Palworld

How This Combo Ranks

The Intel Core i5-14600K paired with the AMD Radeon RX 570 lands at rank 1619 out of 1718 tested combos in Palworld. That places this pairing in the bottom 6% of all configurations, a sobering position that reflects a fundamental imbalance between the two components. The CPU itself is a powerhouse — sitting in the 93rd percentile among all processors with an average benchmark score of 49166 — but the GPU tells a different story. The RX 570, with its average score of 30158, sits in the 74th percentile among all GPUs, yet its nearest rivals in the database include the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 (0.2% higher) and the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT (0.2% higher). This suggests the GPU is the limiting factor in nearly every scenario, and the data reinforces that interpretation.

The ranking gap here is stark. The CPU alone outperforms its nearest rival, the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, by 0.2%, while the GPU trails the RTX 5060 by the same margin. This is a classic bottleneck scenario: a top-tier processor paired with an entry-level graphics card from a previous generation. The measured FPS data confirms this — even at 1080p Low, the combo only reaches 76 FPS average, which is playable but far from the high-refresh experience the CPU could enable with a stronger GPU. The rank of 1619 out of 1718 indicates that most other tested combos deliver better Palworld performance, and the data suggests the GPU is why.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS rows reveal a clear pattern across all three resolutions: the Low preset consistently delivers the best playable experience, while Ultra is almost universally unusable. At 1080p, Low averages 76 FPS, which is the only setting that clears the 60 FPS threshold. Medium drops to 59.8 FPS, High falls to 46.6 FPS, and Ultra plunges to 37.1 FPS. For a survival game like Palworld, where smooth movement and quick reactions matter, the Low preset is the only sensible choice at this resolution.

Moving to 1440p, the situation tightens further. Low averages 45.9 FPS, Medium 39.5 FPS, High 27.4 FPS, and Ultra 25.3 FPS. None of these are ideal, but Low remains the most playable option, barely staying above 45 FPS. At 4K, the picture is grim: Low averages 27.7 FPS, Medium 22.7 FPS, High 17 FPS, and Ultra 15.8 FPS. The data strongly indicates that users should stick to the Low preset at any resolution, and for anything above 1080p, the experience will be compromised regardless of settings. The benchmark results suggest that the Low preset is the best balance of playability and visual fidelity for this combo, with Medium only viable if the user accepts sub-60 FPS.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K is dramatic and reveals where the bottleneck lies. At Low settings, 1080p yields 76 FPS, 1440p drops to 45.9 FPS (a 39.6% reduction), and 4K falls to 27.7 FPS (a 63.6% reduction from 1080p). This scaling pattern is characteristic of a GPU-bound scenario — the RX 570's 4 GB of GDDR5 memory and 224.0 GB/s bandwidth simply cannot keep up with the increasing pixel count. The CPU, with its 14 cores and 20 threads, is not the limiting factor here; the GPU's rendering throughput is.

The data shows that the gap between settings widens as resolution increases. At 1080p, the difference between Low and Ultra is 38.9 FPS (76 vs 37.1). At 1440p, that gap narrows to 20.6 FPS (45.9 vs 25.3), and at 4K it shrinks to 11.9 FPS (27.7 vs 15.8). This compression at higher resolutions is a telltale sign that the GPU is saturated — it cannot exploit the visual headroom of higher settings because it's already maxed out on pixel throughput. The i5-14600K, which can boost to 5.30 GHz and has a 24 MB shared L3 cache, is likely idle waiting for the GPU to finish each frame. This combo would benefit from a GPU upgrade far more than a CPU upgrade.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the full settings range is available: Low averages 76 FPS, Medium 59.8 FPS, High 46.6 FPS, and Ultra 37.1 FPS. The 76 FPS at Low is the only figure that approaches a smooth experience, while Ultra is borderline unplayable for a game that involves combat and exploration. The step from Low to Medium costs 16.2 FPS, and from Medium to High another 13.2 FPS, showing that each quality tier extracts a significant performance penalty.

At 2560x1440, the numbers shift downward across the board: Low averages 45.9 FPS, Medium 39.5 FPS, High 27.4 FPS, and Ultra 25.3 FPS. The Medium preset at 1440p is nearly identical to High at 1080p (39.5 vs 46.6), suggesting that the resolution increase negates roughly one full settings tier. At 3840x2160, the results are uniformly poor: Low 27.7 FPS, Medium 22.7 FPS, High 17 FPS, and Ultra 15.8 FPS. Even the lowest settings at 4K fail to reach 30 FPS, making 4K essentially unsupported for this combo. The data shows a consistent hierarchy — Low > Medium > High > Ultra at every resolution — but the absolute values make clear that only 1080p Low is truly viable for regular play.

FAQ

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

A: The measured data shows 1920x1080 with Low settings delivers 76 FPS average, the highest of any tested configuration. Medium at the same resolution yields 59.8 FPS, which is acceptable, but Low offers the most headroom.

Q: How does this combo rank against other tested configurations?

A: It ranks 1619 out of 1718 tested combos, placing it in the bottom 6%. The GPU is the primary constraint, as the CPU ranks in the 93rd percentile while the GPU sits in the 74th percentile.

Q: Is the CPU or GPU more responsible for the performance seen here?

A: The GPU is clearly the limiting factor. The resolution scaling data shows performance drops sharply from 1080p to 4K (76 FPS to 27.7 FPS at Low), which is characteristic of GPU saturation. The CPU's high benchmark scores suggest it is not the bottleneck.

Q: Can this combo handle 1440p gaming in Palworld?

A: At 1440p, the best result is 45.9 FPS on Low settings, with Medium at 39.5 FPS. This is playable but not smooth, and High or Ultra settings fall below 30 FPS, so 1440p is only feasible on the lowest presets.

Q: What is the maximum FPS this combo can achieve?

A: The maximum measured average is 76 FPS at 1080p with Low settings. No other configuration reaches above 60 FPS, with Medium at 1080p being the next closest at 59.8 FPS.

Q: How does the RX 570 compare to its nearest GPU rivals?

A: The RX 570 has an average benchmark score of 30158, which is 0.2% lower than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 and 0.2% lower than the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT. It also trails the NVIDIA Tesla M60 by 0.6% and the RTX 5070 Mobile by 0.8%.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-14600K is a 14-core, 20-thread processor from the Raptor Lake architecture, built on a 10 nm process. Its base clock is 3.50 GHz with a boost clock of 5.30 GHz, and it carries a 24 MB shared L3 cache plus 2 MB L2 cache per core. In synthetic benchmarks, it scores 32881 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 4642 in single-core, with a Geekbench multi-core score of 15846. These figures place it in the 93rd percentile of all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 49166 that edges out the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X by 0.2%.

In Palworld, this CPU is almost certainly not the performance bottleneck. The measured FPS data shows that performance scales heavily with resolution, which points to GPU limitation. The CPU's strong single-thread performance (Cinebench R23 single-core 4642) and multi-thread capabilities (Cinebench R23 multi-core 32881) are more than sufficient for a survival game's typical physics and AI workloads. The data implies that the i5-14600K is capable of feeding a much faster GPU, and the current RX 570 pairing leaves the CPU's potential largely untapped. For this game, the CPU role is to provide headroom that the GPU cannot use — a classic mismatch that the rank of 1619 out of 1718 reflects.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 570 is a Polaris 20 chip based on GCN 4.0 architecture, manufactured on a 14 nm process at GlobalFoundries. It has 2048 shading units, 128 TMUs, and 32 ROPs, with a base clock of 1168 MHz and a boost clock of 1244 MHz. The memory configuration is 4 GB of GDDR5 on a 256-bit bus, providing 224.0 GB/s of bandwidth. Its FP32 performance is 5.095 TFLOPS, and it supports DirectX 12 (12_0), OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.3. The GPU's average benchmark score is 30158, placing it in the 74th percentile, with its nearest rival being the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 at 0.2% higher.

The GPU's role in Palworld is entirely dominant in determining the measured FPS. The 4 GB VRAM capacity is a likely constraint at higher resolutions, where texture data exceeds available memory. The 224.0 GB/s bandwidth, while reasonable for its era, is insufficient for 4K rendering, as evidenced by the 27.7 FPS at 4K Low. The data shows that the RX 570's performance ceiling is around 76 FPS at 1080p Low, and every increase in resolution or settings pushes it further toward unplayable territory. The GPU's 74th percentile ranking, combined with its nearest rivals being modern cards like the RTX 5060 and RX 7700 XT, indicates that while it's not the weakest GPU in the database, it is vastly outmatched by the CPU in this pairing. The measured FPS breakdown confirms that the RX 570 is the component that users should upgrade first for better Palworld performance.