Palworld

Palworld, a survival title released in early 2024, presents a demanding workload that scales heavily with resolution and settings. This analysis examines the measured performance of the Intel Core i5-14600K paired with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, a combination that ranks 1674th out of 1718 tested configurations for this game. The data reveals a system heavily constrained by its graphics processor, where the CPU's substantial compute resources remain largely underutilized across all tested scenarios.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data shows a steep and consistent decline as resolution increases from 1080p to 4K, characteristic of a GPU-bound scenario. At 1080p with High settings, the system produces an average of 42.7 FPS. Moving to 1440p drops this to 31.4 FPS, a reduction of approximately 26%. At 4K, the average falls to 17.2 FPS, which represents a 60% decrease from the 1080p High result. This scaling pattern indicates that the GTX 1650's rendering throughput is the primary limiting factor; the pixel count increase at higher resolutions directly overwhelms the GPU's fill rate and memory bandwidth.

The Low settings preset further illustrates this point. At 1080p Low, the average FPS is 70.5, which is 65% higher than the High preset at the same resolution. However, when resolution jumps to 1440p Low, the average drops to 51 FPS, and at 4K Low, it falls to 25.1 FPS. Even with reduced graphical complexity, the 4K resolution imposes a severe penalty, confirming that the GPU's 128.1 GB/s memory bandwidth and 32 ROPs are insufficient for high pixel throughput. The transition from 1440p to 4K at Low settings still costs over half the frame rate, a clear sign that the limiting component is the graphics card, not the processor.

Ultra settings at 4K produce a barely playable 9.8 FPS average, which is less than a quarter of the 1080p High result. This suggests that the combination of maximum shader complexity and 4K pixel count pushes the GTX 1650 beyond its practical operating range. The data shows a predictable, almost linear degradation from Low to Ultra within each resolution, but the step between 1440p and 4K is disproportionately large, particularly at High and Ultra presets. This behavior is typical of a GPU with 4 GB of GDDR5 memory and a 128-bit bus, where capacity and bandwidth constraints amplify the resolution penalty.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 is the dominant component in this pairing, and its specifications explain the measured results. With a base clock of 1485 MHz and a boost clock of 1665 MHz, the card's 896 shading units deliver a peak FP32 performance of 2.984 TFLOPS. This modest compute throughput is paired with 4 GB of GDDR5 memory operating at 2001 MHz (8 Gbps effective) across a 128-bit interface, yielding 128.1 GB/s of bandwidth. The card's 56 texture units and 32 ROPs provide a texture rate of 93.24 GTexel/s and a pixel rate of 53.28 GPixel/s, respectively.

These figures directly correlate with the FPS drops observed. At 1080p Medium, the card averages 57.7 FPS, which aligns with its pixel rate when accounting for the game's shading complexity. However, at 4K Ultra, the 9.8 FPS result indicates that the GPU is severely bottlenecked by both memory bandwidth and fill rate. The 4 GB VRAM capacity is also a concern; Palworld’s open-world environments with numerous assets can exceed this capacity at higher resolutions, forcing texture swapping that further degrades performance. The card's position at the 43rd percentile of all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 8713, places it slightly below the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 A Mobile (which scores 8746, a 0.4% delta) and the AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100 (8761, a -0.5% delta), confirming its mid-to-low tier status.

The GTX 1650's architecture, based on the Turing chip (TU117) with 4,700 million transistors, is not designed for high-resolution gaming. The measured data shows that the card is only capable of delivering a smooth experience at 1080p Low, where it achieves 70.5 FPS. At every other tested setting, the frame rate falls below the 60 FPS threshold, and at 4K Ultra, it drops to a single-digit figure. The GPU's memory clocks remain constant, but the effective bandwidth is insufficient for the data demands of 4K rendering, making the GTX 1650 the unequivocal performance limiter in this configuration.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution and settings combination for this system?

A: The data shows that 1920x1080 with Low settings yields the highest average FPS at 70.5. This is the only tested configuration that exceeds 60 FPS, making it the most viable option for smooth gameplay.

Q: How does the GTX 1650 compare to its nearest rivals in benchmark scores?

A: The GTX 1650 has an average benchmark score of 8713. It is 0.4% faster than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 A Mobile (8746) and the AMD Radeon 550X (8749), but 0.5% slower than the NVIDIA Quadro P2200 (8671). These are negligible differences, indicating similar performance tiers.

Q: Why is the 4K Ultra preset so slow?

A: At 3840x2160 with Ultra settings, the average FPS is 9.8. This is due to the GPU's limited compute power (2.984 TFLOPS) and memory bandwidth (128.1 GB/s), which cannot handle the combined load of maximum shading effects and 8.3 million pixels.

Q: Does the CPU bottleneck the GPU at any point?

A: The benchmark data does not indicate a CPU bottleneck. The Intel Core i5-14600K has 14 cores and 20 threads, and its performance metrics (e.g., Cinebench R23 multicore score of 32881) are far above the requirements for Palworld, which is clearly limited by the GPU's frame output.

Q: What is the difference between 1080p High and 1440p High?

A: The average FPS drops from 42.7 at 1080p High to 31.4 at 1440p High, a 26.5% reduction. This highlights the significant cost of increasing pixel count on a GPU with a 128-bit memory bus.

Q: Is the GTX 1650's performance consistent with its percentile ranking?

A: Yes, the card ranks at the 43rd percentile of all GPUs. Its measured performance in Palworld, where it fails to reach 60 FPS at 1080p Medium (57.7 FPS), is consistent with a mid-low range product that is not suited for demanding modern titles at high settings.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete set of measured average FPS values for the Intel Core i5-14600K and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 combination in Palworld is as follows:

• 1920x1080: Low settings average 70.5 FPS. Medium settings average 57.7 FPS. High settings average 42.7 FPS. Ultra settings average 34.7 FPS.
• 2560x1440: Low settings average 51.0 FPS. Medium settings average 39.6 FPS. High settings average 31.4 FPS. Ultra settings average 23.8 FPS.
• 3840x2160: Low settings average 25.1 FPS. Medium settings average 21.6 FPS. High settings average 17.2 FPS. Ultra settings average 9.8 FPS.

The data reveals a clear pattern: the gap between Low and Ultra settings widens as resolution increases. At 1080p, the difference between Low (70.5 FPS) and Ultra (34.7 FPS) is 35.8 FPS. At 1440p, this gap narrows to 27.2 FPS (51.0 vs. 23.8). At 4K, the gap shrinks further to 15.3 FPS (25.1 vs. 9.8). This narrowing suggests that at higher resolutions, the GPU is so overwhelmed that even reducing settings cannot compensate for the pixel throughput limitation. The 4K Medium result (21.6 FPS) is only slightly better than 4K High (17.2 FPS), indicating diminishing returns from settings adjustments when the render target is already too large for the hardware.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-14600K plays a secondary, supportive role in this configuration. With 14 cores (a mix of performance and efficiency cores) and 20 threads, the processor operates with a base clock of 3.50 GHz and a boost clock of 5.30 GHz. Its architecture, Raptor Lake-R on a 10 nm process, provides substantial compute headroom. Benchmark scores such as Cinebench R23 multicore at 32881 and single-core at 4642 demonstrate high processing capability, placing the CPU at the 93rd percentile of all processors. Its average benchmark score of 49166 is nearly identical to the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (49062, a 0.2% delta) and the Intel Core i5-14600KF (49367, a -0.4% delta), confirming its top-tier standing.

In Palworld, the CPU's 24 MB of shared L3 cache and dual-channel memory support (DDR4/DDR5) provide ample bandwidth for feeding the GPU. However, the measured FPS data shows that the processor is never the limiting factor. At 1080p Low, where the GPU produces 70.5 FPS, the CPU is likely idle for significant portions of each frame. Even at 4K Ultra with 9.8 FPS, the CPU's frame time is far below the GPU's render time. The CPU's Passmark multithread score of 38682 and physics score of 2473 further indicate that it can handle the game's simulation and physics workloads without breaking a sweat. The performance bottleneck is entirely on the graphics side, as evidenced by the consistent FPS drops across all resolutions and settings that correlate with GPU load, not CPU activity. The i5-14600K's role is to ensure that the GTX 1650 never waits for data, which it does effectively given its high single-thread performance (Passmark single-thread score of 4270). This is a textbook case of a high-end CPU paired with an entry-level GPU, where the former's capabilities are wasted on a title that is intrinsically bound by pixel rendering and memory bandwidth.