Lockdown Protocol

Lockdown Protocol is a fast-paced FPS built to reward high frame rates, and the Intel Core i5-9400 + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER combination delivers a wide performance envelope across its four presets. The measured data shows that the Ultra preset is the only setting that drops below the 100 FPS threshold at 4K, while the Low, Medium, and High presets all maintain triple-digit averages at every resolution tested. For players seeking the best balance of visual fidelity and fluidity, the High preset at 2560x1440 is the clear standout, producing a 125.6 FPS average that is only 20.2 FPS behind the Low preset's peak at that resolution, while offering dramatically better image quality. At 1920x1080, the High preset's 137 FPS average is similarly impressive, trailing the Low preset by 24 FPS but providing a far more polished experience. The Medium preset is a viable alternative for those wanting a slight performance cushion, but the data suggests that High is the optimal compromise, as it consistently outperforms Ultra by a significant margin—23 FPS at 4K, 15.1 FPS at 1440p, and 14.5 FPS at 1080p—without the visual degradation of Low.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the tested database of 1,637 processor and graphics card combinations for Lockdown Protocol, this pairing holds the 581st position. That places it in the 64th percentile of all tested combos, meaning roughly a third of the configurations tested deliver higher average frame rates. The ranking is heavily influenced by the Intel Core i5-9400, a six-core, six-thread Coffee Lake processor from 2018 that sits at the 50th percentile among all CPUs in general benchmarks. Its average benchmark score of 2,305 is nearly identical to the Intel Core i3-10305 (2,300, +0.2%) and the Intel Core i3-1125G4 (2,299, +0.2%), placing it in a tightly contested mid-range CPU tier. The CPU's age is a limiting factor; while the RTX 4080 SUPER is a top-tier GPU with an average benchmark score of 53,610, placing it at the 88th percentile among all GPUs, the i5-9400 cannot fully feed it at lower resolutions. The combo's rank of 581 out of 1,637 suggests that the CPU is the bottleneck, as the GPU is capable of much higher performance in isolation, evidenced by its closest rivals being the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (53,489, +0.2%) and the AMD Radeon Pro W6600M (53,414, +0.4%).

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER is the dominant component in this pairing, and its specifications explain why it can push such high frame rates even when paired with an older CPU. It features 16 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 256-bit bus, providing a memory bandwidth of 736.3 GB/s, which is more than sufficient for Lockdown Protocol's textures and geometry at 4K. The GPU's boost clock of 2550 MHz, built on the 5 nm Ada Lovelace architecture with 10,240 shading units, drives a pixel rate of 285.6 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 816.0 GTexel/s, ensuring that the rendering pipeline is never starved for fill rate. In this game, the GPU's role is to handle the heavy lifting of resolution scaling and high-detail settings, and the data confirms this. At 4K Ultra, the average FPS drops to 73.6, which is a steep 45.7% decline from the 4K Low preset's 127.1 FPS, indicating that the GPU is fully taxed by the highest settings. However, at 1080p Low, the 161 FPS average is likely capped by the CPU's single-thread performance, not the GPU, which could otherwise push far beyond that number given its raw compute power of 52.22 TFLOPS.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured frame rates reveal a consistent pattern across all resolutions: the Low preset produces the highest averages, followed by Medium, then High, with Ultra being the most demanding. At 1920x1080, the spread is 38.5 FPS from the Low preset's 161 FPS to the Ultra preset's 122.5 FPS. The Medium preset delivers 145.8 FPS, and the High preset comes in at 137 FPS. At 2560x1440, the same ordering holds, with Low leading at 145.8 FPS, Medium at 129.4 FPS, High at 125.6 FPS, and Ultra at 110.5 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra narrows to 35.3 FPS at this resolution, suggesting that the GPU is becoming more of a factor as pixel count increases. At 3840x2160, the differences become more pronounced, with Low achieving 127.1 FPS, Medium at 111.8 FPS, High at 96.6 FPS, and Ultra at 73.6 FPS. The 53.5 FPS gap between Low and Ultra at 4K is the largest of any resolution, confirming that the Ultra preset's extra effects and shading are disproportionately expensive at higher pixel densities. Notably, the High preset at 4K is the only configuration in the entire dataset that falls below 100 FPS, which is a critical threshold for competitive FPS play.

Resolution Scaling

The performance scaling from 1080p to 4K provides clear evidence of the CPU bottleneck. At 1080p Low, the average FPS is 161, which drops to 145.8 at 1440p—a 9.4% decline—and then to 127.1 at 4K—a 21.1% decline from 1080p. This relatively mild scaling across a 4x increase in pixel count indicates that the CPU is limiting performance at the lower resolutions; the GPU has ample headroom but cannot be utilized fully due to the i5-9400's six-thread limitation. In contrast, the Ultra preset shows a steeper scaling curve: from 122.5 FPS at 1080p to 110.5 FPS at 1440p (a 9.8% drop) and then to 73.6 FPS at 4K (a 39.9% drop from 1080p). This aggressive decline at 4K Ultra demonstrates that the GPU becomes the primary constraint when both resolution and settings are maxed out, as the RTX 4080 SUPER's 16 GB frame buffer and 736.3 GB/s bandwidth are pushed to their limits. The data suggests that the limiting component shifts depending on the workload: at 1080p and 1440p with lower presets, the CPU is the bottleneck, while at 4K with Ultra settings, the GPU takes over as the limiting factor. This is a classic sign of an imbalanced pairing, where the 2018-era CPU cannot keep pace with the 2024-era GPU at high frame rates, but the GPU's raw power still ensures playable performance at 4K.