Lockdown Protocol

The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER presents a stark bottleneck scenario in Lockdown Protocol. The data indicates a processor with immense headroom—sitting in the 96th percentile against all CPUs—tethered to a graphics card that lands in the 65th percentile against all GPUs. This asymmetry dictates that performance is almost entirely render-bound, a fact made clear by the measured frame rates across resolutions and settings.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate trajectory from 1080p to 4K reveals a classic GPU-limited curve. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo produces 173.8 FPS. Moving to 1440p drops that to 129 FPS, a 25.8% reduction. Stepping up to 4K further reduces the average to 81.2 FPS, which is 53.3% below the 1080p Low result. This steep decline as pixel count rises is the signature of a graphics card operating at its ceiling; the CPU is not the constraint here.

The scaling pattern holds across all settings. At High settings, the transition from 1080p (106.3 FPS) to 1440p (79.5 FPS) represents a 25.2% loss, and moving to 4K (53.9 FPS) costs another 32.2% from the 1440p figure. The uniformity of these percentage drops—hovering around 25% for the first resolution step and 30-50% for the second—indicates that the RTX 2070 SUPER’s shading and memory subsystems are being saturated proportionally to the pixel workload.

The most telling evidence of the GPU bottleneck is the 4K Ultra result: 40.8 FPS. This is the lowest measured figure in the entire dataset, and it sits 57.5% below the 4K Low average of 81.2 FPS. When resolution and settings both escalate, the 8 GB GDDR6 buffer and the TU104 chip’s 9.062 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput are overwhelmed. The CPU’s 128 MB of shared L3 cache and 16 cores are irrelevant at this juncture; the data shows a hard wall imposed by the graphics solution.

Conversely, the 1080p Low result of 173.8 FPS suggests that even at the lowest graphical load, the GPU still manages to feed frames faster than most displays can refresh. The fact that 1080p Ultra (83.9 FPS) is nearly identical to 4K Low (81.2 FPS) further confirms that the GPU’s raw throughput, not the resolution per se, is the limiting factor. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D’s potential is masked entirely; its 3DMark max-thread score of 17184 and Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 59712 are never challenged by this game’s engine.

Settings Recommendations

For players targeting high refresh rates at 1080p, the Low preset is the only sensible choice, yielding 173.8 FPS. This is 39.9% higher than the Medium preset’s 124.2 FPS and more than double the Ultra preset’s 83.9 FPS. The jump from Low to Medium is costly—a 28.5% performance hit—yet the visual fidelity gains in a fast-paced FPS are often marginal compared to the smoothness gained from the higher frame rate.

At 1440p, the data suggests a compromise. The Medium preset delivers 92.4 FPS, which is a playable figure for most competitive titles, while the High preset drops to 79.5 FPS. The Ultra preset’s 61.9 FPS is borderline for a twitch shooter, making Medium the optimal balance of fluidity and visual quality. The difference between Medium and High at this resolution is 14.0%, a noticeable step down that may not justify the extra graphical detail.

The 4K landscape is harsh for this GPU. The Low preset at 81.2 FPS is the only setting that approaches a smooth experience, while Medium (57.5 FPS) and High (53.9 FPS) fall below the 60 FPS threshold. Ultra at 40.8 FPS is effectively unplayable for a genre that demands responsiveness. The recommendation is clear: if 4K is mandatory, stick to Low; otherwise, drop to 1440p Medium or 1080p Low to unlock the CPU’s potential.

The data shows that the RTX 2070 SUPER’s 8 GB memory capacity is not the primary issue at lower settings; rather, the chip’s compute throughput (9.062 TFLOPS FP32) and texture rate (283.2 GTexel/s) are the constraining factors. The 40 tensor cores and 40 RT cores offer no benefit in this rasterization-heavy scenario, as evidenced by the linear scaling of frame rates with pixel count.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the database of tested combinations for Lockdown Protocol, this pairing ranks 1037 out of 1637 tested combos. This places it in the 63.3rd percentile of all system configurations—a middling result that reflects the GPU’s age. The RTX 2070 SUPER, released in 2019 and now listed as end-of-life, is the anchor dragging down the modern flagship CPU.

The CPU’s nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks—the Intel Xeon Platinum 8270 (0.9% higher average score), AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (1.8% higher), and Intel Core i7-14700KF (2.2% higher)—are all within a few points of the 9950X3D’s average benchmark score of 71660. Yet this ranking shows that in Lockdown Protocol, those CPU differences are negligible; the combo’s rank is determined almost solely by the GPU’s 22206 average benchmark score, which sits near the RTX A400 (-0.5%) and GTX TITAN Z (0.9%) in its own rival list.

The 1037th rank out of 1637 combos indicates that a significant majority of tested systems outperform this pairing in this specific game. This is not a reflection of the CPU, which outperforms 96% of all processors in general benchmarks, but rather a statement about the GPU’s relative position—it outperforms only 65% of all graphics cards. A system with a weaker CPU but a stronger GPU would almost certainly rank higher, as Lockdown Protocol appears highly sensitive to graphics throughput based on the measured FPS deltas.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the full spread of settings shows a wide performance envelope. Low produces 173.8 FPS, Medium 124.2 FPS, High 106.3 FPS, and Ultra 83.9 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra is 89.9 FPS, or 107.1% higher performance for the Low preset. This wide delta indicates that the GPU’s shading units are the primary resource being consumed by the Ultra preset’s effects.

At 2560x1440, the figures compress: Low 129 FPS, Medium 92.4 FPS, High 79.5 FPS, Ultra 61.9 FPS. The Low-to-Ultra delta shrinks to 67.1 FPS, but the percentage difference remains similar at 108.4%. The 1440p results are consistently 25-29% lower than their 1080p counterparts across all settings, reinforcing the pixel-bound nature of the workload.

At 3840x2160, the ceiling drops further: Low 81.2 FPS, Medium 57.5 FPS, High 53.9 FPS, Ultra 40.8 FPS. The Low-to-Ultra gap here is 40.4 FPS, and the Medium-to-High delta is just 3.6 FPS, suggesting that the High preset’s incremental features are less demanding than the jump from Low to Medium. The 4K Medium result (57.5 FPS) is nearly identical to the 1440p Ultra result (61.9 FPS), a 7.1% difference that shows how resolution scaling and settings scaling interact to produce similar GPU loads.

GPU Role

The RTX 2070 SUPER’s specifications tell the story of its limitations. Its base clock of 1605 MHz and boost clock of 1770 MHz are modest by modern standards, and its memory operates at 1750 MHz (14 Gbps effective) across a 256-bit bus, yielding 448.0 GB/s of bandwidth. In Lockdown Protocol, this bandwidth is sufficient for the 8 GB frame buffer at 1080p, but the 4K Ultra result of 40.8 FPS suggests that capacity and bandwidth are both strained.

The GPU’s 2560 shading units and 160 TMUs produce a texture rate of 283.2 GTexel/s, which is the likely culprit for the steep performance drop when settings increase from Medium to High. The 64 ROPs deliver a pixel rate of 113.3 GPixel/s, which at 4K Ultra (8.3 million pixels) would theoretically allow 13,650 FPS if ROPs were the only limit—they are not. The FP32 throughput of 9.062 TFLOPS is the binding constraint, as evidenced by the nearly linear frame rate scaling with resolution.

The GPU’s transistor count of 13,600 million on a 12 nm TSMC process (die size 545 mm²) highlights its age relative to the CPU’s 16,630 million transistors on a 4 nm process (2x 70.6 mm² dies). The Turing architecture lacks the efficiency of newer designs, and its 215 W TDP with a suggested 550 W PSU requirement indicates a power-hungry design that cannot compensate with raw clock speed. The data shows that in this pairing, the GPU is the definitive performance ceiling—no amount of CPU headroom (the 9950X3D’s boost clock of 5.70 GHz is never utilized to its potential) can overcome the graphics card’s 9.062 TFLOPS ceiling in Lockdown Protocol.