Outriders

The Intel Core i5-13400F paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 delivers a wide spread of frame rates across Outriders’ four presets and three resolutions, with the data showing a clear pattern of GPU-bound scaling at higher settings and CPU-limited behavior at lower ones. At 1080p Low, the combo reaches 221.4 FPS average, while 4K Ultra drops to 61.2 FPS, a 72% reduction that highlights how the game’s visual load shifts from the processor to the graphics card as resolution and preset complexity increase.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS rows show a predictable decline as resolution rises, but the magnitude of that decline depends heavily on the preset. At Low settings, moving from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 reduces average FPS from 221.4 to 190.6, a 13.9% drop, and then further to 155.5 at 3840x2160, which is 29.7% below the 1080p figure. This relatively modest scaling at Low suggests that the RTX 4090’s raw shading and rasterization throughput — reflected in its 82.58 TFLOPS FP32 and 1,290.2 GTexel/s texture rate — is not fully taxed until 4K, and that the Core i5-13400F’s 10 cores and 16 threads are still able to feed the GPU adequately at lower settings.

Medium settings show a steeper curve: 202 FPS at 1080p, 170.9 at 1440p, and 114.2 at 4K. The 4K figure is 43.5% lower than the 1080p result, indicating that additional shading work, likely from more detailed lighting and particle effects, begins to engage the GPU more aggressively. High settings compress the range further, with 179.3 FPS at 1080p, 156.5 at 1440p, and 86.1 at 4K — the 4K value is 52% below 1080p. Ultra exhibits the largest proportional drop: 160.8 FPS at 1080p falls to 117.4 at 1440p, then to 61.2 at 4K, a 61.9% reduction from the 1080p baseline.

The resolution scaling pattern indicates that at 1080p and 1440p with Low or Medium presets, the frame rate is likely constrained by the CPU’s ability to issue draw calls and manage game logic, since the RTX 4090’s 24 GB of GDDR6X memory and 1.01 TB/s bandwidth are more than sufficient for these loads. At 4K Ultra, the GPU becomes the clear bottleneck, as the pixel rate of 443.5 GPixel/s is pushed hard by the highest preset’s added geometric and post-processing demands. The data shows that 1440p High, with 156.5 FPS, sits in a sweet spot where neither component is completely saturated, while 4K Ultra at 61.2 FPS is the most demanding configuration tested.

Settings Recommendations

For players targeting the highest refresh rates, the Low preset at 1080p delivers 221.4 FPS, which is 38% higher than the Medium preset’s 202 FPS and 61.9% higher than Ultra’s 160.8 FPS. However, the jump from Low to Medium at 1080p costs only 19.4 FPS (8.8% reduction) while likely providing noticeably better visual fidelity, making Medium a more balanced choice for 1080p displays. At 1440p, Medium offers 170.9 FPS, which is 45.6% above High’s 156.5 FPS and 45.6% higher than Ultra’s 117.4 FPS — the Medium preset at this resolution provides a substantial frame rate advantage over the higher presets with only a moderate visual compromise.

The 4K data tells a different story. Ultra at 3840x2160 yields 61.2 FPS, which is playable but below the 86.1 FPS of High and far below Medium’s 114.2 FPS. The difference between High and Ultra at 4K is 24.9 FPS (29% reduction), suggesting that Ultra’s additional effects tax the GPU heavily without a proportional frame rate benefit. Medium at 4K, at 114.2 FPS, is 86.7% faster than Ultra and 32.6% faster than High, making it the recommended preset for 4K displays where smooth motion matters more than the highest settings. Low at 4K reaches 155.5 FPS, which is 154% above Ultra, but the visual quality loss is likely too severe for most users. Based on the measured rows, Medium at 1440p provides the best combination of frame rate (170.9 FPS) and visual fidelity, while Medium at 4K (114.2 FPS) is the optimal choice for high-resolution displays.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-13400F is a 10-core, 16-thread Raptor Lake-S processor with a base clock of 2.50 GHz and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz, and its benchmark scores place it in the 82nd percentile of all CPUs. In 3DMark tests, it scores 7,314 with 16 threads and 7,307 with max threads, showing that its performance scales well with thread count, but single-thread performance is modest at 960 in 3DMark single-thread and 3,004 in Cinebench R23 single-core. This matters for Outriders, which is a looter shooter that typically relies on a few heavily loaded threads for game logic and physics, but the data shows that the CPU is not the primary limiter at higher presets and resolutions.

Looking at the resolution scaling, the fact that 1080p Low produces 221.4 FPS and 1440p Low produces 190.6 FPS — a 13.9% drop — indicates that the CPU is still able to maintain high frame rates even as the GPU’s workload increases. If the CPU were severely constrained, we would expect the 1080p and 1440p Low results to be much closer, since the GPU would be idle-waiting. Instead, the 4K Low result of 155.5 FPS is 29.7% below 1080p, showing that the GPU begins to take over as the limiting factor at 4K. The Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 21,279 and Geekbench multi-core score of 10,971 demonstrate that the 10-core configuration provides ample parallel throughput for modern game engines, and the 20 MB shared L3 cache helps maintain data locality for the game’s world streaming.

Compared to its nearest rivals, the i5-13400F’s average benchmark score of 25,236 is 0.1% above the Intel Core i7-13620H (25,201), 0.5% above the AMD EPYC 9474F (25,103), and 0.5% above the AMD Ryzen AI 5 PRO 340 (25,099), while being 0.5% below the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D (25,365). These tiny deltas mean that the CPU is effectively tied with several other processors in general compute, but for gaming, its 4.60 GHz boost clock and 10 cores give it enough single-thread and multi-thread headroom to avoid bottlenecking the RTX 4090 until the very lowest presets at 1080p, where the 221.4 FPS result likely approaches the CPU’s practical limit for this title.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo of Intel Core i5-13400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 ranks 130th out of 1,693 tested combinations in Outriders, placing it in the top 7.7% of all systems in the database. This rank is notable because the GPU itself sits in the 91st percentile among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 66,473, while the CPU is in the 82nd percentile. The gap between the GPU’s high percentile and the combo’s overall rank suggests that the CPU is holding back the system in some scenarios, particularly at lower resolutions where the RTX 4090’s massive compute resources cannot be fully utilized.

The combo’s rank of 130 is respectable but not top-tier, which aligns with the measured FPS data showing that at 4K Ultra, the system achieves 61.2 FPS — a playable but not exceptionally high result for the most powerful consumer GPU available. The nearest GPU rivals, including the NVIDIA Tesla T4 (66,733 average score, 0.4% higher), NVIDIA Tesla P40 (66,127, 0.5% lower), AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56 (67,097, 0.9% higher), and NVIDIA Quadro P6000 (67,320, 1.3% higher), are all workstation or datacenter cards that would not perform as well in gaming due to driver optimizations, yet their average scores are close to the RTX 4090’s. This underscores that the RTX 4090’s 66,473 average benchmark score is a general compute metric, while its 24 GB of GDDR6X and 82.58 TFLOPS FP32 make it dominant in gaming, but the i5-13400F’s 10 cores are sufficient to keep the system competitive in the 130th position.

For comparison, a system with a higher-end CPU like a 16-core or 24-core part would likely push this combo into the top 50, given that the RTX 4090’s performance in Outriders at 1080p Low (221.4 FPS) is already high and the CPU’s 3DMark max threads score of 7,307 is moderate. The 130th rank out of 1,693 means that 1,563 combos perform worse, which indicates that the i5-13400F + RTX 4090 pairing is a strong but not elite configuration for this game, primarily due to the CPU’s mid-range positioning rather than any GPU deficiency.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is built on the Ada Lovelace architecture with a 5 nm process from TSMC, featuring 76,300 million transistors on a 609 mm² die. Its 24 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus provides 1.01 TB/s of bandwidth, which is critical for 4K textures and high-resolution rendering in Outriders. The GPU’s base clock of 2235 MHz and boost clock of 2520 MHz, combined with 16,384 shading units, 512 TMUs, and 176 ROPs, deliver 82.58 TFLOPS FP32 and a pixel rate of 443.5 GPixel/s. These specifications explain why the GPU can push 155.5 FPS at 4K Low, where memory bandwidth and shading are the primary demands, and 61.2 FPS at 4K Ultra, where the added pixel and texture work is substantial.

The GPU’s benchmark scores confirm its dominance: 38,194 in Passmark G3D and 31,7684 in Geekbench OpenCL, with a percentile ranking of 91 among all GPUs. In Outriders, the measured data shows that the GPU is the limiting component at 4K across all presets, as evidenced by the steep FPS drops from 1440p to 2160p. For example, at High settings, the drop from 156.5 FPS (1440p) to 86.1 FPS (4K) is 45%, which is a much larger decline than the 12.6% drop from 1080p to 1440p. This non-linear scaling is characteristic of a GPU that is hitting memory bandwidth or shader throughput limits at higher resolutions.

The RTX 4090’s 128 RT cores and 512 tensor cores do not directly benefit Outriders if the game does not use ray tracing or DLSS, but the 82.58 TFLOPS FP16 (1:1) performance and 1,290.2 GTexel/s texture rate ensure that traditional rasterization is handled efficiently. The GPU’s 450 W TDP and 850 W suggested PSU are not reflected in the measured FPS, but they indicate that the card is designed for maximum performance without power constraints. The data shows that at 1080p Medium (202 FPS) and 1440p Medium (170.9 FPS), the GPU is still well within its capabilities, while at 4K Ultra (61.2 FPS), it is operating at its limit for this title, delivering a playable but demanding experience. Overall, the RTX 4090’s role in this combo is to provide massive headroom at lower resolutions and to enable high-refresh-rate 1440p gaming, while at 4K, it remains the primary driver of performance, with the CPU playing a secondary role.