Lockdown Protocol

Lockdown Protocol is a fast-paced FPS that stresses both CPU and GPU, and the combination of the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT delivers a broad performance envelope across resolutions and settings. The data shows a system that is heavily CPU-limited at 1080p, increasingly GPU-bound at 4K, and capable of high refresh rates at every step. This analysis breaks down the measured FPS, the role of each component, and how this pairing ranks against other tested configurations.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution for this combo in Lockdown Protocol?

A: At 2560x1440 with High settings, the combo produces 118 FPS average. Bumping to 4K High drops that to 76 FPS, while dropping to 1080p High yields 161 FPS. The sweet spot is 1440p, where the system maintains triple-digit averages without the steep 4K penalty.

Q: How much FPS do you gain by lowering settings from Ultra to Low?

A: At 1080p, the jump is from 121 FPS on Ultra to 260 FPS on Low, a gain of 139 FPS. At 1440p, it goes from 89 FPS Ultra to 191 FPS Low, a gain of 102 FPS. At 4K, the difference is 57 FPS Ultra to 123 FPS Low, a gain of 66 FPS.

Q: Is the CPU or GPU the limiting factor in this game?

A: At 1080p, the CPU is clearly the bottleneck. The 260 FPS Low result versus the 121 FPS Ultra shows a 139 FPS swing, which is typical of CPU-bound scenarios where graphics settings have less impact. At 4K, the GPU takes over, with the gap between Low and Ultra narrowing to 66 FPS.

Q: How does this CPU compare to its nearest rivals?

A: The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus has an average benchmark score of 84003. It is 0.2% ahead of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K (83807), 1.1% ahead of the AMD EPYC 4584PX (83090), and 1.2% ahead of the AMD EPYC 9135 (82980). It trails the AMD EPYC 7F72 (85072) by 1.3%.

Q: What is the GPU’s performance percentile?

A: The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT sits in the 55th percentile of all GPUs. Its average benchmark score is 13543. Its nearest rival is the AMD Radeon HD 7770M at 13536 (0.1% behind), followed by the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 at 13515 (0.2% behind).

Q: Does the combo rank high among tested configurations?

A: The combo ranks 874th out of 3714 tested combinations in Lockdown Protocol. This places it in the top 23.5% of all combos, indicating strong performance but not a top-tier outlier.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus is a 24-core, 24-thread processor from the Core Ultra Series 2, built on a 3 nm process with an Arrow Lake Refresh architecture. Its base clock is 3.70 GHz, boosting to 5.80 GHz, and it carries 36 MB of shared L3 cache. The chip’s benchmark scores are substantial: a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 51731 and a single-core score of 7303. PassMark multi-thread score is 60860, with single-thread at 4823. The data indicates a top-tier CPU, sitting in the 96th percentile of all CPUs.

In Lockdown Protocol, the CPU’s influence is most visible at 1080p. The measured FPS at 1080p Low is 260, while at 1080p Ultra it drops to 121. This 139 FPS difference suggests that at lower resolutions, the game’s simulation and physics threads are the primary constraint. The high boost clock of 5.80 GHz helps single-threaded performance, which is critical for FPS games. The Cinebench R23 single-core score of 7303 reflects this strength. At 1080p, the CPU is feeding frames faster than the GPU can render them at lower settings, hence the 260 FPS ceiling on Low.

The 24 cores and 24 threads provide ample headroom for background tasks, but Lockdown Protocol likely doesn’t scale perfectly across all cores. The data shows that the CPU’s performance headroom is such that at 1440p, the FPS drops from 191 on Low to 89 on Ultra, a 102 FPS swing. This indicates that while the CPU is still a factor, the GPU is starting to share the load. The CPU’s 125W TDP and dual-channel DDR5 memory support (115.2 GB/s bandwidth) are relevant for sustained gaming loads. The memory bandwidth is sufficient to feed the 24 cores without becoming a bottleneck in this title.

The nearest rivals for the CPU are all within 1.3% of its average score. The Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is essentially tied at 0.2% behind. This means that in CPU-bound scenarios, swapping to the 285K would yield negligible FPS differences. The AMD EPYC parts are server chips, which are unlikely to be used in a gaming rig, but their scores show that the 290K Plus is competitive with high-end server silicon in synthetic benchmarks. For Lockdown Protocol, the CPU’s single-thread performance is more important than its multi-thread muscle, and the 7303 Cinebench R23 single-core score is excellent for this genre.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is built on the RDNA 4.0 architecture using a 4 nm process. It features 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, with a bandwidth of 644.6 GB/s. The GPU has 4096 shading units, 256 TMUs, and 128 ROPs, with 64 RT cores. Its boost clock is 2970 MHz, with a game clock of 2400 MHz. The FP32 compute is 48.66 TFLOPS. The GPU’s benchmark scores include a 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 7260 and a PassMark G3D score of 26795.

In Lockdown Protocol, the GPU becomes the limiting factor as resolution increases. At 4K, the FPS ranges from 123 on Low to 57 on Ultra. The 66 FPS gap between Low and Ultra at 4K is smaller than at 1080p, which is characteristic of GPU-bound scenarios where higher settings demand more pixel throughput. The 16 GB VRAM is ample for this game, even at 4K Ultra, as the measured FPS of 57 on Ultra suggests the GPU is compute-limited rather than memory-limited. The 644.6 GB/s bandwidth provides enough data throughput for high-resolution textures.

The GPU’s 55th percentile ranking among all GPUs is modest, but this is a measure against all GPUs, including older and newer models. Its nearest rivals are all significantly older GPUs (HD 7770M, GTX 570), which indicates that the 9070 XT’s benchmark average of 13543 is low relative to its gaming performance in this title. This is likely because the PassMark tests do not fully capture the RDNA 4.0 architecture’s strengths in modern DirectX 12 workloads. The 3DMark Steel Nomad score of 7260 is a more reliable indicator of gaming performance.

At 1440p, the GPU delivers 191 FPS on Low and 89 FPS on Ultra. The 102 FPS swing shows that the GPU is handling the resolution increase well, but the CPU is still contributing. At 1080p, the GPU is almost never the bottleneck, as even Ultra settings (121 FPS) are well above the 60 FPS threshold. The GPU’s pixel rate of 380.2 GPixel/s and texture rate of 760.3 GTexel/s are high enough to avoid fill-rate limitations at these settings.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo ranks 874th out of 3714 tested combinations in Lockdown Protocol. This places it in the top 23.5% of all combos, which is strong but not exceptional. The data shows that the CPU is in the 96th percentile, while the GPU is in the 55th percentile. This disparity suggests that the combo’s ranking is held back by the GPU. If the GPU were in a higher percentile, the combo would likely rank higher.

The CPU’s nearest rivals are all within 1.3% of its score, meaning that a combo with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K would perform nearly identically. The GPU’s nearest rivals, however, are much older parts with similar benchmark averages. This indicates that the 9070 XT’s synthetic benchmark scores understate its gaming capability, as evidenced by the strong FPS numbers in Lockdown Protocol.

The rank of 874 out of 3714 means that 2840 combos perform worse, while 873 perform better. This is a solid mid-to-upper-tier position. The combo outperforms many configurations that pair weaker CPUs with stronger GPUs, as the 24-core CPU ensures that the GPU is fed adequately at lower resolutions. At 1080p, the combo’s 260 FPS on Low is exceptional, and the 4K Ultra result of 57 FPS is playable, though not ideal for competitive play.

The data shows that the combo’s performance scales predictably with resolution. The FPS drops by roughly 41% from 1080p to 1440p at High settings (161 to 118 FPS), and by another 36% from 1440p to 4K (118 to 76 FPS). This scaling is typical for a balanced system, where neither component is severely mismatched. The combo is more CPU-bound at 1080p and more GPU-bound at 4K, which is the expected behavior for a high-end CPU paired with a mid-high-end GPU.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data shows clear scaling patterns across resolutions. At High settings, the average FPS is 161 at 1080p, 118 at 1440p, and 76 at 4K. This represents a 26.7% drop from 1080p to 1440p, and a 35.6% drop from 1440p to 4K. The total drop from 1080p to 4K is 52.8%, which is significant but not extreme.

At Low settings, the scaling is steeper: 260 FPS at 1080p, 191 at 1440p, and 123 at 4K. The drop from 1080p to 1440p is 26.5%, and from 1440p to 4K is 35.6%, mirroring the High settings pattern. This suggests that the resolution scaling factor is consistent regardless of settings, which indicates that the GPU’s rendering load scales linearly with pixel count.

The Medium settings show similar behavior: 185 FPS at 1080p, 135 at 1440p, and 87 at 4K. The drops are 27.0% and 35.6%, respectively. Ultra settings show the largest relative drops: 121 FPS at 1080p, 89 at 1440p, and 57 at 4K. The drop from 1080p to 1440p is 26.4%, and from 1440p to 4K is 36.0%.

The fact that the percentage drops are nearly identical across all settings (around 26-27% for 1080p to 1440p, and 35-36% for 1440p to 4K) indicates that the limiting component is the same at each resolution tier. At 1080p, the CPU is the primary limiter, but as resolution increases, the GPU takes over. The consistent percentage drops suggest that the GPU’s compute units are scaling uniformly with pixel count, without any unexpected bottlenecks.

The data indicates that at 4K, the GPU is heavily utilized, as the FPS drops to 57 on Ultra. This is a 53% reduction from the 1080p Ultra result of 121 FPS. The drop is more pronounced than the pixel count increase (4K has 4x the pixels of 1080p), which suggests that the GPU is not purely fill-rate limited but also compute-limited. The 16 GB VRAM and 644.6 GB/s bandwidth are sufficient, but the RDNA 4.0 architecture’s compute throughput (48.66 TFLOPS) is the limiting factor at 4K Ultra.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a detailed view of the combo’s performance. At 1920x1080, the results are as follows:

• Low: 260 FPS average
• Medium: 185 FPS average, with a minimum of 157 and maximum of 212
• High: 161 FPS average
• Ultra: 121 FPS average

At 1080p, the combo is clearly CPU-bound. The 260 FPS on Low is the highest measured result in the entire dataset, and it indicates that the CPU can push frames far beyond what most displays can handle. The jump from Low to Medium (260 to 185 FPS) is a 75 FPS drop, which is significant. The drop from Medium to High (185 to 161 FPS) is smaller at 24 FPS, and from High to Ultra (161 to 121 FPS) is 40 FPS. This pattern suggests that the CPU is the bottleneck at Low and Medium, while the GPU starts to contribute at High and Ultra.

At 2560x1440, the results are:

• Low: 191 FPS average
• Medium: 135 FPS average, with a minimum of 115 and maximum of 156
• High: 118 FPS average
• Ultra: 89 FPS average

At 1440p, the CPU and GPU are more balanced. The 191 FPS on Low shows that the CPU can still push high frame rates, but the drop to 135 FPS on Medium (56 FPS) indicates that the GPU is now handling more of the load. The High setting at 118 FPS is a solid result for competitive play, and the Ultra setting at 89 FPS is still very playable. The Medium setting’s minimum of 115 FPS suggests that the frame pacing is consistent, with no major dips.

At 3840x2160, the results are:

• Low: 123 FPS average
• Medium: 87 FPS average, with a minimum of 74 and maximum of 100
• High: 76 FPS average
• Ultra: 57 FPS average

At 4K, the GPU is the clear limiting factor. The 123 FPS on Low is impressive for 4K, but the drop to 87 FPS on Medium (36 FPS) shows that the GPU’s compute units are being saturated. The High setting at 76 FPS is playable, and the Ultra setting at 57 FPS is borderline for smooth gameplay. The Medium setting’s minimum of 74 FPS indicates that the frame rate can dip below the average, which might cause stutter on some displays. The maximum of 100 FPS shows that the GPU can burst higher when the scene is less demanding.

The data shows that the combo is best suited for 1080p and 1440p gaming, where it can deliver high refresh rates. At 4K, the performance is acceptable for slower-paced games but may not be ideal for competitive FPS play, especially on Ultra settings. The 4K Ultra result of 57 FPS is exactly at the common 60 FPS threshold, which means that users may need to dial back to High settings to maintain a stable 60 FPS. The measured FPS across all resolutions and settings indicates a well-rounded system that excels at 1440p, which is likely the intended resolution for this pairing.