Lockdown Protocol

# Lockdown Protocol with Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti

The benchmark data for Lockdown Protocol pairs the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti across 12 measured configurations, spanning three resolutions and four quality presets. All figures are measured, not projected, and the combo ranks 295th out of 2,828 tested combinations, placing it in the top 10% of systems evaluated for this title. The RTX 4070 Ti carries 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus with 504.2 GB/s bandwidth, while the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus provides 24 cores and 24 threads with a 5.80 GHz boost clock — a pairing that drives frame rates from 67 FPS at 4K Ultra to 305 FPS at 1080p Low.

Settings Recommendations

The measured rows reveal a clear hierarchy across presets, and the optimal choice depends on whether the target is maximum visual fidelity or maximum frame throughput. At 1920x1080, the Low preset delivers 305 FPS average, which is the highest measured value in the entire dataset. Medium drops to 217 FPS, High to 189 FPS, and Ultra to 142 FPS. For competitive play on high-refresh 1080p monitors, the Low preset provides the largest headroom, though even Ultra at 142 FPS remains comfortably above typical 120 Hz refresh rates.

Stepping up to 2560x1440, the pattern holds but the margins tighten. Low produces 224 FPS, Medium 159 FPS, High 139 FPS, and Ultra 104 FPS. The Medium preset at 1440p is particularly interesting: it shows a minimum FPS of 135 and a maximum of 183, suggesting consistent frame pacing within a 48 FPS band. At this resolution, Medium or High both offer smooth gameplay for 144 Hz displays, with High only 20 FPS behind Medium and likely providing noticeably better image quality.

At 3840x2160, the trade-off becomes more pronounced. Ultra drops to 67 FPS, which is still playable but falls below the 90 FPS threshold that many players consider minimum for fast-paced FPS titles. High at 90 FPS and Medium at 103 FPS both clear that bar, while Low reaches 144 FPS. The Medium preset at 4K also includes the only min/max data at that resolution (87 to 118 FPS), indicating a tighter frame delivery than the gap between average figures might suggest.

The best experience per the measured data depends on hardware. For 1080p, the Medium preset at 217 FPS offers a strong balance — it is 88 FPS ahead of High while only 88 FPS behind Low, and the min/max range of 184 to 249 FPS shows solid stability. For 1440p, High at 139 FPS is the sweet spot for 144 Hz displays, falling just 20 FPS short of Medium while presumably delivering richer visuals. At 4K, Medium at 103 FPS is the recommended preset, as it exceeds 100 FPS and provides the only measured min/max data at that resolution, suggesting better frame consistency than the other presets.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo ranks 295th out of 2,828 tested combinations for Lockdown Protocol, placing it in the top 10.4% of all systems evaluated. This is a strong showing for a desktop pairing built around an RTX 4070 Ti, which itself ranks in the 84th percentile among all GPUs in the benchmark database. The CPU side is even stronger: the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus sits in the 96th percentile among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 84,003.

Looking at the CPU's nearest rivals, the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus leads the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K by a 0.2% margin in average benchmark score (84,003 vs. 83,807). It also edges out the AMD EPYC 4584PX by 1.1% and the AMD EPYC 9135 by 1.2%, while trailing the AMD EPYC 7F72 by 1.3%. These are small deltas, indicating that the 290K Plus is performance-wise nearly interchangeable with its closest competitors in synthetic workloads, though the in-game ranking reflects the full system's behavior.

On the GPU side, the RTX 4070 Ti's average benchmark score of 44,795 places it just 0.8% behind the RTX 5090 Mobile (45,152) and 1.3% behind the Radeon Pro 5500 XT (45,384), while running 1.6% ahead of the RTX A6000 (44,075) and 1.7% ahead of the Intel Arc A730M (45,592). The tight clustering of these scores suggests that the 4070 Ti's rasterization performance is comparable to a range of professional and mobile parts, though the game-specific data shows how well this particular combination executes in Lockdown Protocol.

The rank of 295 out of 2,828 means that roughly 10% of tested combos outperform this one in this game, while 90% fall behind. Given that the CPU is near the top of the desktop market and the GPU is a high-end 40-series part, the rank reflects a balanced system that is not bottlenecked by either component in most configurations.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is built on the AD104 chip using TSMC's 5 nm process, with 35,800 million transistors on a 294 mm² die. Its base clock runs at 2310 MHz, boosting to 2610 MHz, and the memory operates at 1313 MHz with 21 Gbps effective speed. The 12 GB of GDDR6X memory across a 192-bit bus yields 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth — a figure that becomes relevant when examining how frame rates scale between presets at the same resolution.

The GPU's compute resources include 7,680 shading units, 240 TMUs, and 80 ROPs, with 60 RT cores and 240 tensor cores. Peak FP32 throughput reaches 40.09 TFLOPS, with FP16 at the same 40.09 TFLOPS due to 1:1 ratio. Pixel rate is 208.8 GPixel/s and texture rate is 626.4 GTexel/s. The card draws up to 285 W TDP and requires a 600 W PSU, using a single 16-pin connector.

In Lockdown Protocol, the GPU's memory bandwidth appears to be a limiting factor at higher resolutions. At 4K, the gap between Low (144 FPS) and Ultra (67 FPS) is 77 FPS, a 53% reduction. At 1080p, the same preset gap is 163 FPS (305 to 142), a 53% reduction as well. The proportional drop is nearly identical across resolutions, suggesting the GPU's shading resources and memory subsystem scale predictably with workload, rather than hitting a bandwidth wall at 4K.

The measured FPS at 4K Medium (103 FPS) with a min of 87 and max of 118 indicates the GPU sustains high utilization without severe frame time spikes. At 1440p Medium, the min/max range is 135 to 183, and at 1080p Medium it is 184 to 249. The absolute spread grows with lower resolution (65, 48, and 65 FPS respectively), but the relative consistency improves as resolution drops — the 1080p Medium range represents 30% of the average, while the 4K Medium range represents 30% as well, showing proportional stability.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the dataset covers four presets. Low produces 305 FPS average, the highest figure anywhere in the measurements. Medium delivers 217 FPS with a min of 184 and max of 249. High yields 189 FPS, and Ultra settles at 142 FPS. The progression from Low to Ultra is a steady decline of roughly 40-60 FPS per preset step, with the largest single drop between Low and Medium at 88 FPS.

At 2560x1440, Low hits 224 FPS, Medium 159 FPS (min 135, max 183), High 139 FPS, and Ultra 104 FPS. The step between Low and Medium is 65 FPS, between Medium and High is 20 FPS, and between High and Ultra is 35 FPS. The Medium-to-High gap is the smallest in the entire dataset, suggesting diminishing returns from Medium to High at this resolution.

At 3840x2160, Low reaches 144 FPS, Medium 103 FPS (min 87, max 118), High 90 FPS, and Ultra 67 FPS. The Low-to-Medium drop is 41 FPS, Medium-to-High is 13 FPS, and High-to-Ultra is 23 FPS. The Medium-to-High gap at 4K is even smaller than at 1440p, indicating that High preset at 4K costs only 13 FPS over Medium while likely providing substantial visual improvements.

The min/max data appears only for the Medium preset at each resolution. At 1080p Medium, the range is 184 to 249 FPS (65 FPS spread). At 1440p Medium, it is 135 to 183 FPS (48 FPS spread). At 4K Medium, it is 87 to 118 FPS (31 FPS spread). This pattern shows that frame time variance shrinks in absolute terms as resolution increases, which is expected since the average FPS also drops.

Resolution Scaling

Moving from 1080p to 1440p, the average FPS across presets drops by roughly 27%: Low goes from 305 to 224 (down 81 FPS), Medium from 217 to 159 (down 58 FPS), High from 189 to 139 (down 50 FPS), and Ultra from 142 to 104 (down 38 FPS). The absolute drop is largest at Low and smallest at Ultra, which is consistent with the GPU being the primary limiter — at lower presets, the CPU has more headroom, so the GPU workload scales more directly with pixel count.

Moving from 1440p to 4K, the reductions are steeper in percentage terms: Low drops from 224 to 144 (down 80 FPS, 36%), Medium from 159 to 103 (down 56 FPS, 35%), High from 139 to 90 (down 49 FPS, 35%), and Ultra from 104 to 67 (down 37 FPS, 36%). The consistency of a 35-36% drop across all presets when moving from 1440p to 4K strongly indicates that the GPU is the limiting component at these resolutions. If the CPU were the bottleneck, the percentage reduction would shrink at higher resolutions as the GPU workload grows.

Comparing the full 1080p-to-4K scaling: Low goes from 305 to 144 FPS, a 53% reduction; Medium from 217 to 103, a 53% reduction; High from 189 to 90, a 52% reduction; Ultra from 142 to 67, a 53% reduction. The near-identical scaling across presets confirms that Lockdown Protocol's rendering load at 4K is roughly 2.1 times that of 1080p for this GPU, independent of quality preset. This also implies the CPU maintains sufficient frame delivery at 1080p Low (305 FPS) without becoming a hard cap, since the scaling remains linear rather than flattening at high FPS.

FAQ

Q: What is the highest average FPS measured for this combo in Lockdown Protocol?

A: The highest average FPS is 305, achieved at 1920x1080 with the Low preset.

Q: Which preset at 4K maintains an average FPS above 100?

A: The Medium preset at 3840x2160 delivers 103 FPS average, with a minimum of 87 and maximum of 118.

Q: How does the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus compare to the Core Ultra 9 285K in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The 290K Plus has an average benchmark score of 84,003, which is 0.2% higher than the 285K's 83,807 score.

Q: What is the combo's rank among all tested systems for this game?

A: The combo ranks 295th out of 2,828 tested combinations, placing it in the top 10.4% of systems.

Q: Does the GPU or CPU act as the limiting factor at 4K?

A: The data indicates the GPU is the primary limiter at 4K, as the FPS drop from 1440p to 4K is consistently 35-36% across all presets, matching the pixel count increase.

Q: What memory configuration does the RTX 4070 Ti use in this combo?

A: The RTX 4070 Ti uses 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus, with 504.2 GB/s bandwidth and 21 Gbps effective speed.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus provides 24 cores and 24 threads, with a base clock of 3.70 GHz and a boost clock of 5.80 GHz. It is built on TSMC's 3 nm process with 17,800 million transistors on a 243 mm² die, part of the Arrow Lake Refresh codename within the Core Ultra Series 2. The cache hierarchy includes 192 KB L1 per core, 3 MB L2 per core, and 36 MB shared L3. Memory support is dual-channel DDR5 with 115.2 GB/s bandwidth, and the CPU uses the Intel Socket 1851 with 20 PCIe Gen 5 lanes from the CPU.

In synthetic benchmarks, the CPU scores 51,731 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 7,303 in single-core. PassMark multi-thread reaches 60,860, with single-thread at 4,823. The average benchmark score of 84,003 places it in the 96th percentile among all CPUs. Its nearest rival, the Core Ultra 9 285K, scores 83,807 — a 0.2% difference that is within measurement noise for most workloads.

The CPU's role in Lockdown Protocol is best inferred from the FPS scaling behavior. At 1080p Low, the system reaches 305 FPS, which is a very high frame rate for any FPS title. The fact that FPS continues to scale linearly with resolution (53% drop from 1080p to 4K at every preset) suggests the CPU is not the bottleneck even at 1080p Low. If the CPU were limiting, we would expect to see the 1080p Low figure capped relative to the 1440p Low figure, but the 81 FPS drop between those two configurations shows the GPU workload is still the dominant factor.

The 24-thread configuration provides ample parallelism for game engine tasks, and the 5.80 GHz boost clock ensures strong single-thread performance for physics and game logic. The 36 MB L3 cache helps keep frequently accessed data close to the cores, reducing memory latency. While the benchmark data does not isolate CPU-specific game performance, the combination of top-tier synthetic scores (96th percentile) and the observed FPS scaling indicates the CPU supports the GPU fully across all tested settings. The 0.2% lead over the 285K in synthetic scores translates to negligible in-game differences, but the 290K Plus's higher boost clock and identical core count keep it ahead in CPU-bound scenarios where frame rates exceed 200 FPS.