Minimum

FAQ

Q: What is the average frame rate for this combo at 1440p with High settings?

A: The Intel Core Ultra 5 135H paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 delivers an average of 114 FPS at 2560x1440 on High settings. This places the experience well above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay in this third-person shooter.

Q: How does the CPU compare to its nearest rival in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The Intel Core Ultra 5 135H has an average benchmark score of 29093, which is nearly identical to the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X at 29123, a delta of -0.1%. It also sits close to the Intel Core i5-13500HX, which scores 29270, a -0.6% difference.

Q: What is the GPU's percentile ranking among all tested graphics cards?

A: The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 falls in the 87th percentile of all GPUs, indicating top-tier performance. Its average benchmark score is 56083, placing it slightly above the AMD Radeon 8060S, which scores 55757, a 0.6% lead.

Q: What is the best preset to use at 4K resolution?

A: At 3840x2160, the Low preset yields an average of 95 FPS, while Medium drops to 73 FPS and High to 61 FPS. Ultra falls to 47 FPS. The Medium preset offers a balanced experience with a minimum of 62 FPS, staying above playable thresholds.

Q: Does the CPU hold back the GPU at 1080p?

A: Yes, the data suggests a CPU limitation at 1920x1080. At Low settings, the combo reaches 274 FPS, but scaling from Low to Ultra (134 FPS) shows a 140 FPS drop, indicating the GPU is not the sole bottleneck at lower resolutions where frame rates are extremely high.

Q: How does this combo rank among all tested combinations?

A: This specific combination of CPU and GPU ranks 749th out of 2939 tested combos in this game. This places it in the top 25.5% of all configurations, reflecting strong overall capability.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data provides a clear picture of how different presets affect performance. For the best experience, the Medium preset appears to be the sweet spot across all resolutions, as it is the only setting where both minimum and maximum FPS values are recorded, indicating a stable frame delivery. At 1080p, Medium yields an average of 210 FPS with a minimum of 178 FPS, ensuring no noticeable dips below high refresh rates. The jump from Low to Medium is a 64 FPS drop, but the stability gained is worth it for consistent gameplay.

At 1440p, Medium averages 135 FPS with a minimum of 115 FPS, which is still excellent for competitive play. High settings at 1440p drop to 114 FPS, which is acceptable but starts to approach the threshold where frame time consistency might become noticeable. The Ultra preset at 1440p averages 87 FPS, which is playable but sacrifices the headroom needed for fast-paced action.

For 4K, the choice hinges on display refresh rate. If targeting 60 FPS, High settings achieve 61 FPS on average, but the Medium preset provides a 73 FPS average with a 62 FPS minimum, offering a safer buffer against stutters. Low settings at 4K reach 95 FPS, which is ideal for high-refresh 4K panels but may compromise visual fidelity too much for some players. Ultra at 4K is not recommended, as it dips to 47 FPS, falling below standard playability.

The data indicates that Medium provides the most balanced trade-off between visual quality and performance, maintaining high frame rates across all resolutions while ensuring a stable experience. For users prioritizing maximum visuals on a 1440p monitor, High is a viable alternative, but the 21 FPS loss from Medium to High may not justify the graphical gains.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate progression from 1080p to 4K reveals how the workload shifts between CPU and GPU. Starting at 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo achieves 274 FPS. Moving to 2560x1440 Low drops this to 177 FPS, a 35.4% reduction. At 3840x2160 Low, the average falls to 95 FPS, another 46.3% drop from 1440p. This steep decline as resolution increases points to the GPU becoming the primary limiting factor at higher pixel counts.

The scaling pattern is consistent across all settings. With High settings, the FPS values are 176, 114, and 61 for 1080p, 1440p, and 4K respectively. The percentage drops are 35.2% from 1080p to 1440p, and 46.5% from 1440p to 4K. This suggests that the RTX 5080's rendering capabilities are being taxed more heavily at higher resolutions, while the CPU has ample headroom.

At 1080p, the CPU's role becomes more evident. The difference between Low (274 FPS) and Ultra (134 FPS) at 1080p is 140 FPS, a 51.1% reduction. In contrast, at 4K, the Low-to-Ultra difference is 48 FPS (95 to 47), a 50.5% reduction. The absolute drop is much larger at 1080p, indicating that the CPU's 14 cores and 18 threads are able to feed the GPU at lower resolutions, but the GPU's workload scaling dominates as resolution increases.

The data suggests that at 1080p, the combo is balanced but leans toward CPU-bound behavior at very high frame rates, while at 4K, the GPU is clearly the limiting component. The RTX 5080's 16 GB of VRAM and 960 GB/s bandwidth are sufficient to handle 4K textures, but the raw compute demands of higher resolutions cap performance below the 1080p levels.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo produces its highest frame rates across all settings. Low settings average 274 FPS, representing the absolute ceiling for this configuration. Medium settings drop to 210 FPS, with a minimum of 178 FPS and a maximum of 241 FPS, showing a narrow band of 63 FPS variance. High settings average 176 FPS, a 34 FPS drop from Medium. Ultra settings average 134 FPS, which is still well above the 60 FPS threshold but represents a 51.1% reduction from Low.

Moving to 2560x1440, the performance scales down proportionally. Low settings average 177 FPS, which is 97 FPS lower than at 1080p. Medium settings average 135 FPS, with a minimum of 115 FPS and a maximum of 156 FPS, a variance of 41 FPS. High settings average 114 FPS, while Ultra settings average 87 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra at 1440p is 90 FPS, a 50.8% reduction.

At 3840x2160, the frame rates become more modest. Low settings average 95 FPS, which is the only preset at 4K that exceeds 90 FPS. Medium settings average 73 FPS, with a minimum of 62 FPS and a maximum of 84 FPS, indicating a 22 FPS variance. High settings average 61 FPS, barely hitting the 60 FPS mark. Ultra settings average 47 FPS, which is below the standard playability threshold, making this preset unsuitable for 4K gaming.

The Medium preset is the only one where min and max FPS are recorded across all resolutions, suggesting that this setting provides the most consistent frame pacing. The data shows that at 1080p and 1440p, the combo can handle Ultra settings without dropping below 87 FPS, but at 4K, only Low and Medium settings are viable for smooth gameplay.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 is a high-end graphics card with 10752 shading units, 336 texture mapping units, and 112 raster output units. Its 84 RT cores and 336 tensor cores support advanced rendering features, though this game from 2014 is unlikely to leverage them heavily. The GPU's boost clock of 2617 MHz and base clock of 2295 MHz provide substantial compute throughput, with an FP32 performance of 56.28 TFLOPS.

The 16 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 256-bit bus delivers 960.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is more than sufficient for this game's texture and geometry requirements. The memory clock runs at 1875 MHz (30 Gbps effective), ensuring high data transfer rates. The GPU's 45,600 million transistors on a 378 mm² die, built on TSMC's 5 nm process, explain its high performance but also its 360 W TDP.

In this game, the GPU's role becomes more pronounced at higher resolutions. At 4K, the average FPS drops from 95 at Low to 47 at Ultra, a 50.5% reduction, demonstrating that the GPU's fill rate and pixel processing capabilities are the limiting factor. The pixel rate of 293.1 GPixel/s and texture rate of 879.3 GTexel/s are being taxed by the increased pixel count at 3840x2160.

The GPU's benchmark scores corroborate its strength. A Passmark G3D score of 36565 and a 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 8637 place it in the 87th percentile of all GPUs. Its nearest rivals include the AMD Radeon 8060S (0.6% slower) and the AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE (2.2% faster), confirming its position near the top of the performance hierarchy.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 5 135H is a mobile processor with 14 cores and 18 threads, based on the Meteor Lake architecture built on Intel's 7 nm process. It operates at a base clock of 3.60 GHz and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz, with a 28 W TDP that is typical for mobile parts. The CPU features a 18 MB shared L3 cache, along with 112 KB L1 and 2 MB L2 per core, which helps with game logic and physics calculations.

The CPU's synthetic benchmarks show balanced multi-threaded and single-threaded performance. In Cinebench R23, it scores 11875.5 points in multi-core and 1700 points in single-core. Passmark tests show a multithread score of 22422 and a single-thread score of 3521. These figures position the CPU in the 81st percentile of all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 29093. Its nearest rival, the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, scores nearly identically at 29123, a -0.1% difference.

In this game, the CPU's role is most evident at 1080p with Low settings, where the combo reaches 274 FPS. At this high frame rate, the CPU must process game logic and draw calls quickly enough to feed the GPU. The 14 cores and 18 threads provide ample parallel processing capability, but the single-thread performance (1700 in Cinebench R23) is what matters most for this older title, which likely does not scale across many cores.

The CPU's boost clock of 4.60 GHz helps maintain high single-threaded performance, which is critical for avoiding bottlenecks at lower resolutions. The data shows that at 1080p, the CPU is able to sustain frame rates above 270 FPS, indicating that it is not the primary constraint at this resolution. However, the drop from 274 FPS at Low to 134 FPS at Ultra at 1080p suggests that the GPU's workload increases significantly with higher settings, while the CPU's frame delivery remains relatively constant.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of the Intel Core Ultra 5 135H and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 ranks 749th out of 2939 tested combos in this game. This places it in the top 25.5% of all configurations, which is a strong result given the CPU's mobile nature and the GPU's high-end desktop-class performance.

The ranking reflects the balance between the two components. The GPU is in the 87th percentile among all GPUs, while the CPU is in the 81st percentile among all CPUs. The combo's ranking of 749 is slightly lower than the individual component percentiles might suggest, indicating that the CPU's mobile architecture may introduce some limitations in this game compared to desktop counterparts.

The nearest rival CPUs, such as the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and Intel Core i5-13500HX, have average scores that are within 0.6% of the Ultra 5 135H, suggesting that swapping the CPU would have minimal impact on overall performance. Similarly, the GPU's nearest rivals, like the AMD Radeon 8060S, are within 2.3% in average score, meaning that small changes in GPU choice would not drastically alter the combo's ranking.

The combo's rank of 749 out of 2939 means that 2190 other combinations perform better in this game. This is expected, as many combos likely feature higher-end desktop CPUs paired with the same or better GPUs. However, for a mobile CPU paired with a top-tier GPU, this ranking is respectable and indicates that the combo can handle this game at high frame rates across most settings and resolutions, with the caveat that 4K Ultra is not playable.