Red Dead Redemption 2

The Intel Core i5-13400F paired with the AMD Radeon RX 570 produces a highly constrained experience in Red Dead Redemption 2, where the data indicates the GPU is the definitive bottleneck across all tested configurations. The measured frame rates reveal a system that is fundamentally limited by the graphics card's 14 nm Polaris architecture and 4 GB memory buffer, rather than the 10-core Raptor Lake processor. The results show a predictable collapse in performance as resolution increases, with the gap between settings narrowing at 4K, which is a classic symptom of pixel-bound rendering.

Resolution Scaling

The scaling behavior from 1080p to 4K is severe and clearly illustrates where the performance ceiling lies. At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo achieves an average of 44.4 FPS, which drops to 34.4 FPS at 2560x1440, and then plummets to 22.9 FPS at 3840x2160. This represents a 48% reduction in frame rate from 1080p Low to 4K Low, a decline that is far steeper than what a CPU-bound scenario would produce. When the CPU is the limiting factor, resolution scaling typically yields minimal FPS differences; here, the massive drop indicates that the GPU is saturated at even the lowest settings.

The High preset tells an even more telling story. At 1080p High, the average is 29.1 FPS. Moving to 1440p High reduces that to 22.1 FPS, and at 4K High, the system collapses to just 12.4 FPS. The delta between 1080p and 4K High is 57%, demonstrating that the Polaris 20 chip simply lacks the pixel throughput to handle the increased load. The data reveals a system where the GPU is working at its absolute limit, and the CPU's headroom is irrelevant because the graphics pipeline is starved.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 570's specifications directly explain these results. With 2048 shading units, 128 texture mapping units, and 32 raster output units, the card is architecturally suited for 1080p gaming from its 2017 release era, but not for the demands of a 2018 open-world title at higher resolutions. The 4 GB GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus provides 224.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is insufficient for the high-resolution textures and large draw distances of Red Dead Redemption 2. The data shows that the GPU's 5.095 TFLOPS of FP32 performance and a boost clock of 1244 MHz are the primary drivers of the measured FPS figures.

The VRAM capacity is a critical constraint, particularly at 4K. The transition from Medium to High at 3840x2160 yields only a 5.3 FPS difference (17.7 to 12.4), while the jump from Low to Medium at the same resolution costs 5.2 FPS (22.9 to 17.7). This non-linear scaling suggests that once the 4 GB buffer is exceeded, the card resorts to aggressive texture streaming, which disproportionately impacts frame times. The GPU's 150 W TDP and PCIe 3.0 x16 interface are not contributing factors to the performance wall; rather, the raw compute and memory bandwidth are the limiting elements.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo's position in the database is stark. It ranks 1582 out of 1687 tested combinations for Red Dead Redemption 2, placing it in the bottom 6% of all systems evaluated. This rank is consistent with the GPU's performance tier, as the RX 570's average benchmark score of 30158 places it in the 74th percentile against all GPUs, yet its nearest rivals in that aggregate score are the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060, AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT, NVIDIA Tesla M60, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Mobile. The deltaPct values for these rivals are all within 0.8% of the RX 570’s average score, but those are synthetic workload averages; in this specific game, the 4 GB memory constraint severely hampers real-world results.

The CPU, by contrast, is a much stronger component. The i5-13400F ranks in the 82nd percentile against all CPUs with an average benchmark score of 25236. Its nearest rivals include the Intel Core i7-13620H (0.1% delta), AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D (-0.5% delta), AMD EPYC 9474F (0.5% delta), and AMD Ryzen AI 5 PRO 340 (0.5% delta). This pairing of a high-percentile CPU with a mid-tier GPU creates a massive imbalance, and the combo rank reflects that the GPU is dragging the entire system down. The data indicates that this combination is better suited for older titles or low-fidelity esports games, not for a demanding action-adventure title at high resolutions.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The full dataset provides a comprehensive view of the system's capabilities. At 1920x1080, the settings ladder is as follows: Low yields 44.4 FPS, Medium yields 35.5 FPS, High yields 29.1 FPS, and Ultra yields 19.2 FPS. The drop from Low to Ultra at 1080p is 25.2 FPS, which is a 57% reduction. This shows that even at the native resolution for this GPU, the Ultra preset is unplayable, and only Low settings approach a smooth 60 FPS target, though still falling short of it.

At 2560x1440, the figures are 34.4 FPS (Low), 26.1 FPS (Medium), 22.1 FPS (High), and 17.1 FPS (Ultra). The delta between Low and Ultra at this resolution is 17.3 FPS, and the scaling is more compressed than at 1080p, indicating that the GPU is running out of compute resources. At 3840x2160, the results are 22.9 FPS (Low), 17.7 FPS (Medium), 12.4 FPS (High), and 13.1 FPS (Ultra). Notably, the Ultra preset at 4K is actually 0.7 FPS higher than High, which is an anomaly that suggests the driver or game engine is making different memory allocation decisions at that preset, but the overall trend is clear: the card cannot maintain playable frame rates at 4K under any settings.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-13400F is not the limiting factor in this combination. With 10 cores and 16 threads, a base clock of 2.50 GHz, and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz, the CPU has ample compute headroom for Red Dead Redemption 2. The 20 MB of shared L3 cache and 1.25 MB L2 per core provide sufficient data locality for the game's streaming systems. The CPU's single-thread performance is strong, evidenced by a 3dmark single-thread score of 960 and a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 3004, which are more than adequate for the game's primary simulation thread.

The data confirms this assessment through the resolution scaling pattern. If the CPU were the bottleneck, the frame rates would remain relatively flat across 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. Instead, the FPS drops by roughly half from 1080p Low to 4K Low, proving that the GPU is the sole constraint. The CPU's multi-threaded performance, with a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 21279 and a 3dmark max-threads score of 7307, shows that it can handle the game's background tasks and physics calculations without dropping frames, but those capabilities are never fully exercised because the GPU cannot deliver frames fast enough. In this specific game, the i5-13400F is effectively idle, waiting for the RX 570 to catch up.