Minimum

FAQ

Q: What is the average frame rate for this combo at 1080p with High settings?

A: The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB delivers an average of 150 FPS at 1920x1080 on High settings.

Q: How does the RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB compare to its closest rival in synthetic GPU benchmarks?

A: In the 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 test, the RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB scores 2913, which is 0.1% ahead of the NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF and 0.2% ahead of the RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB. It trails the NVIDIA Quadro P600 by 0.3%.

Q: What is the best preset for maintaining high frame rates at 1440p?

A: At 2560x1440, the Low preset produces 151 FPS, while Medium yields 115 FPS and High drops to 97 FPS. The Ultra preset falls to 74 FPS, making Low the best choice for maximum smoothness at this resolution.

Q: Does the CPU have more cores than threads?

A: Yes, the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus has 24 cores and 24 threads, meaning there is no hyperthreading or SMT — each core corresponds to exactly one thread.

Q: What is the GPU's memory configuration?

A: The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB uses 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus, providing a bandwidth of 288.0 GB/s. The memory clock runs at 2250 MHz, translating to 18 Gbps effective.

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

A: The combo ranks 1077 out of 2939 tested combinations, placing it in the upper-middle portion of the database for this title.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data for this game and this specific hardware combination shows a clear trade-off between visual fidelity and frame rate across all three resolutions. Starting at 1080p, the Low preset achieves 234 FPS, which is exceptionally high and far beyond the refresh rate of most displays. Medium delivers 179 FPS, still very smooth, while High produces 150 FPS and Ultra drops to 115 FPS. At this resolution, even the Ultra preset remains playable, but the step from High to Ultra costs 35 FPS — a 23% reduction — for what is typically a modest visual gain in a 2014-era third-person shooter.

At 1440p, the pattern shifts. Low yields 151 FPS, Medium 115 FPS, High 97 FPS, and Ultra 74 FPS. The High preset at 1440p is still above 60 FPS, which is the baseline for smooth gameplay, but the margin is thinner than at 1080p. For players with 144Hz monitors, the Low preset is the only option that fully saturates the display, while Medium remains viable for 100Hz+ panels.

At 4K, the situation changes dramatically. Low produces 81 FPS, Medium 62 FPS, High 52 FPS, and Ultra 40 FPS. Only the Low preset clears the 60 FPS threshold comfortably. Medium sits right at the edge with a 53 FPS minimum, which could cause noticeable stutter on some displays. High and Ultra are below 60 FPS, making them less suitable for fast-paced third-person shooting.

The best experience per the measured rows depends on the target resolution. For 1080p, the High preset offers an excellent balance — 150 FPS is far above the 60 FPS baseline, and the visual improvements over Medium are meaningful. For 1440p, the Medium preset at 115 FPS is the sweet spot, providing smooth motion while retaining moderate visual quality. For 4K, the Low preset at 81 FPS is the only choice that maintains fluid gameplay, though players with 60Hz displays could consider Medium at 62 FPS.

The data suggests that this hardware combination is best suited for 1080p or 1440p gaming, where it can maintain high frame rates across most presets. At 4K, the GPU becomes the limiting factor, and players must sacrifice visual quality to stay above 60 FPS.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS values show how the game's performance scales as resolution increases from 1080p to 4K. At High settings, the average frame rate drops from 150 FPS at 1920x1080 to 97 FPS at 2560x1440, and further to 52 FPS at 3840x2160. This represents a 65% reduction from 1080p to 4K, which is a steep decline.

Looking at the Low preset, the scaling is even more pronounced in relative terms: 234 FPS at 1080p falls to 151 FPS at 1440p and then to 81 FPS at 4K. The drop from 1440p to 4K is 46%, while the drop from 1080p to 1440p is 35%. This pattern indicates that the game becomes increasingly GPU-bound as resolution rises, which is expected for a title from 2014 that was not designed for modern high-resolution displays.

The Medium preset shows a similar trajectory: 179 FPS at 1080p, 115 FPS at 1440p, and 62 FPS at 4K. The Ultra preset goes from 115 FPS at 1080p to 74 FPS at 1440p and 40 FPS at 4K. In every case, the step from 1440p to 4K is proportionally larger than the step from 1080p to 1440p, which is consistent with the quadratic increase in pixel count.

The data reveals that the limiting component shifts with resolution. At 1080p, the CPU — with its 24 cores and 5.80 GHz boost clock — is likely capable of feeding the GPU enough data to reach 234 FPS on Low. At 4K, the GPU's 8 GB VRAM and 288.0 GB/s bandwidth become the bottleneck, as the frame rate drops to 40 FPS on Ultra. This is a classic sign of GPU-bound performance at higher resolutions, where the RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB's compute and memory bandwidth cannot keep up with the pixel workload.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the dataset includes all four presets. Low settings produce an average of 234 FPS, which is the highest measured value in the entire dataset. Medium delivers 179 FPS with a minimum of 152 FPS and a maximum of 206 FPS, indicating consistent frame times. High settings yield 150 FPS, while Ultra drops to 115 FPS. The spread from Low to Ultra is 119 FPS, showing that the game scales significantly with preset quality at this resolution.

At 2560x1440, the averages are 151 FPS for Low, 115 FPS for Medium, 97 FPS for High, and 74 FPS for Ultra. The Medium preset at this resolution has a recorded minimum of 98 FPS and maximum of 133 FPS, which means the frame rate never dips below 98 FPS even during demanding scenes. The gap between Low and Ultra narrows to 77 FPS, compared to 119 FPS at 1080p, reflecting the increased GPU load.

At 3840x2160, performance falls considerably. Low averages 81 FPS, Medium 62 FPS, High 52 FPS, and Ultra 40 FPS. The Medium preset is the only one with full min/max data: 53 FPS minimum and 72 FPS maximum. This 19 FPS range suggests some scene-to-scene variability, but the average of 62 FPS is just above the 60 FPS threshold. High and Ultra lack min/max data, but their averages of 52 FPS and 40 FPS respectively indicate they are below the ideal smoothness threshold for most players.

Comparing across resolutions, the 1080p Low setting at 234 FPS is more than double the 4K Low setting at 81 FPS. Similarly, 1080p Ultra at 115 FPS is nearly triple the 4K Ultra at 40 FPS. The data consistently shows that this combo delivers playable frame rates at 1080p and 1440p across all presets, but at 4K, only Low and Medium are viable for smooth gameplay.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB is built on the Ada Lovelace architecture using a 5 nm process at TSMC. The chip, designated AD106, contains 22,900 million transistors on a 188 mm² die. The GPU has 4352 shading units, 136 texture mapping units, and 48 raster output units, along with 34 ray tracing cores and 136 tensor cores. Its base clock is 2310 MHz, boosting to 2535 MHz, which provides a peak FP32 performance of 22.06 TFLOPS.

The memory subsystem consists of 8 GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus, running at 2250 MHz (18 Gbps effective) for a bandwidth of 288.0 GB/s. This is a modest memory configuration for a mid-range card, and the 8 GB capacity becomes a constraint at 4K Ultra settings, where the average frame rate drops to 40 FPS. The GPU's percentile rank among all GPUs is 19, indicating it sits in the lower portion of the performance distribution, yet it still delivers playable frame rates at lower resolutions.

In synthetic benchmarks, the GPU scores 2913 in 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12, placing it within 0.1% of the NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF and 0.2% of the RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB. Interestingly, the 8 GB version slightly outperforms its 16 GB sibling in this test, though the difference is negligible. The GPU trails the NVIDIA Quadro P600 by 0.3%, which is a much older and lower-tier product.

The measured game data shows that the GPU becomes the primary bottleneck at higher resolutions. At 4K Ultra, the 40 FPS average suggests that the combination of 8 GB VRAM and 288.0 GB/s bandwidth is insufficient to handle the texture and shading demands of the game at maximum settings. At 1080p, however, the GPU is capable of driving 234 FPS on Low settings, indicating that the card has ample headroom when the resolution and preset are reduced.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus is a 24-core, 24-thread processor from the Core Ultra Series 2, based on the Arrow Lake Refresh codename and built on a 3 nm process at TSMC. It has a base clock of 3.70 GHz and a boost clock of 5.80 GHz, with a TDP of 125 W. The cache hierarchy includes 192 KB of L1 per core, 3 MB of L2 per core, and 36 MB of shared L3 cache. Memory support is dual-channel DDR5 with a bandwidth of 115.2 GB/s.

In synthetic benchmarks, the CPU scores 51731 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 7303 in single-core. Its PassMark multithread score is 60860, and the single-thread score is 4823. The CPU's percentile rank among all CPUs is 96, placing it in the top 4% of processors. Its average benchmark score is 84003, which is 0.2% higher than the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and 1.1% higher than the AMD EPYC 4584PX. The closest rival, the AMD EPYC 7F72, scores 85072, which is 1.3% higher than the 290K Plus.

In this game, the CPU's role is most apparent at lower resolutions. At 1080p Low, the combo achieves 234 FPS, which suggests the CPU can feed the GPU with enough draw calls and physics calculations to sustain very high frame rates. The 24 cores and 5.80 GHz boost clock provide substantial single-thread and multi-thread performance, which is beneficial for a third-person shooter that likely relies on a few primary threads for game logic.

At 4K, the CPU's contribution is less visible because the GPU becomes the limiting factor. The frame rate at 4K Ultra is 40 FPS, and even at 4K Low it is only 81 FPS, which is less than half of the 1080p Low result. This indicates that the CPU is not the bottleneck at high resolutions; rather, the RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB's compute and memory bandwidth constrain the frame rate.

The data suggests that this CPU is overkill for this particular game at 1080p, where the GPU is already the limiting component above Low settings. However, for players who want to maximize frame rates at 1080p or 1440p with high refresh rate monitors, the CPU's strong single-thread performance (736 in Cinebench R15 single-core, 3067 in R20, 7303 in R23) ensures that it will not hold back the GPU.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB ranks 1077 out of 2939 tested combos for this game. This places the combo in the 36.6th percentile of all tested configurations, meaning roughly 63% of tested combos perform better in this title.

This ranking is notably lower than the individual component percentiles would suggest. The CPU ranks in the 96th percentile among all CPUs, while the GPU ranks in the 19th percentile among all GPUs. The combo's overall rank of 1077 is dragged down by the GPU's modest performance, which limits the system in a game that becomes GPU-bound at higher resolutions.

The nearest rival CPUs — the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, AMD EPYC 4584PX, AMD EPYC 9135, and AMD EPYC 7F72 — all have synthetic benchmark scores within 1.3% of the 290K Plus. However, these are all high-end desktop or server processors, and pairing any of them with the RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB would likely produce similar in-game results because the GPU is the limiting factor in this title.

The GPU's nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks — the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF, RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB, Quadro P600, and RTX 4010 — are all within 0.7% of the 4060 Ti 8 GB's 3DMark score. This indicates that the GPU is closely matched with its immediate competitors, and the choice between them would have minimal impact on frame rates in this game.

Overall, the combo rank of 1077 out of 2939 reflects a system that is CPU-heavy but GPU-light for this title. Players using this combo will experience smooth frame rates at 1080p and 1440p, but the 4K performance is limited by the GPU. Upgrading the GPU would yield a significantly higher combo rank, while upgrading the CPU would provide no measurable benefit in this game.