Road 96

Road 96 is an adventure title that leans on narrative pacing rather than twitch-reflex rendering, but the benchmark data for this particular pairing of an Intel Core i7-14700F and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 reveals a system that is heavily constrained by its graphics hardware at every turn. The CPU, a 20-core, 28-thread Raptor Lake Refresh part with a 2.10 GHz base clock and a 5.40 GHz boost clock, is a modern desktop heavyweight that sits at the 94th percentile among all processors in the database. The GPU, in contrast, is an end-of-life Turing-based part from the GeForce 16-series, placing at only the 43rd percentile among all graphics cards. The measured frame rates in Road 96 tell a consistent story: the i7-14700F is effectively idle, waiting on a GTX 1650 that is asked to do far more than its 4 GB of GDDR5 memory and 128-bit bus can handle, particularly at higher resolutions.

CPU Role — cores, clocks, and how they relate to this game's results

The Intel Core i7-14700F is a desktop part built on Intel's 10 nm process, featuring a hybrid architecture with 20 cores and 28 threads, backed by 33 MB of shared L3 cache and 2 MB per-core L2 cache. Its clock speeds are substantial, with a 2.10 GHz base and a 5.40 GHz boost, making it a formidable processor for any workload. In synthetic benchmarks, the chip posts a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 35443 and a single-core score of 5003, alongside a Geekbench multi-core score of 16571. These numbers place it in the top 6% of all CPUs tested, with its average benchmark score of 54097 landing within 1.1% of the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D and just 0.6% behind the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X.

However, in the context of Road 96, the CPU's role is almost entirely passive. The game is not a multi-threaded stress test; it is a story-driven adventure where the visual load is modest but the GPU must still render every frame. The measured FPS data shows that even at 1080p Low settings, where the system achieves 79 FPS, the frame rate is not limited by the i7-14700F's ability to feed the graphics card. The CPU's Passmark multi-thread score of 41765 and single-thread score of 4261 indicate it has ample headroom for game logic and physics, but the bottleneck is clearly downstream. The data suggests that this processor could drive far higher frame rates in Road 96 if paired with a more capable GPU, as its raw compute power is never the limiting factor in any of the twelve measured configurations.

How This Combo Ranks — use comboRankInGame vs other tested combos

The combined pairing of the Intel Core i7-14700F and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 ranks 1647th out of 1684 tested combinations in Road 96, placing it in the bottom 2.2% of all systems benchmarked for this game. This is a stark result for a CPU that individually ranks in the 94th percentile, but it underscores how severely the GPU drags down the overall package. The combination's rank is not a reflection of the processor's capability, but rather of the mismatched pairing where a top-tier modern CPU is yoked to a graphics card that is end-of-life and sits at the 43rd percentile among all GPUs.

Benchmark results indicate that the GTX 1650's average benchmark score of 8713 is nearly identical to its nearest rivals, including the NVIDIA Quadro P2200 (0.5% faster) and the AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100 (0.5% slower), meaning there is no hidden potential in this GPU that the CPU could unlock. The combo rank of 1647 suggests that in Road 96, the vast majority of systems—likely those with more balanced CPU-GPU pairings—will outperform this setup. The CPU's high percentile ranking is effectively wasted here, as the game's frame rates are dictated entirely by the GTX 1650's output, which caps the experience well below what the i7-14700F could theoretically support.

Resolution Scaling — how FPS drops from 1080p to 4K and what it says about the limiting component

The resolution scaling data provides a clear diagnostic of the system's bottleneck. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo produces 79 FPS, which drops to 50.8 FPS at 1440p and further to 25.1 FPS at 4K. This represents a 36% performance hit when moving from 1080p to 1440p, and a further 51% drop from 1440p to 4K. The pattern is consistent across all settings: at High settings, the frame rate falls from 47.4 FPS at 1080p to 31.6 FPS at 1440p (a 33% reduction) and then to 14.3 FPS at 4K (a 55% reduction from 1440p).

These steep drops are characteristic of a GPU that is running out of memory bandwidth and raw fill rate as pixel count increases. The GTX 1650's 128.1 GB/s bandwidth and 53.28 GPixel/s pixel rate are simply insufficient for 4K workloads, and the 4 GB frame buffer is likely spilling over at higher resolutions. The CPU, with its high single-thread and multi-thread scores, shows no sign of being the constraint; if it were, the frame rate would remain relatively flat as resolution increases, since the CPU workload per frame would not change dramatically. Instead, the FPS scales inversely with pixel count, confirming that the limiting component is the GPU. The data shows that this system is only comfortably playable at 1080p, and even then only at Low or Medium settings, as Ultra at 1080p drops to 35.7 FPS.

Measured FPS Breakdown — resolution by resolution, settings by settings, exact numbers

At 1920x1080, the GTX 1650 delivers its best results. Low settings produce an average of 79 FPS, which is the highest frame rate recorded for this combo in any configuration. Medium settings yield 62 FPS, while High settings drop to 47.4 FPS. The Ultra preset is the most demanding, pulling the average down to 35.7 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra at 1080p is 43.3 FPS, showing that the game's settings have a significant impact on the GPU's load, but even at Ultra, the frame rate remains above the 30 FPS threshold for basic playability.

Moving to 2560x1440, the performance degrades noticeably. Low settings still manage an average of 50.8 FPS, which is playable, but Medium falls to 39.8 FPS and High to 31.6 FPS. Ultra at 1440p drops to 25.8 FPS, which is below the 30 FPS mark and likely introduces visible stutter in a game that relies on smooth narrative pacing. The drop from 1080p to 1440p at Ultra is 9.9 FPS, a 28% reduction, while at Low it is 28.2 FPS, a 36% reduction, indicating that the GPU's memory bandwidth is increasingly strained at higher resolutions.

At 3840x2160, the system is largely overwhelmed. Low settings yield just 25.1 FPS, Medium drops to 18.9 FPS, High falls to 14.3 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 10.3 FPS. None of these are playable for a smooth experience, and the gap between Low and Ultra at 4K is 14.8 FPS. The data shows that the GTX 1650 is not a 4K-capable card for this title, and the i7-14700F's presence does nothing to mitigate the GPU's fundamental limitations at this resolution.

GPU Role — VRAM, clocks, and how they relate to this game's results

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 is built on the Turing architecture using a 12 nm process at TSMC, featuring the TU117 chip with 4,700 million transistors on a 200 mm² die. Its base clock is 1485 MHz with a boost clock of 1665 MHz, and it has 896 shading units, 56 TMUs, and 32 ROPs. The GPU is equipped with 4 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit bus, providing 128.1 GB/s of bandwidth. Its compute capabilities are modest, with 2.984 TFLOPS of FP32 performance and 5.967 TFLOPS of FP16 performance through a 2:1 ratio. The card's 75 W TDP and lack of power connectors make it a low-power part, but that does not help it in Road 96.

The GTX 1650's memory configuration is the primary constraint in this game. At 1080p, the 4 GB frame buffer is sufficient for Low and Medium settings, as evidenced by the 79 FPS and 62 FPS results. However, at Ultra settings, the combination of higher-resolution textures and additional effects likely exceeds the available VRAM, contributing to the drop to 35.7 FPS. At 1440p and especially 4K, the 4 GB buffer and 128-bit bus become severe bottlenecks, as the bandwidth cannot keep up with the pixel throughput required. The GPU's Passmark G3D score of 7880 and DirectX 12 score of 35 reflect its limited modern rendering capability, and its nearest rival, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 A Mobile, is only 0.4% faster in average benchmark score, confirming that this is near the floor of acceptable gaming performance.

The data shows that the GTX 1650 is the definitive limiting factor in this pairing. The i7-14700F's high-end specs are irrelevant to the frame rates achieved because the GPU simply cannot deliver more. The GPU's end-of-life status and 43rd percentile ranking mean that it will struggle with any modern game at high settings, and Road 96 is no exception. For this adventure title, the GTX 1650 provides acceptable performance only at 1080p with lower settings, and the measured FPS breakdown makes it clear that any attempt to scale resolution or push settings will result in a sub-30 FPS experience.