Minimum

Minimum, the 2014 third-person shooter, presents an interesting case study for a modern flagship pairing. With the Intel Core i9-14900K and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, the benchmark data reveals a configuration that is less about raw GPU stress and more about understanding how a decade-old title scales with contemporary hardware. The measured results show a system capable of extraordinary frame rates, yet the performance curve across settings and resolutions tells a nuanced story about where the bottlenecks truly lie for this specific combination.

Settings Recommendations

The benchmark data for this title suggests that the "High" preset offers the most balanced experience for this specific CPU-GPU combination, particularly when targeting higher resolutions. At 4K, the transition from High to Ultra incurs a significant performance penalty, dropping from 93.4 FPS to 72.1 FPS, a reduction of over 20 FPS. Given that the visual fidelity jump between these two presets in a game from this era is typically marginal, the High preset provides a substantially smoother experience without a proportionate visual cost. The data indicates that High is the ceiling for maintaining fluid motion at 4K, where the average frame rate stays well above the 90 FPS threshold.

For users prioritizing maximum frame rates on high-refresh-rate displays, the "Low" preset becomes the most compelling option. The measurements show that at 1440p, the Low preset achieves 261.9 FPS, which is a massive leap from the 166.5 FPS seen on High. This headroom is crucial for 240Hz monitors, as the data shows the combo can nearly saturate such displays at 1080p with the Low preset, hitting 405.5 FPS. While Medium offers a middle ground at 202.8 FPS (1440p) and 313.9 FPS (1080p), the jump from Low to Medium costs roughly 23% of the frame rate, making Low the optimal choice for competitive play where responsiveness trumps visual flair.

Interestingly, the data suggests that Ultra is the least efficient setting for this pairing. Across all resolutions, Ultra delivers the lowest frame rates, and at 4K it dips to 72.1 FPS, which is below the 144Hz threshold that many modern displays target. The performance delta between High and Ultra is consistently steep, indicating that the Ultra preset likely enables effects that are disproportionately heavy on the GPU without a commensurate improvement in visual clarity for this older title. Therefore, the recommendation is clear: High for visual quality at high refresh rates, Low for maximum competitive performance, and a general avoidance of Ultra unless absolute visual maximums are the sole priority.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090’s role in these results is defined by its massive memory allocation and clock speeds, though the data suggests that its full potential is rarely taxed by this game. The GPU features 32 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 512-bit bus, providing a bandwidth of 1.79 TB/s. In a title like Minimum, which was released over a decade ago, this memory capacity is virtually untouchable; the game’s textures and assets are unlikely to stress even a fraction of that 32 GB pool. This means that memory pressure is not a limiting factor in any of the measured scenarios, allowing the GPU to operate without the risk of VRAM-related stutters or texture pop-in.

The clock speeds are equally robust, with a base clock of 2017 MHz and a boost clock of 2407 MHz. These high frequencies are crucial for maintaining the frame rates seen in the data, as the RTX 5090’s raw compute power is what drives the performance at 4K. However, the benchmark results indicate that the GPU is not the primary bottleneck at lower resolutions. At 1080p, the frame rates balloon to over 400 FPS on Low settings, which suggests that the CPU is doing the heavy lifting to feed the GPU. The GPU’s role here is to render frames as fast as the CPU can dispatch them, and the data shows that it is more than capable of keeping up, as evidenced by the lack of a plateau at 1080p.

The GPU’s architecture, Blackwell 2.0, built on a 5 nm process, is clearly overqualified for this workload. The measured FPS at 4K Ultra (72.1 FPS) is surprisingly low for a card that scores 39,650 in Passmark G3D benchmarks. This indicates that the game’s engine has limitations that prevent the RTX 5090 from utilizing its full 104.8 TFLOPS of FP32 performance. Instead of being a GPU-bound scenario, the data points to a game engine that struggles to parallelize work across the GPU’s 21,760 shading units effectively. Thus, while the GPU provides the necessary foundation for high frame rates, its role in this specific title is constrained by software inefficiencies rather than hardware limitations.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the benchmark database, this specific combination of the Intel Core i9-14900K and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 ranks 8th out of 1,733 tested combos for Minimum. This top-1% placement is expected given the pedigree of both components, but the data suggests that the pairing does not dominate as much as one might anticipate. The CPU itself is a powerhouse, sitting in the 97th percentile compared to all CPUs, with a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 49,872. Its nearest rivals, such as the AMD EPYC 7413 and Intel Core i9-14900KF, are within a 0.7% delta in average benchmark scores, meaning the CPU is not uniquely advantaged in this title.

The GPU, ranking in the 94th percentile versus all GPUs, shows a similar story. Its average benchmark score of 84,306 places it just 1.3% ahead of the AMD Radeon PRO W6600 and a mere 0.1% ahead of the RTX 5090 D. This tight clustering in the GPU benchmarks suggests that the RTX 5090’s performance in Minimum is not dramatically superior to its immediate rivals. The combo’s rank of 8th, while impressive, indicates that there are 7 other CPU-GPU pairings that achieve higher average frame rates in this specific title. This could be due to other CPUs with higher single-thread performance (the i9-14900K scores 7,040 in Cinebench R23 single-core) or slight variations in memory configuration that better suit this game’s engine.

The data implies that the combination is overkill for Minimum, but it still manages to secure a top-tier position. The fact that it does not rank #1 suggests that the game’s performance is sensitive to factors beyond raw core counts and GPU shading units. The i9-14900K’s 24 cores and 32 threads are largely underutilized in a game that likely only leverages a few cores, making the CPU’s high multi-threaded performance (20,946 in Cinebench R20) somewhat irrelevant. Instead, the ranking is likely determined by the boost clock of 6.00 GHz, which provides the single-thread grunt needed for this genre, and the GPU’s ability to maintain high fill rates at lower resolutions.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a comprehensive view of how this combo scales across three resolutions and four settings presets. At 1920x1080, the performance is exceptional, with the Low preset delivering a staggering 405.5 FPS. This drops to 313.9 FPS on Medium, 261 FPS on High, and finally 202.4 FPS on Ultra. The spread from Low to Ultra is over 200 FPS, showing that the settings menu has a profound impact on the CPU’s ability to feed the GPU. The 1080p results are clearly CPU-bound, as the GPU is likely idling, waiting for the processor to complete game logic and draw calls.

Moving to 2560x1440, the frame rates remain high but show a more pronounced GPU influence. The Low preset yields 261.9 FPS, which is a 35% reduction from 1080p, indicating that the GPU is starting to become a limiting factor. Medium drops to 202.8 FPS, High to 166.5 FPS, and Ultra to 132.2 FPS. The delta between Low and Ultra at 1440p is 129.7 FPS, which is narrower than at 1080p, suggesting that the GPU is beginning to shoulder more of the rendering load. These numbers are still well above the range of playability, even for the most demanding esports displays.

At 3840x2160, the data reveals where the RTX 5090’s limits are reached with this game. The Low preset delivers 138.6 FPS, which is a substantial drop from 1440p, and this is the only preset that remains above the 120 FPS threshold. Medium falls to 108.2 FPS, High to 93.4 FPS, and Ultra to 72.1 FPS. The performance cliff between High and Ultra is steep (a 21.3 FPS drop), confirming that the Ultra preset is poorly optimized for this title. At 4K, the GPU is unequivocally the bottleneck, as the 5 nm chip’s 32 GB of memory and 512-bit bus are fully engaged, yet the game’s engine still fails to extract the maximum possible throughput from the hardware.

Resolution Scaling

The scaling from 1080p to 4K demonstrates a classic transition from a CPU-bound to a GPU-bound scenario. At the Low preset, the frame rate drops from 405.5 FPS at 1080p to 261.9 FPS at 1440p, a 35.4% reduction, and then to 138.6 FPS at 4K, a further 47.1% reduction from 1440p. This steep decline indicates that the GPU is the primary limiter as resolution increases, with the 4K pixel count (over 8 million pixels) overwhelming the GPU’s ability to maintain the sky-high frame rates seen at 1080p. The data suggests that the RTX 5090’s 1.79 TB/s bandwidth is sufficient, but the sheer pixel throughput required at 4K is what causes the performance to halve.

For the High preset, the scaling is more moderate but still significant. The frame rate drops from 261 FPS at 1080p to 166.5 FPS at 1440p (a 36.2% reduction) and then to 93.4 FPS at 4K (a 43.9% reduction from 1440p). The consistency of the percentage drops across presets indicates that the game’s rendering pipeline scales linearly with resolution, which is a sign of a well-behaved engine. However, the absolute numbers at 4K (93.4 FPS on High) are lower than what one would expect from a flagship GPU, reinforcing the notion that the game’s draw call overhead and shader complexity are not optimized for DX12-era hardware.

The 4K Ultra result of 72.1 FPS is particularly telling. When compared to the 1080p Ultra score of 202.4 FPS, the scaling factor is 2.8x, which is close to the theoretical 4x pixel increase but not exact. This non-linear scaling suggests that the game’s internal resolution scaling or post-processing effects are not perfectly scaling with pixel count, leading to a more pronounced performance hit at the highest settings. The data indicates that the Intel Core i9-14900K’s 3.20 GHz base clock and 6.00 GHz boost clock are sufficient to keep the GPU fed at 1080p, but at 4K, the GPU’s raw compute power (104.8 TFLOPS) becomes the sole determinant of performance, and the game’s limitations curtail the expected gains.