The Long Drive

The Long Drive pairs the AMD Ryzen 5 7600, a six-core Zen 4 desktop processor, with the Intel Arc B390, an integrated graphics solution built on Intel’s Xe3-LPG architecture. This combination ranks near the bottom of the benchmark database, landing at position 2594 out of 2934 tested combos for this driving simulation. The data shows a system that can handle the game at lower resolutions and settings, but one that struggles significantly at 4K, with the GPU acting as the primary constraint.

FAQ

Q: How does this CPU+GPU combo rank for The Long Drive?

A: The combo ranks 2594 out of 2934 tested combinations for this game, placing it in the lower 12% of all tested systems. This indicates that while the setup is functional, it sits well below the median performance tier for this title.

Q: What is the GPU’s memory configuration and how does it affect performance?

A: The Intel Arc B390 uses System Shared memory, with a system-dependent bandwidth. This means the GPU draws from the main system memory rather than having dedicated VRAM, which directly impacts performance—particularly at higher resolutions where memory bandwidth demands increase sharply.

Q: What are the CPU’s core and clock specifications?

A: The AMD Ryzen 5 7600 has 6 cores and 12 threads, with a base clock of 3.80 GHz and a boost clock of 5.10 GHz. It uses the Zen 4 architecture on a 5 nm process from TSMC, with 32 MB of shared L3 cache.

Q: What is the best measured FPS result for this combo?

A: The highest average FPS recorded is 95 at 1920x1080 with Low settings. This drops to 49 at High settings and 34 at Ultra settings for the same resolution, showing a steep performance curve as graphical fidelity increases.

Q: How does the GPU compare to its nearest rivals in benchmark scores?

A: The Intel Arc B390 has an average benchmark score of 1482, which puts it 1.3% ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce GT 520MX, 1.5% ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce 800M, 2.5% ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce GT 625 OEM, and 2.7% ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce GT 710. It sits in the 9th percentile of all GPUs.

Q: Is the CPU a limiting factor in this game?

A: Based on the FPS scaling from 1080p to 4K, the CPU is not the primary bottleneck. The Ryzen 5 7600’s strong multi-threaded scores, such as 12735 in Cinebench R23 multi-core and 13413 in Geekbench multi-core, suggest it has ample headroom; the GPU’s shared memory architecture and low percentile ranking prove to be the limiting component.

How This Combo Ranks

The measured data places this configuration at rank 2594 out of 2934 combos tested for The Long Drive. That is a low position, but not the absolute bottom—roughly 340 combinations perform worse. The percentile positioning matters more than the raw rank: the GPU alone sits in the 9th percentile of all GPUs, while the CPU sits in the 78th percentile of all CPUs. This asymmetry is the defining characteristic of the pairing; a mid-to-high-tier processor is yoked to an entry-level graphics solution.

Benchmark results reinforce this split. The CPU’s average benchmark score across all tests is 26324, with nearest rivals including the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX (scoring 26274, just 0.2% lower) and the AMD Ryzen 7 7435HS (scoring 26402, 0.3% higher). The Intel Core i9-11900KF is 0.4% behind at 26212, and the AMD Ryzen 5 8540U is 0.5% behind at 26187. These are all close scores, indicating the Ryzen 5 7600 is a solidly average performer among its peers. In contrast, the GPU’s average benchmark score of 1482 is barely above legacy NVIDIA parts like the GeForce GT 520MX and GT 710, which trail by margins of 1.3% to 2.7%.

For The Long Drive specifically, the combo’s rank suggests that most other tested systems—including those with older or less capable CPUs but dedicated GPUs—will outperform it. The game’s driving simulation genre, which often involves broad open landscapes and dynamic rendering, places a premium on sustained GPU throughput. With the Arc B390’s low pixel rate of 60.00 GPixel/s and texture rate of 120.0 GTexel/s, the system simply lacks the fill rate to compete with even mid-range discrete options. The data shows a combo that is workable for casual play at modest settings, but it will not deliver a high-refresh or high-fidelity experience.

GPU Role

The Intel Arc B390 is an integrated GPU (IGP) based on the Panther Lake chip, using the Xe3-LPG architecture on a 3 nm process from Intel. Its clock speeds are modest: a base of 300 MHz and a boost of 2500 MHz. The GPU has 1536 shading units, 48 texture mapping units, and 24 raster operation units, along with 12 ray tracing cores. These specifications yield a FP32 performance of 7.680 TFLOPS and a FP16 performance of 15.36 TFLOPS (2:1).

The most critical aspect of this GPU is its memory: it uses System Shared memory, with system-dependent bandwidth. There is no dedicated VRAM pool. This has profound implications for gaming performance. The GPU must compete with the CPU for memory bandwidth, and in a driving simulation like The Long Drive, where textures and geometry streaming are constant, this creates a bottleneck. The measured FPS data illustrates this clearly: at 1080p Low, the system hits 95 FPS, but at 4K Low, it drops to 35 FPS—a 63% reduction that reflects not just increased pixel count, but also the strain on shared memory bandwidth.

The GPU’s benchmark score of 1482 in 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 places it in the 9th percentile of all GPUs. Its nearest rivals are all legacy NVIDIA parts—the GT 520MX (1463, 1.3% slower), GeForce 800M (1460, 1.5% slower), GT 625 OEM (1446, 2.5% slower), and GT 710 (1443, 2.7% slower). These are parts from a bygone era, and the Arc B390 only marginally outperforms them. In The Long Drive, this translates to playable frame rates only at 1080p with Low or Medium settings, where the average FPS is 95 and 78 respectively. At 1440p, the GPU struggles to maintain 60 FPS even on Low (63 FPS), and at 4K, it falls below 30 FPS on all settings except Low, where it manages 35 FPS.

The GPU also supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.4. This modern API support is a silver lining, as it means the hardware can technically handle current rendering features, but the raw compute and memory limitations prevent it from leveraging them effectively at higher resolutions. The 12 ray tracing cores are present, but with such low fill rates, enabling ray tracing—if the game supported it—would likely be impractical. The data shows a GPU that is adequate for light loads but out of its depth for a demanding simulation at high settings.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data for The Long Drive provides a complete picture of what this combo can achieve. All numbers are average FPS, with min and max values available only for Medium settings. Starting at 1920x1080: Low settings deliver 95 FPS, Medium delivers 78 FPS (with a min of 66 and max of 90), High delivers 49 FPS, and Ultra delivers 34 FPS. This is a playable range—even Ultra at 34 FPS is technically smooth enough for a driving game that doesn’t require twitch reflexes, though the gap between Low and Ultra is substantial.

Moving to 2560x1440: Low settings produce 63 FPS, Medium produces 51 FPS (min 44, max 59), High produces 32 FPS, and Ultra produces 22 FPS. The 1440p results show a clear drop-off. High settings at 32 FPS are borderline, and Ultra at 22 FPS is stutter-prone. The min FPS of 44 at Medium suggests occasional dips below the average, which could be noticeable in scenes with dense geometry or long draw distances.

At 3840x2160, the results are sobering: Low settings yield 35 FPS, Medium yields 29 FPS (min 24, max 33), High yields 18 FPS, and Ultra yields 12 FPS. None of these are comfortable for gameplay. Even Low at 4K struggles to maintain 30 FPS, and the Ultra result of 12 FPS is essentially a slideshow. The min FPS of 24 at Medium indicates the system can dip below playable thresholds during intense moments.

The pattern across all resolutions is consistent: the GPU’s performance degrades predictably as pixel count increases. At 1080p, the system can handle Medium settings comfortably (78 FPS), but at 4K, even Low settings produce less than half that frame rate (35 FPS). The max FPS values, where available, show some headroom—90 FPS at 1080p Medium versus an average of 78—but this headroom narrows at higher resolutions, with 59 FPS max at 1440p Medium and 33 FPS max at 4K Medium. The data indicates a GPU that is best suited for 1080p gaming, with 1440p possible only on lower settings.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals the nature of the bottleneck in this system. At Low settings, the average FPS goes from 95 at 1080p to 63 at 1440p to 35 at 4K. That is a 34% drop from 1080p to 1440p, and a 44% drop from 1440p to 4K. For a purely GPU-bound scenario, we might expect scaling closer to the pixel count ratio—1440p has 1.78 times the pixels of 1080p, and 4K has 2.25 times the pixels of 1440p. The observed drops are smaller than these ratios, which suggests that other factors—likely the shared memory bandwidth—are mitigating the expected load increase.

At Medium settings, the scaling is similar: 78 FPS at 1080p, 51 FPS at 1440p (a 35% drop), and 29 FPS at 4K (a 43% drop). At High settings, 49 FPS at 1080p drops to 32 FPS at 1440p (35% drop) and then to 18 FPS at 4K (44% drop). Ultra settings show the steepest absolute decline: 34 FPS at 1080p, 22 FPS at 1440p (35% drop), and 12 FPS at 4K (45% drop). The consistency of these percentage drops—around 34-35% from 1080p to 1440p and 43-45% from 1440p to 4K—points to a uniform scaling behavior.

This scaling pattern indicates that the GPU is the limiting component, but not purely on pixel throughput. The system shared memory architecture means that as resolution increases, the amount of data read from main memory grows, and the system-dependent bandwidth becomes a bottleneck. The CPU’s role is minimal here: the Ryzen 5 7600 has a memory bandwidth of 83.2 GB/s (dual-channel DDR5), but the GPU must share this with the CPU, and the effective bandwidth available to the GPU is not specified—it is simply "system dependent." The result is that the FPS drops are steeper than what a dedicated GPU with its own VRAM might show, because the memory subsystem is contending with both CPU and GPU workloads.

For a driving simulation like The Long Drive, which likely streams terrain and environment data continuously, this memory contention is particularly impactful. The data suggests that 1080p is the sweet spot for this combo, with 1440p possible only on Low settings, and 4K being largely unplayable except at Low with a 35 FPS average that will dip below 30 in demanding scenes.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 7600 is a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on the Zen 4 architecture, codenamed Raphael. It operates at a base clock of 3.80 GHz and a boost clock of 5.10 GHz, with a 65 W TDP. The CPU uses the AMD Socket AM5 platform and supports DDR5 memory with a dual-channel bus, offering a theoretical memory bandwidth of 83.2 GB/s. It has 64 KB of L1 cache per core, 1 MB of L2 cache per core, and 32 MB of shared L3 cache. The chip is manufactured on a 5 nm process by TSMC, with 6,570 million transistors on a 71 mm² die.

Benchmark scores for the CPU show a strong multi-threaded performer. In Cinebench R23, it scores 12735 multi-core and 1852 single-core. In Geekbench, it scores 13413 multi-core and 2521 single-core. The 3DMark tests show scaling from 999 single-thread to 6503 max threads, with 6499 at 16 threads. PassMark results include 27058 multi-thread and 3910 single-thread, along with strong integer and floating-point scores of 80581 and 48107 respectively. The CPU’s average benchmark score is 26324, placing it in the 78th percentile of all CPUs, with nearest rivals all within 0.5% of its score.

In The Long Drive, the CPU’s role is to handle game logic, physics simulation, and the overall frame pacing. Given that the measured FPS drops proportionally with resolution increases—which is a GPU-bound behavior—the CPU is evidently not the primary constraint. At 1080p Low, the system achieves 95 FPS, which suggests the CPU is capable of feeding frames at that rate. Even at 1080p Ultra, where the GPU is more stressed, the CPU maintains enough throughput to deliver 34 FPS, which is a GPU-limited result.

However, the CPU’s memory bandwidth of 83.2 GB/s is shared with the GPU’s system shared memory. This creates a subtle interaction: while the CPU has enough compute headroom, the memory subsystem is a shared resource. At higher resolutions, the GPU’s increased memory demands could starve the CPU of bandwidth, potentially causing frame hitches. The min FPS values at Medium settings—66 at 1080p, 44 at 1440p, and 24 at 4K—suggest that the system does experience dips that may be attributable to memory contention, though the average FPS remains stable.

The Ryzen 5 7600’s 12 threads and high boost clock of 5.10 GHz make it well-suited for a simulation title that may have single-threaded bottlenecks. Its single-thread score of 1852 in Cinebench R23 and 999 in 3DMark single-thread are respectable, and the CPU’s percentile of 78 indicates it outperforms the majority of CPUs on the market. In this pairing, the CPU is clearly not the weak link. The data shows that if the GPU were replaced with a more capable discrete solution, the CPU would likely support much higher frame rates, given its multi-threaded and single-threaded scores. For now, the combo’s performance ceiling is set entirely by the Intel Arc B390’s limited capabilities.