Minimum

Minimum running on the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Mobile is a case of modern laptop hardware massively overdelivering for an older third-person shooter. Released in mid-2014, Minimum is exactly the kind of title where a current-generation mobile pairing produces frame rates far beyond what the game was designed around. The measured data shows playable performance at every resolution and preset tested, including 4K Ultra, which is rare for any laptop combination. This page breaks down where each preset lands, how the combo ranks against other tested hardware pairings in this game, and which component is actually doing the work.

Settings Recommendations

The measured rows make the preset choice straightforward: play at Ultra and don't look back. At 1920x1080, Ultra averages 143 FPS — more than double what most players need for smooth play in a third-person shooter. Even at 2560x1440, Ultra holds a 92 FPS average, comfortably above high-refresh territory. At 3840x2160, Ultra averages 50 FPS, which is the only data point where a step down is worth considering.

The Medium rows are the most informative in the dataset because they include min/max spread alongside the average. At 1080p Medium, the combo averages 224 FPS with a floor of 190 and a peak of 258 — a tight range that indicates very consistent frame delivery. At 1440p Medium, the average is 144 FPS with lows of 123 and highs of 166. At 4K Medium, the average sits at 78 FPS with lows of 66 and highs of 89. Those floors stay above 60 at every resolution on Medium, which makes Medium the safe pick if you're gaming on a 4K panel and want guaranteed smoothness. High at 4K averages 65 FPS, so if your display refreshes at 60 Hz, High is the natural setting — it clears the panel rate on average.

The practical recommendation by resolution: 1080p and 1440p players should use Ultra (143 and 92 FPS averages respectively), and 4K players should choose between High at 65 FPS average or Medium at 78 FPS average depending on how much headroom they want. Low preset numbers — 293, 189, and 102 FPS at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K — exist mostly as a ceiling reference; there's no gameplay reason to drop that far given how strong the higher presets perform.

How This Combo Ranks

Against the full database of tested combinations in Minimum, this pairing ranks 814th out of 3712 combos. That places it roughly in the top fifth of all tested hardware pairings for this game — a strong showing, though not at the very top, which makes sense given the CPU side of the equation (more on that below).

The context matters here: this is a mobile pairing. The Core Ultra 9 185H is a 45 W TDP laptop processor with a BGA 2049 socket — soldered, not socketed — and the RTX 5090 Mobile is a 95 W integrated mobile GPU. Desktop combinations with unlocked processors and full-power graphics cards will naturally post higher numbers, so ranking in the top fifth against a field that includes those desktop parts is a good result for a notebook-class build. For a laptop, this combo delivers frame rates that most desktop pairings in the lower ranks of the database cannot match.

It's also worth noting the rank reflects the pairing, not either component alone. The RTX 5090 Mobile sits in the 84th percentile versus all GPUs in the database, and the Core Ultra 9 185H sits in the 85th percentile versus all CPUs. Both components are strong for their class, and the in-game rank of 814 out of 3712 lands close to where those percentiles would predict.

GPU Role

The RTX 5090 Mobile is the reason Minimum runs this well at every setting. It's a Blackwell 2.0 architecture part built on TSMC's 5 nm process, with the GB203 chip packing 45,600 million transistors on a 378 mm² die. The raw specs are substantial for a mobile part: 10,496 shading units, 328 TMUs, 112 ROPs, 82 RT cores, and 328 tensor cores. Compute output is 31.80 TFLOPS FP32, with a texture fill rate of 496.9 GTexel/s and a pixel rate of 169.7 GPixel/s.

The memory configuration is the standout for a game like this. 24 GB of GDDR7 on a 256-bit bus delivers 896.0 GB/s of bandwidth, with memory running at 1750 MHz (28 Gbps effective). Minimum is a 2014 title and will not come close to filling 24 GB of VRAM at any resolution tested — even 4K Ultra at 50 FPS average is trivially within budget. The bandwidth headroom is one reason the 4K results hold up as well as they do: the GPU is never memory-starved.

Clocks run from a 990 MHz base to a 1515 MHz boost. For a game of this age, the GPU is barely working at 1080p — the 293 FPS Low average at 1080p is more likely constrained by other parts of the pipeline than by the graphics chip itself. The GPU's percentile versus all GPUs is 84, with an average benchmark score of 45152. Among its nearest rivals by aggregate score, the Radeon Pro 5500 XT sits 0.5 percent ahead, the RTX 4070 Ti is 0.8 percent behind, the Arc A730M is 1 percent ahead, and the RTX 5880 Ada is 1.8 percent ahead. In other words, the RTX 5090 Mobile benchmarks in the same overall neighborhood as a desktop RTX 4070 Ti — far more graphics power than a 2014 shooter demands. Its PassMark G3D score of 30034 and 3DMark Steel Nomadin DX12 score of 5871 confirm the same picture of high-end mobile capability.

API support is another non-issue: DirectX 12 Ultimate, Vulkan 1.4, and OpenGL 4.6 cover anything Minimum could ask for. PCIe 5.0 x16 keeps the host link from ever becoming a factor.

Measured FPS Breakdown

Here is every measured row for this combination, all from measured data rather than estimates.

At 1920x1080:

• Low: 293 FPS average
• Medium: 224 FPS average (190 min, 258 max)
• High: 188 FPS average
• Ultra: 143 FPS average

At 2560x1440:

• Low: 189 FPS average
• Medium: 144 FPS average (123 min, 166 max)
• High: 121 FPS average
• Ultra: 92 FPS average

At 3840x2160:

• Low: 102 FPS average
• Medium: 78 FPS average (66 min, 89 max)
• High: 65 FPS average
• Ultra: 50 FPS average

The pattern is clean and consistent. Each preset step costs roughly 20-35 percent of the average frame rate at any given resolution, and the Ultra-to-Low spread is roughly a 2x difference at every resolution. The Medium min/max spreads are the only rows with floor and ceiling data, and they're tight: at 1080p, the worst frame (190) is still above the High preset's average (188). That tells you frame times are stable and the experience will feel as smooth as the averages suggest.

If your display is a standard 60 Hz panel, every single row above 60 FPS average qualifies — which is everything except 4K Ultra at 50 FPS. On a high-refresh display, 1080p Ultra at 143 FPS and 1440p Ultra at 92 FPS both make use of the extra headroom.

Resolution Scaling

Comparing averages across resolutions at a fixed preset shows where the bottleneck sits.

At Low: 293 FPS at 1080p, 189 FPS at 1440p, 102 FPS at 4K. Moving from 1080p to 1440p costs about 35 percent of the frame rate; 1080p to 4K costs about 65 percent.

At Medium: 224, 144, and 78 — a roughly 36 percent drop to 1440p and a 65 percent drop to 4K.

At High: 188, 121, and 65 — again about 36 percent to 1440p and 65 percent to 4K.

At Ultra: 143, 92, and 50 — a 36 percent drop to 1440p and a 65 percent drop to 4K.

That consistency is the tell. When a GPU is the limiting factor, frame rate scales roughly with pixel count — 4K is four times the pixels of 1080p — and the observed 65 percent drop at 4K across every preset fits a GPU-bound profile almost exactly. A CPU-limited configuration would instead show frame rates flattening at higher resolutions, with 4K and 1440p results closer together. That's not what the data shows.

The one nuance is the 1080p Low result of 293 FPS. A purely GPU-bound system would push even higher there; the fact that the number lands under 300 suggests the ceiling at 1080p Low is set by something other than raw graphics throughput — likely the CPU or game engine itself. For actual gameplay this distinction is academic: no realistic scenario in Minimum will run into it.

The takeaway for buyers: this combination scales cleanly with resolution, so pick your resolution based on your display and use the highest preset that keeps the average above your refresh rate. There's no awkward middle ground in the data.

CPU Role

The Core Ultra 9 185H is a Meteor Lake mobile processor with 16 cores and 22 threads, a 3.90 GHz base clock, and a 5.10 GHz boost clock, built on Intel's 7 nm process. It carries 112 KB of L1 cache per core, 2 MB of L2 per core, and a shared 24 MB L3. Memory support is DDR5 on a dual-channel bus with 89.6 GB/s of bandwidth, and the chip sits in the 85th percentile versus all CPUs in the database.

For Minimum, the CPU's role is mostly about staying out of the way — and the data indicates it does. A third-person shooter from 2014 doesn't have the thread demands of modern titles, and the 22-thread configuration provides far more parallelism than the game can use. Single-thread speed matters more in this genre, and the 5.10 GHz boost with an R23 single-core score of 1810.5 and Geekbench single-core score of 1794 is more than sufficient. The PassMark single-thread result of 3697 tells the same story.

The benchmark profile explains why this combo ranks 814th rather than higher despite the GPU's strength. In multi-core throughput, the 185H's R23 multi-core score is 17984.5, Geekbench multi-core is 11657, and PassMark multithread is 29376. Its aggregate average benchmark score of 35670 puts it in a dead heat with its nearest rivals: the Ryzen AI 7 PRO 350 is 0.1 percent ahead, the Intel Core 7 250H is 0.2 percent ahead, the Ryzen 7 PRO 5845 is 0.4 percent ahead, and the Ryzen 7 7700X is 0.7 percent ahead. Those are negligible gaps in practice, but they show the CPU is matched, not dominant, against comparable mobile and desktop parts. A pairing built around a stronger desktop CPU could edge this combo out in Minimum's rank table even with similar graphics power.

Practical notes for laptop buyers: the 45 W TDP means sustained performance depends heavily on the notebook's cooling design, and the locked multiplier means no overclocking headroom. The integrated Arc Xe-LPG Graphics with 128 EU is irrelevant here since the RTX 5090 Mobile handles all rendering. PCIe Gen 5 with 8 CPU lanes keeps the GPU fed without issue.

Verdict-wise, this is a pairing where the GPU overmatches the game and the CPU comfortably keeps pace. Play at Ultra at 1080p or 1440p, drop to High or Medium only if you're on a 4K panel, and expect consistent frame delivery at every setting — the Medium min/max data confirms it.