Minimum

The AMD Ryzen 5 9600X paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER delivers a robust experience in Minimum, with frame rates that scale predictably across its four quality presets. At 1080p, the Low preset reaches 310.2 FPS, while Medium and High deliver 235 and 197.6 FPS respectively. The Ultra preset, at 151.2 FPS, remains highly playable but represents a significant drop from the other settings. At 1440p, the pattern holds: Low produces 201.8 FPS, Medium 152.1, High 130.9, and Ultra 100.6. At 4K, the margins compress, with Low hitting 107.4 FPS, Medium 83.2, High 71.2, and Ultra dropping to 51.7 FPS. Given these measurements, the High preset offers the best balance of visual fidelity and performance headroom, especially for high-refresh-rate 1440p displays. At 1080p, High still provides 197.6 FPS, which is sufficient for competitive play, while at 4K it maintains a playable 71.2 FPS. The Ultra preset, while visually superior, incurs a steep performance cost—roughly 23% lower than High at 1080p (151.2 vs. 197.6) and 27% lower at 4K (51.7 vs. 71.2)—making it viable only for users prioritizing image quality over frame rate. For most scenarios, High is the recommended preset, as it avoids the diminishing returns of Ultra while keeping frame rates comfortably above 60 FPS at 4K and above 100 FPS at 1440p.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is the dominant component in this configuration, equipped with 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus, yielding a bandwidth of 504.2 GB/s. The GPU’s memory clock runs at 1313 MHz, with an effective data rate of 21 Gbps, while the core operates with a base clock of 1980 MHz and a boost clock of 2475 MHz. These specifications align with the card’s Ada Lovelace architecture, built on a 5 nm process with 35,800 million transistors and a die size of 294 mm². The GPU’s compute capabilities include 7168 shading units, 224 texture mapping units, and 80 raster output units, alongside 56 ray tracing cores and 224 tensor cores. In practical terms, the RTX 4070 SUPER’s rendering throughput is substantial—its pixel rate is 198.0 GPixel/s and its texture rate is 554.4 GTexel/s—which directly supports the high frame counts observed in Minimum.

The benchmark data shows that the GPU’s performance scales with resolution, but the gap between presets narrows as pixel count rises. At 1080p, the difference between Low and Ultra is 159 FPS (310.2 vs. 151.2), a 2.05x spread. At 4K, the spread drops to 55.7 FPS (107.4 vs. 51.7), a 2.08x difference, indicating that the GPU remains the primary bottleneck across all settings. The 12 GB VRAM capacity is adequate for this title, as even at 4K Ultra the measured average frame rate is 51.7 FPS, suggesting no memory-related stutters or capacity limits are being hit. The GPU’s percentile rank against all GPUs is 84, placing it in the upper tier of tested hardware. Its average benchmark score of 42576 is within 0.2% of the NVIDIA RTX A6000 (42653) and 0.3% of the AMD Radeon RX 7650 GRE (42723), positioning it as a high-mid-range performer that comfortably handles Minimum’s demands.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals a consistent pattern of performance degradation as resolution increases from 1080p to 4K, with the GPU being the limiting factor at all settings. At Low settings, the frame rate drops from 310.2 FPS at 1080p to 201.8 FPS at 1440p, a 35% reduction, and further to 107.4 FPS at 4K, a 47% drop from 1440p. The High preset follows a similar trajectory: 197.6 FPS at 1080p falls to 130.9 FPS at 1440p (34% lower) and then to 71.2 FPS at 4K (46% lower). This scaling is typical for a GPU-bound scenario, where the RTX 4070 SUPER’s fill rate and bandwidth are increasingly taxed by higher pixel counts. The Ultra preset shows the steepest absolute decline, from 151.2 FPS at 1080p to 100.6 FPS at 1440p (33% drop) and finally to 51.7 FPS at 4K (49% drop).

The resolution scaling also highlights the diminishing returns of higher presets at lower resolutions. At 1080p, the CPU has more headroom to push frames, but the data shows the GPU still governs the outcome—the 310.2 FPS at Low versus 151.2 FPS at Ultra is a 2.05x gap that persists across resolutions. At 4K, the same gap is 2.08x, indicating that the GPU’s workload scales proportionally with pixel count, and the CPU’s role becomes secondary. The 1440p measurements offer the best middle ground: High at 130.9 FPS and Medium at 152.1 FPS both provide excellent smoothness, while 4K High at 71.2 FPS remains playable for slower-paced segments. The data shows no anomalous spikes or bottlenecks at any resolution, confirming that the RTX 4070 SUPER’s 504.2 GB/s memory bandwidth is sufficient to feed the GPU across all tested configurations.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the benchmark database, this CPU-GPU combination ranks 288th out of 1733 tested combos in Minimum, placing it in the top 16.6% of all configurations. This position reflects the balanced nature of the pairing—the Ryzen 5 9600X provides strong single-thread performance, while the RTX 4070 SUPER handles the graphical load. The combo’s rank is consistent with the GPU’s 84th percentile standing among all GPUs and the CPU’s 85th percentile among all CPUs, suggesting a well-matched pair with no glaring bottleneck in either component. The measured FPS data supports this: at 1080p High, the combo achieves 197.6 FPS, which is 1.3x higher than the 1440p High result of 130.9 FPS, and the 4K High result of 71.2 FPS is still 46% of the 1080p figure.

Compared to other combinations in the database, this pairing sits comfortably above the median, given that the 288th rank out of 1733 places it in the upper quintile. The GPU’s nearest rivals in average benchmark score—the NVIDIA RTX A6000 (42653, delta -0.2%), AMD Radeon RX 7650 GRE (42723, delta -0.3%), AMD Radeon Pro 580X (41991, delta 1.4%), and NVIDIA Tesla M40 (41897, delta 1.6%)—are all within 1.6% of the RTX 4070 SUPER’s score, indicating that this combo’s performance is tightly clustered with other high-end options. The CPU’s nearest rivals, including the Intel Core i5-13490F (28173, delta 0.3%) and AMD Ryzen 5 230 (28164, delta 0.3%), show even tighter competition, with deltas under 0.5%. This data suggests that the combo’s rank is primarily driven by the GPU, as the CPU’s performance is nearly indistinguishable from its closest alternatives.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 9600X, based on the Zen 5 (Granite Ridge) architecture, contributes 6 cores and 12 threads, with a base clock of 3.90 GHz and a boost clock of 5.40 GHz. Its 65 W TDP and 4 nm process node from TSMC allow for high clock speeds without excessive power draw, and the 32 MB shared L3 cache provides ample data locality for game workloads. The CPU’s benchmark results show strong single-threaded performance—a 3DMark single-thread score of 1253 and a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 3603—which is critical for Minimum’s game logic and physics calculations. In multi-threaded tests, the CPU reaches 25525 in Cinebench R23 multicore and 7590 in 3DMark max threads, indicating that it can handle background tasks without impacting frame rates.

The CPU’s role in this combo is secondary to the GPU, as evidenced by the resolution scaling data. At 1080p Low, the frame rate of 310.2 FPS suggests the CPU is capable of feeding the GPU at high rates, but the GPU becomes the bottleneck as resolution increases. The CPU’s 85th percentile ranking among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 28246, places it slightly ahead of the Intel Core i5-13490F (28173, delta 0.3%) and AMD Ryzen 5 230 (28164, delta 0.3%), but behind the AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS (28369, delta -0.4%) and Intel Core i5-14500T (28377, delta -0.5%). These small deltas (all under 0.5%) mean that swapping the CPU for a rival would produce negligible FPS changes in Minimum, confirming that the RTX 4070 SUPER is the primary driver of performance. The CPU’s 6-core, 12-thread configuration is sufficient for this title, as the game’s 2014 release date suggests it does not heavily utilize more than a few threads, leaving the 9600X with ample headroom even at lower resolutions where frame rates exceed 300 FPS.