Minimum

The Intel Core i5-14600KF and AMD Radeon RX 9070 combination delivers a compelling experience in Minimum, a 2014 third-person shooter. The data shows this pairing lands in the 559th position out of 1733 tested combos, placing it in the upper third of all configurations. This analysis breaks down the CPU and GPU contributions, followed by a detailed look at measured frame rates across resolutions and settings.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution and settings combination for this game?

A: At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo achieves an average of 264.1 FPS, which is the highest measured result. For a balance of quality and performance, 2560x1440 on High settings delivers 110.3 FPS average.

Q: How does the RX 9070 perform relative to its closest competitors?

A: The GPU’s average benchmark score of 34780 places it slightly below the NVIDIA A2, which scores 34866, a delta of -0.2%. It is 0.3% ahead of the NVIDIA Quadro GV100, which scores 34677.

Q: Is the CPU a bottleneck at 4K resolution?

A: The data indicates the GPU becomes the primary limiter at 3840x2160. The frame rate drops significantly from 1080p to 4K, showing the render load is shifting to the graphics card, which is typical for higher resolutions.

Q: What are the key specifications of the Intel Core i5-14600KF?

A: This processor features 14 cores and 20 threads, with a base clock of 3.50 GHz and a boost clock of 5.30 GHz. It has a 24 MB shared L3 cache and a TDP of 125 W.

Q: What is the memory configuration of the AMD Radeon RX 9070?

A: The GPU comes equipped with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, providing a bandwidth of 644.6 GB/s. Its memory clock runs at 2518 MHz, or 20.1 Gbps effective.

Q: How does the CPU's multi-core performance compare to its direct rival?

A: The i5-14600KF has an average benchmark score of 49367, which is 0.4% higher than the Intel Core i5-14600K's score of 49166. It also edges out the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X by 0.6%.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 is built on the RDNA 4.0 architecture and the Navi 48 chip, manufactured on a 4 nm process by TSMC. The data shows it operates with a base clock of 1330 MHz and a boost clock of 2520 MHz, with a game clock of 2070 MHz. This configuration is supported by 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, which is a substantial allocation for a game from 2014 and ensures that texture-heavy scenes do not run into memory capacity limits. The 644.6 GB/s of memory bandwidth and 256-bit bus width provide the data throughput necessary for high-resolution rendering.

The GPU’s raw compute capabilities are significant, with a FP32 performance of 36.13 TFLOPS and a pixel rate of 322.6 GPixel/s. These specifications translate into strong rasterization performance, which is the primary workload for Minimum. Benchmark results show the card achieves a 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 6290 and a Passmark G3D score of 25381. Its overall average benchmark score is 34780, placing it in the 79th percentile of all GPUs. The closest rival in the data is the NVIDIA A2, which scores 34866, a difference of only -0.2%, indicating the RX 9070 is on par with that card in synthetic tests.

Looking at the measured FPS, the GPU's role becomes more pronounced as resolution increases. At 3840x2160, the performance gap between Low and Ultra settings is stark. The card manages 94 FPS on Low, but this drops to 46.8 FPS on Ultra, showing that the shading units and ROPs (128) are heavily taxed by the higher visual fidelity. The 16 GB VRAM buffer is more than adequate for this title, but the compute load at 4K Ultra is what limits the frame rate. The data suggests that for a smooth 60 FPS experience at 4K, High settings are the ceiling, as it averages 59.3 FPS.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-14600KF is a 14-core, 20-thread processor based on the Raptor Lake architecture, using a 10 nm process. Its base clock of 3.50 GHz can boost up to 5.30 GHz, which is crucial for single-threaded performance that many game engines rely on for core game logic. The processor has a 24 MB shared L3 cache and an 80 KB L1 cache per core, along with a 2 MB L2 cache per core. This cache hierarchy helps reduce latency when feeding the GPU with draw calls and physics calculations.

In synthetic benchmarks, the CPU shows strong results, including a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 32889 and a single-core score of 4643. Its Geekbench multi-core score is 15636, with a single-core score of 2778. The processor's average benchmark score is 49367, which puts it in the 93rd percentile of all CPUs. Compared to its nearest rivals, it is 0.4% faster than the Intel Core i5-14600K and 0.6% faster than the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X.

In the context of Minimum, the CPU's role is to maintain high frame rates at lower resolutions. The data shows that at 1920x1080, the processor is capable of driving the GPU to produce 264.1 FPS on Low settings. This indicates that the CPU is not the limiting factor at 1080p, as the frame rate scales significantly with GPU load changes. The high boost clock and large core count ensure that even with background tasks, the game has access to the processing power it needs to keep up with the GPU's output at lower resolutions. The Passmark multithread score of 38697 and single-thread score of 4273 corroborate this balanced capability.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured data provides a clear picture of performance across three resolutions and four quality presets. At 1920x1080, the combination shows exceptional headroom. The Low preset leads with an average of 264.1 FPS, followed by Medium at 201.9 FPS, High at 168.2 FPS, and Ultra at 129.7 FPS. This spread of over 130 FPS between the lowest and highest settings shows that the GPU is fully utilized at this resolution, with the CPU able to feed it enough data to saturate its capabilities.

Moving to 2560x1440, the performance remains strong but shows the expected decline. The Low preset averages 167.1 FPS, which is a significant drop from the 1080p result. Medium follows at 131.6 FPS, and High at 110.3 FPS. The Ultra preset at 1440p averages 83.4 FPS, which is still comfortably above 60 FPS for a smooth experience. The relative ordering of the presets remains consistent, with Low being fastest and Ultra being slowest.

At 3840x2160, the GPU workload becomes the dominant factor. The Low preset averages 94 FPS, which is a substantial decrease from the 1440p result. Medium averages 68 FPS, and High drops to 59.3 FPS, which is just below the 60 FPS threshold. The Ultra preset at 4K averages only 46.8 FPS, indicating that this setting is too demanding for consistent 60 FPS gameplay at this resolution. The data shows that High settings at 1440p provide a better balance than High at 4K, with a 51 FPS advantage.

Resolution Scaling

The performance scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals how the system’s components share the workload. At 1920x1080, the average FPS across all settings is roughly 191. The jump to 2560x1440 reduces this average to about 123.1 FPS, a drop of approximately 36%. This reduction indicates that while the resolution increase adds pixels, the GPU still has enough headroom to render the scene, and the CPU is not the main constraint.

However, the scaling from 1440p to 4K is more severe. The average FPS at 3840x2160 is 67.0, which is a 46% drop from the 1440p average. This larger decline points to the GPU becoming the primary limiting component. The RX 9070’s 16 GB of VRAM is not exhausted, but the pixel fill rate and shading compute required for 4K are the bottlenecks. The data shows that the gap between Low and Ultra settings widens at higher resolutions; at 1080p the difference is 134.4 FPS, but at 4K it narrows to 47.2 FPS. This is because at 1080p, the CPU can push more frames, making the GPU’s setting sensitivity more apparent, while at 4K, the GPU is fully saturated even on Low settings.

This analysis suggests that for a smooth 60 FPS experience, 1440p Ultra is achievable with 83.4 FPS, but 4K requires dropping to Medium settings to hit 68 FPS. The high core count and clock speeds of the i5-14600KF ensure that it does not hold back performance until the frame rate reaches very high levels, such as the 264 FPS seen at 1080p Low. Therefore, the limiting component in this system is the GPU at 4K, while the CPU is more than sufficient for lower resolutions.