Outriders

The pairing of a six-core Comet Lake processor with NVIDIA’s flagship Ada Lovelace GPU creates a fascinating bottleneck study in Outriders. The data shows a configuration where the RTX 4090’s immense rendering power is progressively unleashed as resolution climbs, while the Core i5-10400F struggles to keep pace at lower settings. This analysis breaks down the measured frame rates, the CPU’s synthetic standing, and the GPU’s raw specifications to explain exactly where this combo excels and where it leaves performance on the table.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals a clear inverse relationship between resolution and frame rate, but the scaling pattern is far from uniform. At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo achieves 154.8 FPS average, which is the highest figure recorded across all configurations. Moving to 2560x1440 Low drops performance to 135 FPS, a reduction of approximately 12.8% from the 1080p figure. The jump to 3840x2160 Low yields 105.7 FPS, which represents a 21.7% decline from the 1440p result.

This scaling behavior changes dramatically when settings are increased. At Ultra settings, the 1080p score of 110.1 FPS falls to 93.4 FPS at 1440p, and then plummets to 64.2 FPS at 4K. The 4K Ultra result is the lowest in the entire dataset, standing at just 41.5% of the peak 1080p Low performance. The gap between Low and Ultra widens considerably at higher resolutions: at 1080p the difference is 44.7 FPS, at 1440p it expands to 41.6 FPS, and at 4K it reaches 41.5 FPS.

The data indicates that at 1080p, the CPU is the primary limiting factor. The RTX 4090’s capabilities are effectively capped by the i5-10400F’s single-thread performance, as evidenced by the relatively modest frame rate gains when dropping from Ultra to Low at this resolution. However, as resolution increases to 4K, the GPU becomes the dominant constraint. The 4K Ultra score of 64.2 FPS versus the 4K Low score of 105.7 FPS shows a 39.3% performance swing, indicating that pixel throughput and memory bandwidth are now the bottlenecks. This is a classic sign of a GPU-bound scenario where the CPU has sufficient headroom to feed the graphics card.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the benchmark database, this specific CPU-GPU pairing achieves a combo rank of 745 out of 1693 tested combinations in Outriders. This places it in the upper-middle tier of all tested systems, though notably not in the top quartile. The position reflects the inherent imbalance: the RTX 4090 is an end-of-life flagship, but the i5-10400F is a mid-range desktop part from an older generation.

The rank becomes more meaningful when considering the GPU’s standalone percentile. The RTX 4090 sits in the 91st percentile among all GPUs, while the i5-10400F ranks in the 73rd percentile among all CPUs. The combo’s rank of 745 out of 1693 (approximately the 56th percentile) sits below both individual component percentiles, confirming that the processor is dragging down the overall system performance. In a game like Outriders, which relies heavily on sustained frame delivery, this mismatch prevents the combo from reaching the top echelons of the ranking table.

The data suggests that with a stronger CPU, this GPU would likely achieve a much higher combo rank. The 4K Ultra result of 64.2 FPS, while playable, is far below what the RTX 4090 is capable of in more balanced systems. The gap between this combo’s rank and the GPU’s raw potential highlights a common pitfall in system building: pairing a top-tier GPU with a mid-range CPU.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-10400F brings six physical cores and twelve threads to the table, with a base clock of 2.90 GHz and a boost clock of 4.30 GHz. This Comet Lake architecture, built on Intel’s 14 nm process, provides 12 MB of shared L3 cache and supports dual-channel DDR4 memory with a bandwidth of 42.7 GB/s. The CPU’s synthetic benchmarks paint a picture of a capable but not exceptional performer: the Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 10297 and single-core score of 1453 are solid for a six-core part, but they lag behind modern competitors.

In Outriders specifically, the CPU’s impact is most evident at 1080p and Low settings. The 154.8 FPS average at 1080p Low represents the ceiling imposed by the processor’s single-thread performance. The 3DMark single-thread score of 688 and the Geekbench single-core score of 1454 indicate that the i5-10400F cannot feed the RTX 4090 enough draw calls to saturate its rendering pipeline at lower resolutions. This is why the 1080p Ultra score of 110.1 FPS is only 28.9% higher than the 1080p Low score, a relatively small gain compared to what a stronger CPU would allow.

The CPU’s multi-threaded capabilities, as shown by the Cinebench R20 multi-core score of 4324 and the PassMark multi-thread score of 12115, are adequate for the game’s background tasks and physics calculations. However, Outriders is not heavily multi-threaded, so the processor’s 12 threads provide diminishing returns. The data shows that the CPU’s bottleneck is primarily in single-threaded performance, which directly limits frame rates at 1080p and, to a lesser extent, at 1440p.

Measured FPS Breakdown

Examining the full dataset, the measured FPS values show consistent scaling across all resolutions and settings. At 1920x1080, the range spans from 110.1 FPS at Ultra to 154.8 FPS at Low, with Medium at 136.5 FPS and High at 123.1 FPS. The 1080p results demonstrate a clear hierarchy where lower settings yield higher frame rates, but the differences between settings are compressed due to CPU limitations.

Moving to 2560x1440, the performance envelope tightens. Low settings produce 135 FPS, Medium achieves 118.9 FPS, High delivers 109.1 FPS, and Ultra drops to 93.4 FPS. The 1440p results show a more pronounced spread between settings compared to 1080p, indicating that the GPU is beginning to take on a larger share of the workload. The difference between Low and Ultra at 1440p is 41.6 FPS, which is slightly narrower than the 44.7 FPS gap at 1080p.

At 3840x2160, the GPU becomes the dominant factor. Low settings yield 105.7 FPS, Medium drops to 98.8 FPS, High falls to 84.4 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 64.2 FPS. The 4K results show the largest percentage differences between settings, with Ultra delivering 39.3% less performance than Low. This scaling pattern confirms that the RTX 4090’s memory bandwidth of 1.01 TB/s and 24 GB of GDDR6X VRAM are being fully utilized at this resolution, while the CPU has sufficient headroom to avoid becoming a constraint.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is a behemoth of a graphics card, built on the Ada Lovelace architecture using a 5 nm TSMC process. With 16,384 shading units, 512 texture mapping units, and 176 raster operation pipelines, the GPU delivers 82.58 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. The 128 RT cores and 512 tensor cores provide hardware acceleration for ray tracing and AI-based features. The card’s 24 GB of GDDR6X memory operates across a 384-bit bus, achieving a bandwidth of 1.01 TB/s.

The GPU’s clock speeds are equally impressive, with a base clock of 2235 MHz and a boost clock of 2520 MHz. The memory runs at 1313 MHz with 21 Gbps effective speed. These specifications translate into a PassMark G3D score of 38194, which places the RTX 4090 in the 91st percentile among all GPUs. The nearest rivals in the benchmark database include the NVIDIA Tesla T4 with a deltaPct of -0.4% and the AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56 with a deltaPct of -0.9%, showing that the RTX 4090 sits in a tight cluster of high-performance cards.

In Outriders, the GPU’s role is most apparent at 4K resolution. The 4K Ultra score of 64.2 FPS, while the lowest in the dataset, demonstrates the card’s ability to handle demanding pixel workloads. The 4K Low score of 105.7 FPS shows that even at lower settings, the GPU’s memory bandwidth and compute resources are fully engaged. The RTX 4090’s 24 GB VRAM capacity ensures that Outriders’ texture streaming and asset loading never hit memory limits, even at 4K Ultra settings. The GPU’s 443.5 GPixel/s pixel rate and 1,290.2 GTexel/s texture rate are more than sufficient for this game’s visual demands, allowing the card to maintain high frame rates when the CPU is not the bottleneck.