Steamworld Build

Steamworld Build is a city builder that scales unusually hard with resolution and settings, and the measured data for the Intel Core i7-13700K plus NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER combo reveals a system that is massively overqualified for 1080p but still finds its limits at 4K Ultra. The benchmark results show a clear progression from CPU-bound territory at lower resolutions to GPU-bound performance as pixel count rises.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate drop from 1080p to 4K is steep and consistent across all settings presets, which points directly at the GPU as the limiting component at higher resolutions. At Low settings, the average FPS falls from 384.2 at 1920x1080 to 131.9 at 3840x2160 — a reduction of roughly 66% when moving to four times the pixel count. That dramatic scaling is classic GPU-bound behavior, as the RTX 4080 SUPER’s shading units, texture mapping units, and render output units are being fed progressively larger workloads.

The Medium preset tells a similar story: 303.6 FPS at 1080p drops to 102.7 FPS at 4K, a 66% decline. High settings show 225.7 FPS at 1080p versus 74.1 FPS at 4K, again a 67% reduction. The pattern holds for Ultra, where 154.7 FPS at 1080p collapses to 50.3 FPS at 4K — a 67% drop. The consistency of these percentages across all four presets is telling: it means the scaling penalty is purely resolution-driven, not settings-driven.

However, the data also reveals that at 1080p, the CPU becomes the bottleneck. At Low settings, the combo hits 384.2 FPS, which is far beyond what any display can typically show, but the fact that the RTX 4080 SUPER is capable of much higher raw throughput suggests the i7-13700K’s 16 cores and 24 threads are capping the output. The 3DMark single-thread score of 1136 and multi-thread score of 12412 indicate strong single-core performance, but city builders often have simulation threads that limit frame pacing. At 1440p, the scaling is more moderate — Low goes from 384.2 to 253.4 FPS, a 34% drop — which indicates the system is transitioning from CPU to GPU limitation.

How This Combo Ranks

In Steamworld Build specifically, this CPU-GPU pairing ranks 83rd out of 1730 tested combos. That places it in the top 4.8% of all configurations tested in this game, which is a strong showing for a desktop platform built around a Raptor Lake processor and an Ada Lovelace GPU.

The i7-13700K itself sits at the 93rd percentile against all CPUs in the database, with an average benchmark score of 47282. Its nearest rivals are extremely close: the Intel Core i7-13700KF scores 47334 (0.1% higher), the AMD EPYC 4364P scores 47131 (0.3% lower), the Intel Core i9-12900F scores 47081 (0.4% lower), and the AMD Ryzen 9 PRO 5945 scores 47527 (0.5% higher). These deltas are within noise, meaning the CPU is not the differentiator in this game’s ranking.

The RTX 4080 SUPER sits at the 88th percentile against all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 53610. Its nearest rivals are the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT at 53489 (0.2% lower), the AMD Radeon Pro W6600M at 53414 (0.4% lower), the AMD Radeon RX 7700S at 52505 (2.1% lower), and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti at 52086 (2.9% lower). The RTX 4080 SUPER leads all of them in average score, but the margins are small enough that game-specific optimization matters more than raw compute.

The combo’s 83rd place out of 1730 is notable because it outperforms the individual percentiles of both components. That suggests Steamworld Build responds well to the combination of high single-thread CPU performance and high GPU memory bandwidth, rather than relying purely on raw core counts or shader throughput.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS rows provide a clear hierarchy for playable settings. At 4K, Ultra is the only preset that dips below 60 FPS, averaging 50.3 — which is playable but not ideal for a city builder where camera panning and zooming need to stay fluid. High at 4K delivers 74.1 FPS, which is a comfortable margin above 60 and represents the best balance of visual quality and performance at that resolution.

At 1440p, the situation is much more relaxed. Ultra runs at 98.6 FPS, which is smooth, but High hits 142.5 FPS and Medium reaches 192.7 FPS. For a city builder, the extra headroom from Medium or High at 1440p is arguably more valuable than Ultra’s marginal visual improvements, because the simulation logic and UI rendering benefit from consistent frame pacing. Low at 1440p produces 253.4 FPS, which is unnecessary for this genre.

At 1080p, every preset is above 150 FPS, with Ultra at 154.7 and High at 225.7. The data suggests that 1080p Ultra is the sensible ceiling for this combo — anything lower is leaving performance on the table, and the 154.7 FPS average means the GPU is still not fully stretched. The recommended path is to run High at 4K, Ultra at 1440p, and Ultra at 1080p, depending on the display’s native resolution.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The full matrix of measured results shows a consistent pattern across all twelve data points. At 3840x2160, the averages are: Low 131.9, Medium 102.7, High 74.1, and Ultra 50.3. The step from Low to Medium costs 29.2 FPS, from Medium to High costs 28.6 FPS, and from High to Ultra costs 23.8 FPS. The diminishing returns are linear rather than exponential, which indicates that each settings tier adds a similar load on the GPU’s 16 GB of GDDR6X memory and 736.3 GB/s bandwidth.

At 2560x1440, the numbers are: Low 253.4, Medium 192.7, High 142.5, and Ultra 98.6. The deltas are 60.7, 50.2, and 43.9 FPS respectively. The larger absolute drops at 1440p compared to 4K suggest that the GPU is less saturated at this resolution, so each settings increase has more headroom to consume.

At 1920x1080, the figures are: Low 384.2, Medium 303.6, High 225.7, and Ultra 154.7. The delta from Low to Medium is 80.6 FPS, Medium to High is 77.9 FPS, and High to Ultra is 71.0 FPS. These are the largest absolute differences in the entire data set, which reinforces that 1080p is where the RTX 4080 SUPER has the most spare capacity and where the CPU’s 3.40 GHz base and 5.40 GHz boost clocks are more likely to become the constraint.

Comparing across resolutions, the ratio of 4K to 1080p performance is remarkably stable: Low runs at 34% of 1080p speed, Medium at 34%, High at 33%, and Ultra at 33%. This uniformity is a sign of well-balanced scaling in the game engine, with no single settings option disproportionately taxing the hardware.

GPU Role

The RTX 4080 SUPER brings 16 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 256-bit bus, delivering 736.3 GB/s of bandwidth. For Steamworld Build, a city builder that likely streams many texture assets and maintains a large simulation state, this memory capacity and bandwidth are more than sufficient. The measured FPS at 4K High (74.1) and 4K Medium (102.7) indicates that the GPU is not running out of memory, since performance scales predictably with settings rather than collapsing due to capacity limits.

The GPU’s clocks are a base of 2295 MHz and a boost of 2550 MHz, with memory running at 1438 MHz (23 Gbps effective). These clocks, combined with 10240 shading units, 320 TMUs, and 112 ROPs, produce a pixel rate of 285.6 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 816.0 GTexel/s. The FP32 throughput of 52.22 TFLOPS is the same as FP16, which indicates a 1:1 ratio that is typical for Ada Lovelace. For this game, the pixel rate is the more relevant metric because city builders rely heavily on fill-rate for rendering large numbers of buildings and terrain details.

The GPU’s 80 RT cores and 320 tensor cores are present but unlikely to be heavily utilized in a game of this genre. The passmark G3D score of 34245 and the 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 6600 confirm the GPU’s overall strength, but the game-specific data shows that the RTX 4080 SUPER is the primary driver of the frame rate at 4K. At 1080p, the GPU is effectively idle, with the i7-13700K’s 30 MB of shared L3 cache and 24 threads handling the simulation overhead. The fact that the combo ranks 83rd out of 1730 while the GPU only ranks 88th percentile suggests that the pairing is well matched for this title, with neither component dragging the other down.