The Long Drive

Settings Recommendations

The measured frame rates for The Long Drive across this AMD Ryzen 5 7600X and Intel Arc B580 combination reveal a clear hierarchy of playable presets. At 1920x1080, the Medium preset delivers 136.8 FPS average, which represents a substantial 51.8 FPS advantage over the High preset at 85 FPS while retaining a meaningful visual upgrade over Low. This makes Medium the optimal choice for high-refresh-rate displays at 1080p, as it stays well above the 60 FPS threshold with considerable headroom.

At 2560x1440, the Medium preset produces 88 FPS average, which remains comfortably playable and only drops 48.8 FPS from the 1080p Medium result. The High preset at this resolution falls to 53.3 FPS, which is workable but leaves less margin for demanding scenes. For users prioritizing smoothness, Low at 2560x1440 offers 110.4 FPS, a strong option for competitive play or when frame-time consistency matters more than visual fidelity.

The 3840x2160 results show that the Ultra preset at 20.1 FPS is effectively unplayable, and even High at 31 FPS struggles to maintain a consistent experience. The Medium preset at 47.5 FPS is the highest quality tier that approaches acceptable performance at 4K, though it remains below the 60 FPS target. The Low preset at 59.5 FPS is the only 4K configuration that nears fluid motion, making it the recommended choice for 4K displays unless the user accepts reduced visual quality as a trade-off for playability. Overall, the data indicates that Medium at 1080p or 1440p provides the best balance of visual quality and measured performance across the tested configurations.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 7600X is a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on the Zen 4 Raphael architecture, built on a 5 nm process. Its base clock of 4.70 GHz and boost clock of 5.30 GHz provide strong single-thread performance that directly influences frame pacing in The Long Drive. The processor’s 32 MB shared L3 cache helps maintain data locality for the game’s physics and world-streaming tasks, which are typical demands of a driving simulation.

Benchmark results show the 7600X achieves a Cinebench R23 multicore score of 24128 and a single-core score of 3406, indicating robust multi-threaded capability that prevents CPU bottlenecks in most scenarios. The 3DMark 16-thread score of 6879 and max-thread score of 6845 suggest near-linear scaling across the 12 threads, which is relevant for a game that may utilize multiple cores for simulation logic. The PassMark multithread score of 28390 and single-thread score of 4135 reinforce this processor’s balanced profile.

At 1080p with Low settings, the measured 163.9 FPS average indicates that the CPU can sustain high frame rates without being the primary constraint at lower resolutions. The 7600X sits in the 83rd percentile among all CPUs, and its nearest rivals include the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X with a deltaPct of 0.2, meaning the 7600X is essentially tied with that older 8-core part in aggregate benchmarks. This parity suggests that core count matters less than per-core efficiency in this title, and the 7600X’s high boost clock compensates for having fewer cores than some competitors.

As resolution increases and GPU load rises, the CPU’s role diminishes, but the 7600X’s consistent single-thread performance ensures that frame drops at higher settings are attributable to GPU limitations rather than processor stalls. The process node’s 5 nm design with 6,570 million transistors on a 71 mm² die contributes to efficient power delivery, though the 105 W TDP indicates the CPU can draw significant power under sustained gaming loads.

GPU Role

The Intel Arc B580 is built on the Xe2-HPG architecture (Battlemage generation) using a 5 nm process with 19,600 million transistors on a 272 mm² die. It features 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus, delivering 456.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is ample for The Long Drive’s open-world environment at 4K resolutions. The GPU’s boost clock of 2670 MHz and memory clock of 2375 MHz (19 Gbps effective) provide the raw throughput needed for high-resolution rendering.

The B580’s 2560 shading units, 160 texture mapping units, and 80 raster operation units yield a pixel rate of 213.6 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 427.2 GTexel/s. The FP32 performance of 13.67 TFLOPS places this GPU in the mid-range segment, and its 190 W TDP with a suggested 450 W PSU indicates a power envelope suitable for mainstream systems. The PCIe 4.0 x8 interface may slightly limit bandwidth in some scenarios, but for this game, the measured results show no obvious interface bottleneck.

In benchmark comparisons, the Arc B580 achieves a PassMark G3D score of 15748 and a 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 3068, placing it in the 66th percentile among all GPUs. Its nearest rival, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, shows a deltaPct of -0.7, meaning the B580 trails by less than one percent in aggregate scores — a near-statistical tie. This parity is visible in the game’s 1080p High result of 85 FPS, which reflects the GPU’s ability to handle moderate settings at mainstream resolutions.

At 4K Ultra, the 20.1 FPS result exposes the GPU’s limitations under extreme load, where the 12 GB VRAM and 456.0 GB/s bandwidth are insufficient to maintain fluid performance. The B580’s 20 ray tracing cores and support for DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2) indicate it is prepared for modern rendering features, but The Long Drive’s measured results show that rasterization performance at high settings is the decisive factor. The GPU’s role becomes more pronounced as resolution scales, with the 4K Low result of 59.5 FPS still exceeding the 4K High result by 28.5 FPS, demonstrating that settings adjustments have a larger impact than resolution alone at this tier.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the measured average frame rates across settings are as follows: Low produces 163.9 FPS, Medium delivers 136.8 FPS, High reaches 85 FPS, and Ultra falls to 59 FPS. The progression from Low to Medium shows a 27.1 FPS drop, while the Medium to High transition incurs a larger 51.8 FPS penalty, indicating that the High preset introduces significant rendering costs. The Ultra preset at 59 FPS remains playable but offers diminishing returns over High.

Moving to 2560x1440, the results scale predictably: Low averages 110.4 FPS, Medium hits 88 FPS, High manages 53.3 FPS, and Ultra drops to 38.4 FPS. The delta between Low and Medium at this resolution is 22.4 FPS, while Medium to High costs 34.7 FPS. The High preset at 53.3 FPS is borderline for smooth gameplay, whereas Low and Medium both provide comfortable margins above 60 FPS.

At 3840x2160, the frame rates compress significantly: Low averages 59.5 FPS, Medium delivers 47.5 FPS, High produces 31 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 20.1 FPS. The gap between Low and Medium here is only 12 FPS, but the Medium to High transition costs 16.5 FPS, and High to Ultra loses another 10.9 FPS. This pattern shows that the GPU’s rendering capabilities are increasingly taxed at 4K, with only the Low preset approaching a playable threshold.

The data reveals that the 1080p Ultra result of 59 FPS is nearly identical to the 4K Low result of 59.5 FPS, suggesting that the GPU’s performance ceiling is consistent across different combinations of resolution and quality settings. The 1440p High result of 53.3 FPS sits between the 1080p High and 4K Medium results, illustrating how resolution scaling impacts frame rates in a nonlinear fashion.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate drop from 1080p to 4K varies by settings preset, providing insight into which component becomes the limiting factor. At Low settings, the transition from 1080p (163.9 FPS) to 1440p (110.4 FPS) represents a 53.5 FPS reduction, and further to 4K (59.5 FPS) another 50.9 FPS drop — a total loss of 104.4 FPS from 1080p to 4K. This substantial decline indicates that even at the lowest quality settings, the GPU is heavily responsible for maintaining frame rates as pixel count quadruples.

At Medium settings, the 1080p result of 136.8 FPS drops to 88 FPS at 1440p (a 48.8 FPS loss) and then to 47.5 FPS at 4K (a 40.5 FPS additional loss). The total reduction of 89.3 FPS from 1080p to 4K is slightly smaller than at Low, suggesting that the GPU’s workload scaling is not perfectly linear with resolution — other bottlenecks begin to emerge at higher settings.

The High preset shows a 1080p result of 85 FPS, which drops to 53.3 FPS at 1440p (31.7 FPS loss) and then to 31 FPS at 4K (22.3 FPS additional loss), totaling 54 FPS lost from 1080p to 4K. This smaller absolute decline at High settings indicates that the GPU is already near its saturation point at 1080p High, so the additional resolution stress yields proportionally smaller frame rate penalties. The Ultra preset follows a similar pattern: 59 FPS at 1080p, 38.4 FPS at 1440p (20.6 FPS loss), and 20.1 FPS at 4K (18.3 FPS additional loss), for a total 38.9 FPS drop.

The percentage reductions from 1080p to 4K are: Low loses 63.7% of its frame rate, Medium loses 65.3%, High loses 63.5%, and Ultra loses 65.9%. These consistent percentages across settings suggest that the GPU is the dominant limiting component at all quality levels, as the relative scaling remains stable regardless of preset. The CPU’s influence is minimal in this scaling behavior, as the Ryzen 5 7600X’s strong single-thread performance ensures it does not become the bottleneck even at 1080p Low where frame rates exceed 160 FPS. The data points to the Arc B580 as the primary constraint in The Long Drive, with its performance ceiling reached at roughly 164 FPS at 1080p Low and diminishing rapidly as resolution increases.