Red Dead Redemption 2

The Core i5-11400F and GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER pairing in Red Dead Redemption 2 shows a classic resolution scaling curve, where the graphics card becomes the dominant constraint as pixel count climbs. At 1920x1080, the gap between Low and Ultra settings is the widest in the entire dataset, with the Low preset delivering 93.6 FPS against 42.2 FPS at Ultra, a difference of 51.4 FPS that underscores how much headroom the CPU provides at this resolution. The 1080p High preset lands at 55.4 FPS, which is only 13.2 FPS behind the Medium result of 67.5 FPS, suggesting that the step from Medium to High costs less performance than the jump from High to Ultra.

Moving to 2560x1440, the scaling pattern tightens considerably. The Low preset still leads with 66.8 FPS, but Medium drops to 54.9 FPS and High falls to 44.1 FPS. The Ultra preset at 1440p produces 32 FPS, which is exactly 10.1 FPS lower than the 1440p High result. This compression of the settings range, from 34.8 FPS spread at 1080p down to 34.8 FPS spread at 1440p, indicates that the RTX 2060 SUPER is starting to hit its throughput ceiling as the pixel workload grows. The data suggests that at 1440p, the GPU rather than the CPU is setting the pace, since the relative ordering of settings remains consistent but the absolute deltas between presets shrink.

At 3840x2160, the picture becomes stark. The Low preset manages 45.6 FPS, Medium drops to 34 FPS, High falls to 28.5 FPS, and Ultra plummets to 19.1 FPS. The difference between Low and Ultra at 4K is 26.5 FPS, which is actually smaller in absolute terms than the 51.4 FPS gap seen at 1080p, but the percentages tell a different story: 4K Ultra runs at roughly 42% of the 4K Low speed. This pattern, where higher resolutions compress the settings spread while shifting the entire curve downward, is a clear signature of a GPU-bound scenario. The 8 GB of GDDR6 memory and 256-bit bus with 448.0 GB/s bandwidth are being saturated, and no amount of CPU headroom can compensate for the pixel fill rate required at 3840x2160.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution for this CPU and GPU combination in Red Dead Redemption 2?

A: The 1920x1080 resolution is the only one where the system consistently exceeds 42 FPS across all tested presets, with Low reaching 93.6 FPS and Medium hitting 67.5 FPS. At 2560x1440, only the Low preset exceeds 60 FPS, while High and Ultra fall to 44.1 FPS and 32 FPS respectively. The 3840x2160 resolution is not viable for smooth gameplay, as even Low only produces 45.6 FPS and Ultra drops to 19.1 FPS.

Q: How does the CPU's multi-threaded performance compare to its closest rivals?

A: The Core i5-11400F has an average benchmark score of 17181, which places it at the 75th percentile of all CPUs. Its nearest rival, the AMD Ryzen 7 5700U, scores 17189, a delta of 0%. The Intel Core i7-1260P scores 17212 with a -0.2% delta, and the Intel Core Ultra 7 164U also scores 17215 with -0.2%. This indicates the 11400F is statistically tied with these competitors in synthetic workloads, despite having only 6 cores and 12 threads.

Q: Does the RTX 2060 SUPER's VRAM capacity affect performance at higher resolutions?

A: The GPU has 8 GB of GDDR6 memory with a 256-bit bus, providing 448.0 GB/s of bandwidth. The measured FPS data shows a steep decline as resolution increases, with 1080p High at 55.4 FPS dropping to 1440p High at 44.1 FPS and then to 4K High at 28.5 FPS. While the VRAM size is adequate for the game's textures at these settings, the bandwidth and compute throughput appear to be the limiting factors, given that the settings spread narrows at 4K.

Q: What is the GPU's performance percentile relative to all other graphics cards?

A: The RTX 2060 SUPER sits at the 63rd percentile of all GPUs with an average benchmark score of 19774. Its nearest rival is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN with a score of 19706, a 0.3% delta, followed by the RTX 2070 at 19680 with 0.5%. This places the 2060 SUPER in a competitive tier, though the data shows it struggles with Ultra settings at 1080p and above in this specific game.

Q: How does the CPU's single-thread performance influence the frame rates?

A: The i5-11400F has a boost clock of 4.40 GHz and scores 2029 in Cinebench R23 single-core, with a Passmark single-thread score of 2981. In Red Dead Redemption 2, the 1080p Low preset achieves 93.6 FPS, which is the highest measured value in the entire dataset. This suggests that the CPU's single-thread performance is sufficient to feed the GPU at lower settings, but the frame rates drop to 55.4 FPS at High, indicating the GPU becomes the bottleneck as graphical load increases.

Q: Is the 1440p resolution usable for this combo?

A: Yes, but with significant caveats. The Low preset at 2560x1440 delivers 66.8 FPS, which is playable, and Medium produces 54.9 FPS. However, High drops to 44.1 FPS and Ultra to 32 FPS, which may feel sluggish for action sequences. The data suggests that 1440p is only practical if the user accepts Medium or Low settings, whereas 1080p allows for High at 55.4 FPS without dropping below the 60 FPS threshold at Medium.

GPU Role

The RTX 2060 SUPER is a Turing-architecture card built on TSMC's 12 nm process, featuring 2176 shading units and 34 RT cores. Its base clock is 1470 MHz with a boost of 1650 MHz, and the memory runs at 1750 MHz with 14 Gbps effective speed. The 8 GB VRAM is paired with a 256-bit bus for 448.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is critical for Red Dead Redemption 2's large open-world textures. The pixel rate of 105.6 GPixel/s and texture rate of 224.4 GTexel/s are the raw throughput figures that determine how quickly the card can fill the screen with rendered geometry.

In the measured FPS data, the GPU's role becomes clearer when looking at the settings scaling. At 1080p, going from Low to Medium costs 26.1 FPS (from 93.6 to 67.5), while Medium to High costs 12.1 FPS (from 67.5 to 55.4), and High to Ultra costs 13.2 FPS (from 55.4 to 42.2). This non-linear penalty suggests that the card's shading units and ROPs are handling the additional effects load reasonably well at lower presets, but the Ultra preset's demands on the 7.181 TFLOPS FP32 performance and memory bandwidth cause a disproportionate drop. At 4K, the Ultra preset produces only 19.1 FPS, which is 24.1 FPS below the 1080p Ultra result, highlighting that the card's 64 ROPs and 105.6 GPixel/s fill rate are insufficient for 3840x2160 at maximum settings.

The GPU's benchmark scores corroborate this analysis. The Passmark G3D score of 16462 and the 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 2011 indicate a card that is competent for 1080p gaming but has clear limits at higher resolutions. The Geekbench Vulkan score of 83503 and OpenCL score of 87670 show strong compute capability, yet the game's rendering pipeline appears to be more dependent on fixed-function hardware than raw compute. The RTX 2060 SUPER's 63rd percentile ranking and its proximity to the older GTX TITAN in benchmarks (0.3% delta) suggest that while the architecture is modern, the memory configuration and shader count cap its performance in this title.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS data points to a clear hierarchy for this system. At 1920x1080, the Medium preset is the sweet spot, delivering 67.5 FPS, which is comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay. The High preset at 55.4 FPS is acceptable for those who prioritize visual fidelity over frame rate, but the 12.1 FPS penalty from Medium to High is noticeable. The Ultra preset at 42.2 FPS is not recommended for 1080p, as the visual gains do not justify the 25.3 FPS drop from Medium. For 2560x1440, the Low preset at 66.8 FPS is the only option that maintains fluid motion, while Medium at 54.9 FPS is playable but with potential stutter in dense scenes. High and Ultra at 1440p are not advisable, given their 44.1 FPS and 32 FPS results, respectively.

At 3840x2160, the data effectively rules out this resolution for this hardware. Even the Low preset at 45.6 FPS is borderline, and the Medium preset at 34 FPS and High at 28.5 FPS are below acceptable playability. The Ultra preset at 19.1 FPS is essentially a slideshow. The pattern across resolutions suggests that the RTX 2060 SUPER's 8 GB VRAM and 448.0 GB/s bandwidth are the constraining factors, as the FPS drop from Low to Medium at 4K is 11.6 FPS, while the drop from Medium to High is only 5.5 FPS, indicating diminishing returns on settings that rely more heavily on memory bandwidth.

For the best overall experience, the data supports using 1080p with Medium settings as the default configuration. This provides a 67.5 FPS average, which is 12.1 FPS higher than High and 25.3 FPS higher than Ultra. If the user has a 1440p monitor, dropping to Low settings yields 66.8 FPS, which is nearly identical to the 1080p Medium result, but the visual quality will be noticeably inferior due to lower texture and shadow detail. The 4K resolution should be avoided entirely, as even the lowest settings cannot maintain a stable 60 FPS. The GPU's benchmark percentile of 63 and its close rivalry with the RTX 2070 (0.5% delta) suggest that this card is positioned for 1080p performance, not high-resolution gaming.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The full dataset for the Core i5-11400F with the RTX 2060 SUPER in Red Dead Redemption 2 is as follows. At 1920x1080, the Low preset averages 93.6 FPS, Medium averages 67.5 FPS, High averages 55.4 FPS, and Ultra averages 42.2 FPS. The spread from Low to Ultra is 51.4 FPS, with each successive preset costing roughly 20-23% of the previous performance. At 2560x1440, Low averages 66.8 FPS, Medium averages 54.9 FPS, High averages 44.1 FPS, and Ultra averages 32 FPS. The spread narrows to 34.8 FPS, and the drop from Low to Medium is 11.9 FPS, which is smaller than the 26.1 FPS drop seen at 1080p. At 3840x2160, Low averages 45.6 FPS, Medium averages 34 FPS, High averages 28.5 FPS, and Ultra averages 19.1 FPS. The spread is 26.5 FPS, and the Low to Medium drop is 11.6 FPS, indicating a more uniform degradation as settings increase.

Comparing across resolutions, the 1080p Low result of 93.6 FPS is the highest in the entire dataset, and it drops to 66.8 FPS at 1440p and 45.6 FPS at 4K. This represents a 28.6% decrease from 1080p to 1440p and a 51.3% decrease from 1080p to 4K. The 1080p Ultra result of 42.2 FPS drops to 32 FPS at 1440p and 19.1 FPS at 4K, a 24.2% and 54.7% decrease respectively. The consistency of the percentage drops across settings suggests that the GPU's scaling is primarily resolution-driven, not settings-driven. The 1440p Medium result of 54.9 FPS is nearly identical to the 1080p High result of 55.4 FPS, meaning that a user can either drop resolution or drop settings to achieve the same frame rate, but not both without sacrificing performance.

The data also reveals that the gap between Medium and High is smaller than the gap between Low and Medium at all resolutions. At 1080p, the Low to Medium gap is 26.1 FPS, while the Medium to High gap is 12.1 FPS. At 1440p, the gaps are 11.9 FPS and 10.8 FPS, respectively. At 4K, the gaps are 11.6 FPS and 5.5 FPS. This indicates that the Medium preset captures most of the visual improvements without the steep performance penalty associated with High and Ultra. The Ultra preset is consistently the most expensive, costing between 13.2 FPS and 9.4 FPS more than High across the three resolutions.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-11400F is a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on the Rocket Lake architecture, manufactured on Intel's 14 nm process with a die size of 276 mm². Its base clock is 2.60 GHz with a boost of 4.40 GHz, and it has 12 MB of shared L3 cache. The CPU supports DDR4 memory with dual-channel configuration and a memory bandwidth of 51.2 GB/s. In synthetic benchmarks, the chip scores 14372 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 2029 in single-core, with a Geekbench multi-core score of 7579 and single-core of 1979. The Passmark multi-thread score is 16908, and the single-thread score is 2981.

In Red Dead Redemption 2, the CPU's influence is most apparent at 1080p with lower settings. The 93.6 FPS result at 1080p Low suggests that the processor can feed the GPU well above the 60 FPS threshold, and the 3DMark 2-thread score of 1691 and 4-thread score of 3171 indicate strong single-thread performance for game logic. The CPU's 75th percentile ranking among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 17181, places it slightly below the AMD Ryzen 7 5700U (17189, 0% delta) but above the Intel Core i7-1260P (17212, -0.2% delta). This tight grouping suggests that the 11400F is not a bottleneck at this resolution, as the GPU is clearly the limiting factor when settings are raised.

The data shows that as resolution increases, the CPU's role diminishes. At 4K, the frame rates are consistently low across all settings, from 45.6 FPS at Low to 19.1 FPS at Ultra, which is characteristic of a GPU-bound scenario. The CPU's 6 cores and 12 threads are sufficient to handle the game's threading model, as evidenced by the 3DMark 8-thread score of 4691 and max-thread score of 5652. The lack of integrated graphics on this chip means the discrete GPU handles all rendering, and the PCIe Gen 4 interface with 20 CPU lanes provides adequate bandwidth for the RTX 2060 SUPER's PCIe 3.0 x16 bus. The CPU's 65 W TDP and boost clock of 4.40 GHz are well-matched to the GPU's 175 W TDP, and the combination ranks 1266 out of 1687 tested combos in this game, placing it in the middle of the pack. The benchmark results indicate that upgrading the CPU would yield minimal gains at 1440p or 4K, where the GPU's 448.0 GB/s bandwidth and 105.6 GPixel/s fill rate are the primary constraints.