Minimum

The Intel Core i5-10400F paired with the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT delivers a robust 1080p experience in Minimum, but the data reveals a predictable scaling curve as resolution increases. At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo achieves 205.9 FPS, dropping to 134.1 FPS at High and 97.5 FPS at Ultra. This indicates that the CPU has ample headroom to feed the GPU at lower resolutions, allowing the graphics card to stretch its legs. However, the transition to 2560x1440 shows a significant performance cost, with the average FPS falling from 205.9 to 130.7 at Low settings, a 36.5% reduction. The gap narrows at higher presets, but the trend is clear: the RX 6700 XT begins to become the limiting factor as pixel count rises.

Moving to 3840x2160, the scaling confirms a GPU-bound scenario. The 1080p Low figure of 205.9 FPS plummets to 68.9 FPS at 4K Low, a stark 66.5% drop. At Ultra settings, the 4K average of 33.2 FPS is only marginally above the threshold for smooth gameplay, highlighting that this combination is not designed for native 4K Ultra in this title. The data suggests that the sweet spot for this pairing is 1440p, where the balance between CPU and GPU workload yields playable frame rates across all settings, from 130.7 FPS at Low to 64.6 FPS at Ultra.

How This Combo Ranks

In the comprehensive database of tested combinations, this specific pairing ranks 972 out of 1733 combos for Minimum. This places it in the middle of the pack, indicating a balanced but not exceptional configuration for this particular game. The rank reflects a system that can deliver high refresh rate gaming at 1080p and solid performance at 1440p, but it does not break into the top tier of combinations that would be required for 4K Ultra settings. Given the game’s 2014 release date, the data suggests that this modern mid-range hardware is more than sufficient for the title’s demands, with the bottleneck shifting entirely to the GPU at higher resolutions.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is the dominant component in this pairing, featuring 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus, yielding a bandwidth of 384.0 GB/s. This memory configuration is substantial for a 2014 title, ensuring that texture loading and memory-intensive scenes do not cause stuttering. The GPU’s boost clock of 2581 MHz and game clock of 2424 MHz are high for the RDNA 2.0 architecture, allowing for strong rasterization performance. The data shows a clear correlation between the GPU’s workload and the FPS drop at higher resolutions. At 1440p, the card’s 13.21 TFLOPS of FP32 compute is sufficient to maintain high frame rates, but at 4K, the pixel rate of 165.2 GPixel/s becomes a limiting factor, especially when combined with Ultra settings that demand more from the shading units and ROPs. The card’s 40 RT cores are present, but Minimum does not leverage ray tracing, so the focus remains on raw fill rate and shader performance.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured data provides a clear matrix of performance across three resolutions and four quality presets.

At 1920x1080, the combo excels:

• Low: 205.9 FPS
• Medium: 154.4 FPS
• High: 134.1 FPS
• Ultra: 97.5 FPS

The spread from Low to Ultra is 108.4 FPS, demonstrating that the CPU can easily drive the GPU to produce high frame rates when the graphical load is light. Even at Ultra, the frame rate exceeds 90 FPS, making this an ideal resolution for high-refresh-rate monitors.

At 2560x1440, performance remains strong:

• Low: 130.7 FPS
• Medium: 99.3 FPS
• High: 86.1 FPS
• Ultra: 64.6 FPS

The transition from Low to Ultra here shows a 66.1 FPS drop, indicating that the GPU is now the primary constraint. The Ultra preset at 64.6 FPS is still smooth for a third-person shooter, but the data suggests that players seeking 100+ FPS should stick to Medium or lower.

At 3840x2160, the GPU is clearly saturated:

• Low: 68.9 FPS
• Medium: 52.3 FPS
• High: 47.9 FPS
• Ultra: 33.2 FPS

The 4K results show a stark reality: even at Low settings, the combo barely maintains 60 FPS, and at Ultra, it falls below 35 FPS. The performance degradation from 1080p Low (205.9 FPS) to 4K Low (68.9 FPS) is substantial, confirming that the RX 6700 XT’s 12 GB VRAM and 384.0 GB/s bandwidth are not enough to handle the pixel throughput required at this resolution without significant compromises.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-10400F provides a solid foundation for this gaming combo. With 6 cores and 12 threads, it offers a base clock of 2.90 GHz and a boost clock of 4.30 GHz. The data from synthetic benchmarks shows a single-thread score of 1453 in Cinebench R23 and a multi-thread score of 10297, indicating that the CPU has sufficient single-core performance for gaming workloads. The L3 cache of 12 MB (shared) is modest by modern standards, but for a game released in 2014, it is more than adequate. The CPU’s performance percentile ranks it at 73 among all CPUs, placing it above the median.

In the context of Minimum, the CPU’s role is to feed the GPU with draw calls and physics calculations. At 1080p, the 205.9 FPS Low result suggests that the CPU is not a bottleneck, as the frame rate is high enough to indicate that the GPU is the limiting factor even at lower settings. However, the data from the nearest rivals shows that the i5-10400F is not a top-tier part; it sits within 1.2% of the AMD Ryzen Embedded V2546 and 1.1% ahead of the Intel Core i5-8500. This means that while it is capable, it does not provide the headroom that a higher-end CPU might offer. The 42.7 GB/s of memory bandwidth and dual-channel DDR4 support are standard, and they do not appear to restrict performance in this title, as the measured FPS at 1080p are consistently high across all settings.