The Long Drive

The Long Drive, a driving simulation that released on September 2, 2019, presents an unusual challenge for high-end hardware: it scales dramatically with both resolution and settings, but not always in the expected direction. This analysis examines the measured performance of the Intel Core i7-14700K paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, a combination that ranks 4th out of 1,734 tested combos in this title. The data reveals a system capable of extreme frame rates at lower resolutions, yet one that becomes surprisingly constrained at 4K Ultra settings, highlighting a significant performance ceiling in the game engine itself.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data indicates that the "High" preset offers the most balanced experience across all tested resolutions. At 3840x2160, High settings produce an average of 75.8 FPS, which is eminently playable for a driving simulation. This represents a substantial improvement over the Ultra preset, which drops to 56.3 FPS at the same resolution—a difference that pushes the experience from smooth to potentially stutter-prone on high refresh rate displays. The performance gap between High and Ultra is not linear; at 4K, Ultra demands nearly 26% more rendering overhead than High, yet the visual fidelity difference in a game like The Long Drive, with its often sparse environments, is unlikely to justify the frame rate penalty.

For users prioritizing maximum fluidity, the Medium preset provides an excellent middle ground. At 2560x1440, Medium delivers 221.6 FPS, which is more than sufficient for even the fastest 144Hz or 240Hz monitors. The jump from Medium to High at this resolution costs roughly 37% of the frame rate (from 221.6 to 139.6 FPS), which is a steep price for incremental visual gains. At 1920x1080, the situation is less critical: High still achieves 210.1 FPS, making it the recommended choice for 1080p displays. The Low preset, while delivering extreme frame rates (408.5 FPS at 1080p, 269.1 FPS at 1440p, and 150.7 FPS at 4K), strips away so much visual detail that it undermines the driving simulation experience. The data strongly suggests that High is the optimal preset for this combination, offering the best compromise between visual quality and performance across all resolutions.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific configuration—Intel Core i7-14700K with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090—achieves a combo rank of 4th out of 1,734 tested combinations in The Long Drive. This places it in the top 0.2% of all systems tested, an elite tier that reflects the raw capability of both components. The CPU itself sits in the 96th percentile against all processors, with an average benchmark score of 70,074. Its nearest rivals in synthetic testing show a tightly clustered field: the Intel Core i7-14700KF scores 70,104 (a negligible 0% delta), the AMD EPYC 9115 scores 69,887 (0.3% behind), and the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X scores 70,420 (0.5% ahead). This indicates that the i7-14700K is essentially at parity with the fastest consumer and server chips available, meaning the 4th place ranking in-game is likely influenced more by GPU performance and game engine optimization than by CPU headroom.

The GPU side tells a similar story. The RTX 5090 holds the 94th percentile against all GPUs with an average benchmark score of 84,306. Its nearest rivals include the RTX 5090 D at 84,241 (0.1% ahead), the RTX 5050 Mobile at 84,171 (0.2% ahead), and the AMD Radeon PRO W6600 at 83,209 (1.3% behind). The fact that this top-tier desktop GPU is virtually tied with a mobile part and a workstation card in synthetic tests underscores how benchmark scores do not always translate directly to gaming performance. In The Long Drive specifically, the 4th place ranking out of 1,734 combos suggests that only a handful of alternative configurations—likely those with even faster memory or slightly higher clocked variants—can outperform this setup in actual gameplay.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 brings substantial resources to bear in The Long Drive. Its 32 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 512-bit bus provides 1.79 TB/s of bandwidth, which is critical for driving simulations that often stream large, open-world environments. The GPU's 21,760 shading units and 176 ROPs, paired with a boost clock of 2407 MHz, deliver a theoretical FP32 throughput of 104.8 TFLOPS. These specifications place it far ahead of any previous generation, yet the measured FPS data shows that this raw power is not always fully utilized. At 4K Ultra, the frame rate collapses to 56.3 FPS, which is surprisingly low given the GPU's capabilities. This suggests that The Long Drive may have engine-level limitations—possibly in draw call processing or single-threaded game logic—that prevent the RTX 5090 from achieving its full potential at the highest settings.

The GPU's memory configuration is particularly relevant here. With 32 GB of VRAM, there is no possibility of running out of memory at any tested resolution or setting, eliminating a common bottleneck in less well-optimized titles. The 1750 MHz memory clock (28 Gbps effective) ensures that texture streaming is never a constraint. However, the data shows diminishing returns: at 1080p, the GPU can push 408.5 FPS on Low settings, but at 4K Ultra, the performance drops by 86% to 56.3 FPS. This disproportionate scaling indicates that while the GPU is capable of extreme throughput, the game's rendering pipeline becomes the limiting factor at higher resolutions and settings, likely due to CPU-bound physics or simulation code that cannot be parallelized effectively across the 20 cores of the i7-14700K.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a comprehensive view of performance across three resolutions and four settings presets. At 1920x1080, the results are exceptional across the board: Low settings yield 408.5 FPS, Medium produces 337.7 FPS, High delivers 210.1 FPS, and Ultra still manages 148 FPS. These numbers indicate that at 1080p, the system is almost entirely GPU-bound, with even the most demanding preset maintaining frame rates well above any display refresh rate currently available. The drop from Low to Ultra is 63.8% (from 408.5 to 148 FPS), which is substantial but still leaves the experience perfectly smooth.

Moving to 2560x1440, the performance scales predictably. Low settings produce 269.1 FPS, Medium drops to 221.6 FPS, High falls to 139.6 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 99.9 FPS. The transition from Medium to High is particularly notable, representing a 37% performance loss (from 221.6 to 139.6 FPS). At 1440p, the Ultra preset finally drops below the 100 FPS threshold, which may be noticeable on high refresh rate monitors, though it remains playable for a driving simulation. The resolution scaling from 1080p to 1440p shows an average FPS reduction of approximately 34% across all settings, which is consistent with the increased pixel count of 78% (from 2.07 million to 3.69 million pixels), suggesting that the GPU is still the primary bottleneck at these resolutions.

At 3840x2160, the picture changes dramatically. High settings produce 75.8 FPS, which is playable, but Ultra collapses to 56.3 FPS. Medium holds at 120.5 FPS, and Low reaches 150.7 FPS. The gap between Medium and High at 4K is 37.5% (from 120.5 to 75.8 FPS), while the gap between High and Ultra is 25.7% (from 75.8 to 56.3 FPS). These numbers suggest that at 4K, the game becomes increasingly CPU-limited, as the RTX 5090's massive compute resources cannot compensate for the engine's inability to feed geometry and draw calls fast enough. The 4K results are the only scenario where the system fails to deliver consistently high frame rates, and Ultra settings at this resolution are best avoided.

Resolution Scaling

The transition from 1080p to 4K reveals a complex scaling pattern that provides insight into the system's limiting components. At 1080p Low, the system achieves 408.5 FPS; at 4K Low, this drops to 150.7 FPS, a 63% reduction. However, at Ultra settings, the drop is steeper: from 148 FPS at 1080p to 56.3 FPS at 4K, a 62% reduction. This similarity in percentage drop across settings suggests that the scaling is primarily resolution-driven rather than settings-driven, which points to a rendering pipeline that becomes pixel-bound at higher resolutions.

The absolute FPS drops from 1080p to 1440p average around 34% across all settings, while the drop from 1440p to 4K averages 46%. This non-linear scaling indicates that the system handles the jump to 1440p relatively efficiently but struggles more with the 4K pixel count (8.29 million pixels, which is 4 times 1080p). The fact that the RTX 5090, with its 1.79 TB/s memory bandwidth, cannot maintain proportional performance at 4K strongly suggests that the limiting factor is not GPU memory bandwidth but rather the CPU's ability to issue draw calls and update the game's simulation state. The i7-14700K, despite its 20 cores and 28 threads and a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 44,534, appears to be the bottleneck at 4K Ultra, where the game's single-threaded or lightly-threaded rendering logic cannot keep pace with the GPU's output demands. This analysis is supported by the fact that the CPU's single-threaded performance, while strong (Geekbench single-core score of 2,932), is still finite, and The Long Drive's engine likely does not scale well beyond a few cores. Consequently, users aiming for 4K Ultra should temper expectations, as the data shows this combination, despite its elite ranking, cannot overcome the engine's architectural constraints at the highest fidelity settings.