Palworld

Palworld presents an unusually balanced workload for the Intel Core i5-10400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 pairing. The data shows that this combination delivers exceptional frame rates across all tested resolutions, but the performance scaling pattern reveals a clear division of labor: the RTX 4090 dominates at higher resolutions, while the i5-10400F becomes the limiting factor at 1080p. This benchmark set demonstrates that even a top-tier GPU can be constrained by a mid-range 10th-generation processor, yet the overall experience remains highly playable, with the combo ranking in the 121st position out of 1718 tested configurations in Palworld.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution for this combo in Palworld?

A: The data indicates that 2560x1440 at High settings provides the most balanced experience, delivering 145.6 FPS average. This resolution offers a substantial visual upgrade over 1080p while maintaining frame rates well above 144Hz, unlike 4K which drops to 78.8 FPS at the same settings.

Q: How does the RTX 4090 compare to its nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The RTX 4090's average benchmark score of 66,473 places it slightly below the NVIDIA Tesla T4, which scores 66,733 (a 0.4% deficit). It outperforms the NVIDIA Tesla P40 by 0.5% and trails the AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56 by 0.9%, showing tight competition among high-end cards in aggregate testing.

Q: Is the Intel Core i5-10400F a bottleneck for the RTX 4090?

A: Benchmark results indicate yes, particularly at 1080p where the frame rate ceiling appears. The CPU's single-thread score of 688 in 3DMark and its Passmark single-thread score of 2,541 suggest it cannot fully feed the GPU at lower resolutions, evidenced by the relatively small FPS gap between 1080p and 1440p.

Q: What is the CPU's performance percentile compared to all processors?

A: The Intel Core i5-10400F sits in the 73rd percentile when compared to all CPUs in the database. Its average benchmark score of 14,168 places it within 1.2% of rivals like the AMD EPYC 7552, AMD Ryzen 3 7320C, Intel Core i5-8500, and AMD Ryzen Embedded V2546.

Q: How much VRAM does the RTX 4090 have and what type?

A: The RTX 4090 features 24 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus, providing 1.01 TB/s of bandwidth. This substantial memory configuration is more than sufficient for Palworld at any tested setting, even at 4K Ultra where the game only demands 63.7 FPS.

Q: What is the frame rate difference between Low and Ultra settings at 1080p?

A: The data shows a 75.8 FPS gap, with Low settings achieving 240.7 FPS and Ultra dropping to 164.9 FPS at 1920x1080. This represents a 31.5% reduction in performance when moving from the lowest to the highest preset.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data strongly favors Medium settings as the optimal balance for this combination. At 1920x1080, Medium delivers 223.8 FPS compared to 240.7 FPS on Low, a mere 7.0% reduction that yields substantial visual improvements. The jump from Medium to High costs 23.0 FPS (dropping to 200.8 FPS), while Ultra exacts a further 35.9 FPS penalty, settling at 164.9 FPS.

At 2560x1440, the pattern shifts slightly. Medium produces 187.6 FPS, which remains comfortably above 144Hz refresh rates, while High delivers 145.6 FPS—still smooth but closer to the threshold. For 4K gaming, the choice narrows considerably: Medium achieves 106.2 FPS, High drops to 78.8 FPS, and Ultra falls to 63.7 FPS. The data suggests that players targeting 60 FPS at 4K should select High, while those with 120Hz displays should stick with Medium.

Ultra settings provide diminishing returns across all resolutions. The 4K Ultra result of 63.7 FPS is only 19.2% higher than the 4K Medium frame rate of 106.2 FPS in relative smoothness, yet costs significantly more GPU headroom. For competitive play or high-refresh monitors, Medium at 1440p offers the best combination of visual fidelity and performance, delivering 187.6 FPS while maintaining 79.5% of the maximum Low-settings throughput.

Resolution Scaling

The performance scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals the RTX 4090's immense headroom and the CPU's constraints. At High settings, the frame rate drops from 200.8 FPS at 1920x1080 to 145.6 FPS at 2560x1440—a 27.5% reduction—then falls further to 78.8 FPS at 3840x2160, a 45.9% drop from 1440p. This pattern indicates that the GPU becomes increasingly dominant as resolution rises, with the 4K result showing only 39.2% of the 1080p performance.

The Low settings data provides the clearest evidence of CPU bottlenecking. At 1080p, Low settings yield 240.7 FPS, but moving to 1440p only drops this to 209.9 FPS, a modest 12.8% decrease. The 4K Low result of 129.9 FPS represents a 46.0% drop from 1440p, suggesting that the CPU caps performance around 240 FPS at lower resolutions. This ceiling is further confirmed by the 1080p Medium result of 223.8 FPS versus 1440p Medium's 187.6 FPS, showing a smaller-than-expected 16.2% decline that points to CPU limitations rather than GPU scaling.

The Ultra preset shows the most linear scaling, with 164.9 FPS at 1080p, 108.8 FPS at 1440p, and 63.7 FPS at 4K. This 61.4% reduction from 1080p to 4K indicates that Ultra settings finally load the GPU sufficiently to mask the CPU bottleneck. The data suggests that the i5-10400F's 6 cores and 12 threads become the limiting component below 4K, while the RTX 4090's 82.58 TFLOPS of FP32 performance remains underutilized at 1080p and 1440p.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the full settings range was tested. Low settings achieve 240.7 FPS average, representing the maximum throughput of this combination. Medium settings deliver 223.8 FPS, maintaining 93.0% of the Low performance. High settings produce 200.8 FPS, a further 10.3% reduction. Ultra settings drop to 164.9 FPS, which is 31.5% below the Low setting result but still exceptionally smooth.

The 2560x1440 resolution shows a compressed range. Low settings produce 209.9 FPS, Medium delivers 187.6 FPS, and High settings achieve 145.6 FPS. Ultra at 1440p yields 108.8 FPS, which represents 51.8% of the Low setting performance. The gap between Medium and High at 1440p is 42.0 FPS, larger than the 23.0 FPS gap at 1080p, indicating the GPU is becoming more involved.

At 3840x2160, the performance hierarchy remains consistent but compressed. Low settings achieve 129.9 FPS, Medium delivers 106.2 FPS, High produces 78.8 FPS, and Ultra drops to 63.7 FPS. The spread from Low to Ultra at 4K is 66.2 FPS, compared to 75.8 FPS at 1080p. This compression suggests that at 4K, both CPU and GPU are working near their limits, with the RTX 4090's 24 GB of GDDR6X memory and 1.01 TB/s bandwidth helping to maintain playable frame rates even at the highest presets.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 serves as the primary performance driver in this configuration, particularly at higher resolutions. Its Ada Lovelace architecture, built on a 5 nm process at TSMC, contains 76,300 million transistors across a 609 mm² die. The GPU operates at a 2235 MHz base clock and boosts to 2520 MHz, with memory running at 1313 MHz (21 Gbps effective). This configuration produces 82.58 TFLOPS of FP32 performance and a texture rate of 1,290.2 GTexel/s.

The 24 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus provides 1.01 TB/s of bandwidth, which proves critical for 4K performance. At 3840x2160, the RTX 4090 maintains 129.9 FPS on Low settings, demonstrating that memory bandwidth is not a constraint even at the highest resolution. The GPU's 16,384 shading units and 512 texture mapping units handle Palworld's open-world rendering efficiently, though the 176 ROPs appear sufficient for the tested settings.

The RTX 4090's 91st percentile ranking among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 66,473, places it slightly below the NVIDIA Tesla T4 in synthetic tests. However, in real-world Palworld performance, the GPU's capabilities shine at 4K, where it achieves 78.8 FPS at High settings—a result that few other cards could match. The GPU's 128 RT cores and 512 tensor cores provide additional headroom for future graphical demands, though Palworld's current implementation does not appear to leverage these features heavily based on the measured frame rates.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-10400F, with its 6 cores and 12 threads based on Comet Lake architecture, acts as the performance ceiling at lower resolutions. The CPU's 2.90 GHz base clock and 4.30 GHz boost clock, combined with 12 MB of shared L3 cache, deliver sufficient single-thread performance for Palworld's game logic. However, the 3DMark single-thread score of 688 and Cinebench R23 single-core score of 1,453 indicate that the processor's per-core performance is modest by modern standards.

The CPU's 73rd percentile ranking among all processors, with an average benchmark score of 14,168, places it near the AMD EPYC 7552 (0.4% ahead) and AMD Ryzen 3 7320C (0.8% behind). This positioning suggests that the i5-10400F is a competent mid-range processor that can handle Palworld's requirements, but its 14 nm process node and 65 W TDP limit its ability to feed the RTX 4090 at high frame rates.

Evidence of CPU limitation appears in the 1080p data, where Low settings achieve 240.7 FPS but Medium only reaches 223.8 FPS—a smaller gap than expected if the GPU were the bottleneck. The Passmark multithread score of 12,115 and Cinebench R23 multicore score of 10,297 show that the CPU's aggregate throughput is adequate, but the 3DMark 4-thread score of 2,560 reveals that scaling beyond 4 cores provides diminishing returns for this workload. The CPU's dual-channel DDR4 memory support with 42.7 GB/s bandwidth may also contribute to the frame rate ceiling observed at 1080p.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of Intel Core i5-10400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 achieves rank 121 out of 1,718 tested combos in Palworld, placing it in the top 7.0% of all configurations. This ranking reflects the GPU's dominance in the pairing, as the RTX 4090's 91st percentile GPU score significantly outweighs the CPU's 73rd percentile ranking.

The rank position indicates that 120 configurations deliver higher average frame rates in Palworld, likely featuring newer, higher-clocked processors that can better utilize the RTX 4090's capabilities. The CPU's nearest rivals—the AMD EPYC 7552, AMD Ryzen 3 7320C, Intel Core i5-8500, and AMD Ryzen Embedded V2546—all score within 1.2% of the i5-10400F in synthetic benchmarks, suggesting that processor choice within this performance tier has minimal impact on overall ranking.

The data shows that this combo's strength lies in its 4K performance, where the RTX 4090 can operate closer to its full potential. At 3840x2160, the combination achieves 78.8 FPS on High settings, which is 32.5% higher than the 1440p High result would suggest if scaling were linear. This indicates that the combo's ranking would improve further if the benchmark weighted 4K performance more heavily, as the CPU bottleneck diminishes with increasing resolution. The 121st rank out of 1,718 combos represents a strong showing for a mid-range CPU paired with a flagship GPU, with the data suggesting that only processors with significantly higher single-thread performance would meaningfully improve Palworld's frame rates.