks position the RX 9060 in the 59th percentile with an average score of 16,014. The 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 3,322 and Geekbench Vulkan score of 39,476 indicate modern API support, while the PassMark G3D score of 17,631 confirms its mid-range positioning. The GPU's nearest rival, the RTX 3060 Ti, scores 16,129 (0.7% higher), suggesting near-parity performance with that previous-generation card.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data reveals clear performance tiers across resolutions and settings. At 1920x1080, the system delivers 175 FPS on Low, 124 FPS on Medium, 109 FPS on High, and 81 FPS on Ultra. The Medium preset includes min/max values of 106 and 143 FPS respectively, providing the only complete frame time data at this resolution.

Moving to 2560x1440, performance drops to 128 FPS on Low, 91 FPS on Medium, 80 FPS on High, and 60 FPS on Ultra. The Medium preset again offers the only min/max data, showing 77 FPS minimum and 105 FPS maximum. This represents a 37.9% reduction in average FPS from 1080p Medium, consistent with the increased pixel count.

At 3840x2160, the system achieves 83 FPS on Low, 59 FPS on Medium, 51 FPS on High, and 39 FPS on Ultra. The Medium preset shows 50 FPS minimum and 68 FPS maximum, representing the tightest frame time consistency of any 4K setting. The progression from Low to Ultra at 4K demonstrates a 53% performance drop, highlighting the GPU's struggle with the pixel workload.

The frame rate deltas between presets are consistent across resolutions. Moving from Low to Medium costs approximately 29-30% performance, Medium to High costs 12-18%, and High to Ultra costs 21-26%. This scaling pattern indicates that Ultra settings impose significant additional rendering work beyond High, likely through increased shadow quality, post-processing effects, and texture filtering.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS progression from 1080p to 4K reveals important insights about the system's bottleneck characteristics. At Low settings, performance drops from 175 FPS at 1080p to 128 FPS at 1440p (26.9% reduction) and 83 FPS at 4K (52.6% reduction from 1080p). This scaling is steeper than the linear pixel count increase would suggest, indicating the GPU becomes progressively more limited as resolution increases.

The Medium preset shows 124 FPS at 1080p, 91 FPS at 1440p (26.6% reduction), and 59 FPS at 4K (52.4% reduction). This nearly identical scaling pattern across Low and Medium suggests the GPU's memory bandwidth is the limiting factor, as both presets exhibit the same relative performance drops despite different visual workloads.

At High settings, the system achieves 109 FPS at 1080p, 80 FPS at 1440p (26.6% reduction), and 51 FPS at 4K (53.2% reduction). Ultra settings show 81 FPS at 1080p, 60 FPS at 1440p (25.9% reduction), and 39 FPS at 4K (51.9% reduction). The consistency of these scaling percentages across all presets strongly indicates that the GPU's 288.0 GB/s memory bandwidth is the primary constraint, rather than compute throughput or CPU limitations.

The CPU's role in this scaling is minimal. If the CPU were the bottleneck, we would expect to see smaller FPS differences between resolutions, as the CPU workload remains constant regardless of pixel count. Instead, the consistent 26% drop from 1080p to 1440p and 52% drop to 4K across all presets confirms that the GPU is the limiting component. This is further supported by the CPU's 91st percentile ranking, which indicates substantial headroom for more powerful graphics cards.