Ready Or Not

Ready Or Not is a tactical shooter that punishes hesitation, and this pairing of an Intel Core i5-9400 with an AMD Radeon RX 7700 shows a system that is heavily GPU-bound at every resolution tested. The benchmark data presents a clear picture: the RX 7700’s massive headroom at 1080p is tamed by the i5-9400’s six threads, while at 4K the GPU is doing nearly all of the work. The results are measured and consistent across four quality presets, offering a practical guide to where this combination excels and where it leaves performance on the table.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K is steep and consistent, but the shape of that drop tells you exactly what is limiting the system at each step. At 1080p with High settings, the combo produces 224 FPS average. Move to 1440p and that falls to 141 FPS, a 37% reduction. Go to 4K and it drops again to 74 FPS, another 47% cut from the 1440p figure. The scaling is not linear, and that is the tell.

At 1080p the i5-9400 is holding the RX 7700 back. The data shows a 224 FPS average at High settings, which is far beyond typical monitor refresh rates, but the gap between the 1080p and 1440p numbers is too small to be pure GPU scaling. A GPU that is 20% faster at 1080p should not lose 30% of its frame rate when pixel count nearly doubles, unless the CPU is preventing the GPU from stretching at the lower resolution. At 4K, the GPU becomes the clear limit: 74 FPS at High is exactly the kind of figure you get when the rendering pipeline is filled with pixel work, and the CPU is idle waiting. The 52 FPS at Ultra is further proof that the Radeon RX 7700 is maxed out, not the processor.

The 4K Medium setting provides the only min/max data in the entire table: 69 to 93 FPS. That 24-frame spread suggests that even at 4K, some scenes are still lightly threaded, and the i5-9400 can occasionally inject frame time delays. But the overall pattern is unmistakable: 1080p is a CPU-limited scenario, 4K is a GPU-limited scenario, and 1440p sits in the middle where neither component is fully maxed but both are working.

FAQ

Q: Why does the 1080p Ultra setting score 157 FPS when the 1080p High scores 224?

A: The gap from High to Ultra at 1080p is 67 FPS, a 30% penalty. At 4K the same preset jump costs only 22 FPS (74 to 52). This is exactly what a CPU bottleneck looks like: at 1080p the processor is the limiter, so adding GPU-heavy settings does not increase frame time, and the extra draw calls from Ultra are pushed into the GPU, which has headroom. At 4K the GPU is already saturated, so the preset change has a smaller absolute effect.

Q: Is the i5-9400 paired well with the RX 7700 for this game?

A: At 1440p and 4K, yes. The GPU is the primary determinant of framerate there. At 1080p, no, the CPU is leaving performance on the table. The data shows 282 FPS on Low at 1080p, but that’s already beyond most monitors; the real issue is that the CPU cannot push the GPU further. The i5-9400 has 6 cores and 6 threads, and Ready Or Not is a heavy multithreaded title, so the lack of Hyper-Threading is a measurable constraint.

Q: What is the best setting for a 1440p monitor?

A: The Medium preset at 1440p delivers 155 FPS average with an 132–178 range. That is the strongest combination of smoothness and headroom in the data. High drops to 141 FPS, Ultra to 99 FPS. If you want to stay above 144 FPS guaranteed, the Medium preset is the only OLED of the four that stays above 144 with the min FPS (132) still above 120.

Q: What happens to the 4K Ultra preset?

A: The 4K Ultra preset averages 52 FPS. That is playable for a tactical shooter but not competitive. The min FPS is not recorded for that preset, but the 4K Medium preset shows a minimum of 69 FPS, so the Ultra preset is likely below 60 at times. The 4K Low preset is the only way to stay above 90 FPS at 4K, with 93 FPS average.

Q: How does the RX 7700 compare to its nearest rivals in raw compute?

A: The GPU sits at the 58th percentile of all GPUs. Its nearest rival by average benchmark score is the Radeon R9 370X, which is just 0.1% behind, and the Radeon RX 9060 is 1% ahead. The RX 7700 has 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, which is far more than any competitor in its score band, but in this game the VRAM is not the constraint; the FPS drops are driven by shader and pixel work, not memory capacity.

Q: What does the CPU’s benchmark score say about its place in the market?

A: The i5-9400 sits at the 47th percentile of all CPUs, and its rival, the i7-10710U, is just 0.3% faster in the average benchmark score. That is a tight cluster. The i5-9400’s single-thread performance is its strength, but the 6-thread limit in a game that scales past 6 threads is the reason it cannot fully feed the 7700 at 1080p.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 7700 is the dominant component in this pairing, but the data shows it is only fully exercised at higher resolutions. The GPU has 16 GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus, delivering 624.1 GB/s of bandwidth. That is a high figure, and it explains why the 4K Medium preset can hold 81 FPS average without dipping below 69 FPS. The card’s 2560 shading units are backed by a 236.1 GPixel/s pixel rate and a 393.4 GTexel/s texture rate, which are the numbers that actually matter for a game like Ready Or Not, where walls, floors, and character models are lit with high-frequency detail.

The 7700’s boost clock is 2459 MHz, with a game clock of 2041 MHz. In the measured data, the GPU’s performance scales almost perfectly with pixel count when the CPU is not in the way. From 4K High (74 FPS) to 1440p High (141 FPS) is a 1.9x increase, which is close to the 2.25x pixel ratio plus a small CPU assist. From 1440p High to 1080p High (224 FPS) is only a 1.59x increase, which is far below the 1.78x pixel ratio, proving that the i5-9400 is the wall at 1080p.

The VRAM is another story. 16 GB is overkill for Ready Or Not at 1080p, but at 4K Ultra with full textures, the card still has no memory pressure. The data does not show any VRAM-related frame drops, so the 7700’s 16 GB is a safety margin. The card’s average benchmark score of 15852 places it at the 58th percentile, which is modest for its class, but the nearest rivals are all within 1.7% of its score, indicating that the 7700 is a well-tuned card for its intended range. The RTX 3060 Ti is only 1.7% faster on average, yet the 7700 has 16 GB versus that card's typical 8 GB, so the 7700 is the better bet for this game’s high resolution presets.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured rows are laid out for four presets and three resolutions. At 4K, the Ultra preset averages 52 FPS, Medium 81 FPS (min 69, max 93), High 74 FPS, and Low 93 FPS. The Medium preset’s min of 69 FPS is the only 4K data point with a recorded min, and it indicates that even at 4K, the playable floor is above 60 FPS only if you stay on Low. The difference between High and Low at 4K is 19 FPS, the smallest gap of any resolution, because the GPU is already saturated.

At 1440p, the rows show 178 FPS on Low, 159 on Medium (min 132, max 178), and 141 on High. Ultra drops to 99 FPS. The Medium setting has a min of 132 FPS, which is the only 1440p row with a min/max pair, and it is the safest for a 144 Hz display. The 1440p High and Low have no min/max, but the average gap is wide. The 1080p rows are where the CPU becomes the story: Low hits 282 FPS, Medium 246 (min 209, max 283), High 224, and Ultra 157. The Ultra preset’s 157 FPS is still higher than the 1440p Ultra’s 99 FPS, which means the CPU is the limiter at 1080p, but the GPU is still able to push beyond 60 FPS at all presets.

The 1080p Medium min of 209 FPS is the highest minimum of any row, and the max of 283 FPS matches the Low average. This data tells you that the i5-9400 is not a hard wall at 1080p, but it is a soft ceiling: 282 FPS on Low versus 224 on High shows that the CPU can still process the game logic, but the GPU is not allowed to stretch because the CPU cannot feed it more than a certain number of frames.

Settings Recommendations

For a 1440p monitor, the Medium preset is the only choice that keeps the average above 144 FPS while maintaining a 132 FPS minimum. The High preset dips to 141 FPS average, which is still playable but not a locked 144. The Ultra preset at 99 FPS is not worth the visual gain, especially since the Medium and High differ by only 14 FPS in the average. The 4K resolution is a different story: the High preset at 74 FPS is the best balance, because the Medium at 81 FPS is only 7 FPS faster, but the Low at 93 FPS is the only way to get near 90 FPS. The Ultra preset at 62 FPS is the only one that drops below 60 FPS for the minimum, so it is not recommended.

For 1080p, the situation is reversed. The Medium preset at 246 FPS (min 209, max 283) is the best experience because it is the highest preset that stays above 200 FPS for the minimum. The High preset at 224 FPS is also excellent, but the jump to Ultra at 157 FPS is a 30% reduction, so the Medium or High presets are the practical choices. The Low preset at 282 FPS is only useful for extremely high refresh rate displays, but the visual quality is worse. In all cases, the i5-9400 is the limiting factor at 1080p, so there is no point in maxing settings when the CPU will not allow the GPU to draw more frames anyway.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-9400 is a six-core, six-thread processor based on Coffee Lake, running at 2.9 GHz base and 4.1 GHz boost. Its 9 MB of L3 cache is shared among the six cores, and it supports DDR4-2666 memory in dual-channel mode, delivering 42.7 GB/s of bandwidth. In this game, the CPU’s limitation is not its clock speed but its thread count. Ready Or Not is a simulation-heavy tactical shooter that spreads load across many cores, and a 6-thread CPU is a bottleneck at 1080p because the game’s main thread and physics threads cannot all run on the same core.

The benchmark scores confirm this: the i5-9400’s multicore score in Cinebench R23 is 6629, which is average for a modern 6-core, but its single-core score of 935 is strong. The nearestRivals data shows the i5-9400 is nearly identical to the i7-1068NG7 (0.2% faster), the i7-10710U (0.3% faster), and the Ryzen 5 PRO 1500 (0.4% faster). The i5’s 47th percentile against all CPUs is a reflection of its age, but in this game, the bottleneck is not raw compute and threads.

At 1080p Low, the CPU can manage 282 FPS, which is 7 ms per frame. At 1080p Ultra, the frame rate drops to 157 FPS, and the CPU is now spending more time on the game’s background tasks, but the GPU is only at 157 FPS because the CPU cannot feed it more. The 1440p and 4K numbers confirm the GPU takes over: the CPU is not the limit there, and the frame rate is set by the GPU’s pixel fill rate. For anyone with a 1440p or 4K display, the i5-9400 is adequate. For 1080p, it is the reason the 7700 cannot show its full potential.