The Technomancer

The Technomancer, a 2016 action RPG from Spiders, is exactly the kind of title that exposes the balance point of a modern mid-tier pairing like the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060. This is a game that predates both components by nearly a decade — it was released in June 2016, while the RTX 5060 launched in May 2025 and the Core Ultra X9 388H arrived in January 2026 — so the interesting question is not whether the combo can run it, but how the measured frame rates scale across resolutions and settings, and where the bottlenecks lie. The data in this database entry is measured, not estimated, and it covers three resolutions at four settings tiers each.

Resolution Scaling

The scaling story here is clean and consistent. At 1920x1080, the pairing averages 146 FPS on Low, 112 FPS on Medium, 96 FPS on High, and 75 FPS on Ultra. Step up to 2560x1440 and those numbers become 95, 73, 63, and 49 FPS respectively — Low to Ultra, same ordering. At 3840x2160 the figures drop further to 52, 40, 34, and 27 FPS.

Look at the drop from 1080p to 4K as a ratio. On Low settings, frame rates fall from 146 to 52 FPS — a reduction to roughly a third of the 1080p result. On Medium, 112 FPS becomes 40 FPS. On High, 96 becomes 34. On Ultra, 75 becomes 27. In every case the 4K result lands at close to one-third of the 1080p figure, which is a heavier drop than pure pixel-count scaling would demand: 4K has four times the pixels of 1080p, but a perfectly GPU-bound pipeline typically loses less than the full 4x ratio because fixed per-frame CPU work remains constant. Losing about two-thirds of the frame rate suggests the RTX 5060 is doing the heavy lifting at every resolution in this game, with its shading throughput, memory bandwidth, and fill rates all scaling directly with pixel load.

That interpretation is reinforced by the settings behavior. Within each resolution, moving from Low to Ultra costs a consistent share of performance: at 1080p the Ultra figure of 75 FPS is roughly half the Low figure of 146; at 1440p, 49 versus 95 FPS; at 4K, 27 versus 52 FPS. Settings-dependent losses of that magnitude indicate the game's visual features — likely driven through the GPU's render pipeline rather than CPU-side simulation — dominate the frame budget.

There is a practical takeaway. The 4K results sit below comfortable playability for most players at higher settings: 27 FPS at Ultra and 34 FPS at High are far from smooth. At 1440p, however, 63 FPS on High and 73 FPS on Medium represent a genuinely playable experience, and 1080p delivers 96 FPS on High with 75 FPS even on Ultra. For this game on this hardware, 1440p Medium-to-High is the sweet spot where the frame rate stays high without sacrificing much visual detail.

How This Combo Ranks

Across the full database of tested combinations for The Technomancer, the Core Ultra X9 388H plus RTX 5060 pairing ranks 2453 out of 3696 combos. That places it in the bottom half of tested configurations — a middling standing for a game this old, and one worth unpacking.

The rank reflects the fact that The Technomancer has been benchmarked against a very large field of hardware pairings, many of which include stronger discrete GPUs. The RTX 5060 sits in the 72nd percentile versus all GPUs in the database with an average benchmark score of 26331, which is a solid mainstream position but not a top-tier one. Its nearest rivals by average score are telling: the AMD Radeon 860M at 26401, the NVIDIA GeForce MX550 at 26421, the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary at 26553, and the AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT at 26011. The deltaPct values here are small — the 5060 is 0.3 percent behind the 860M and MX550 on average score, 0.8 percent behind the RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary, and 1.2 percent ahead of the RX 6750 XT. In practice, the RTX 5060 is in a dead heat with that cluster of GPUs on aggregate benchmark results.

The CPU side is stronger relative to its field. The Core Ultra X9 388H sits in the 88th percentile versus all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 44466. Its nearest rivals are the AMD Ryzen 5 7500X3D at 44573 (0.2 percent ahead), the Intel Core i9-13950HX at 44342 (0.3 percent behind), the AMD Ryzen AI Max 385 at 44309 (0.4 percent behind), and the Intel Core i5-13600 at 44240 (0.5 percent behind). All four of those gaps are under one percent, meaning the 388H performs within a rounding error of that competitive band while ranking well above the bulk of CPUs overall.

So the combo rank of 2453 out of 3696 for this specific game is driven more by the GPU's position in its field than the CPU's. A top-quartile CPU paired with a solidly upper-mid GPU produces a mid-table result in this particular title — consistent with a game where the GPU is the limiting factor.

GPU Role

The RTX 5060 is a Blackwell 2.0 part built on TSMC's 5 nm process, using the GB206 chip with 21,900 million transistors packed into a 181 mm² die — a density of 121.0 million transistors per square millimetre. Its core configuration includes 3840 shading units, 120 TMUs, 48 ROPs, 30 RT cores, and 120 tensor cores. The theoretical throughput figures follow from that: 119.9 GPixel/s of pixel fill, 299.6 GTexel/s of texture fill, and 19.18 TFLOPS of FP32 compute, with FP16 running at a 1:1 ratio for the same 19.18 TFLOPS.

Clocks matter for how those numbers translate into frames. The card runs a 2280 MHz base clock and boosts to 2497 MHz. Memory is where the story gets more interesting for a 2016 title running at 4K: 8 GB of GDDR7 on a 128-bit bus, clocked at 1750 MHz for 28 Gbps effective, delivering 448.0 GB/s of bandwidth. That bandwidth is substantial for the card's class, and it helps explain why 4K playability is as close as it is — at 34 FPS on High and 27 FPS on Ultra, the card is feeding a four-times-larger pixel field through 48 ROPs and 448 GB/s of memory traffic.

For context on raw compute standing, the card scores 3628 in 3DMark Steel Nomad (DX12), 112787 in Geekbench OpenCL, and 113321 in Geekbench Vulkan. Its PassMark G3D score is 20891, with a GPU compute score of 10899 and DirectX-specific scores of 225 on DX9, 127 on DX10, 200 on DX11, and 77 on DX12. The Technomancer is an older title and the measured results — with 1080p Low at 146 FPS — are consistent with a game whose engine demands are modest against a modern Blackwell GPU, even one positioned in the 72nd GPU percentile.

Connectivity and physical attributes round out the picture: a dual-slot card 241 mm long, 111 mm tall, and 40 mm wide, powered by a single 8-pin connector, with a 145 W TDP and a 300 W suggested PSU. It interfaces over PCIe 5.0 x8, supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.4, and offers one HDMI 2.1b output alongside three DisplayPort 2.1b outputs. Launch MSRP was 299 USD. None of the interface details limit performance in a 2016 action RPG; the PCIe 5.0 x8 link is more than sufficient for the card's bandwidth needs in this title.

FAQ

Q: Can the RTX 5060 run The Technomancer at 4K?

A: Technically yes, but not comfortably at high settings. Measured 4K averages are 52 FPS on Low, 40 on Medium, 34 on High, and 27 on Ultra. Medium is borderline; High and Ultra fall below what most players would call smooth.

Q: What is the best resolution and settings combination for this hardware in this game?

A: The data points to 2560x1440 at Medium (73 FPS average) or High (63 FPS average) as the balance point. 1080p High at 96 FPS is the pick for high-refresh play, while 1080p Ultra at 75 FPS delivers full visual detail at still-playable rates.

Q: How does the Core Ultra X9 388H compare to rival CPUs?

A: It sits in the 88th percentile of all CPUs with an average benchmark score of 44466. Its nearest rivals — the Ryzen 5 7500X3D, Core i9-13950HX, Ryzen AI Max 385, and Core i5-13600 — all fall within one percent of its aggregate score, with deltas ranging from 0.2 to 0.5 percent.

Q: Where does this combo rank among tested configurations for this game?

A: It ranks 2453 out of 3696 tested combinations, placing it in the lower half of the field despite the CPU's strong standing, reflecting the GPU's mid-tier position.

Q: What frame rate variance was recorded?

A: At 1080p Medium, the average of 112 FPS ranged from a 95 FPS minimum to a 129 FPS maximum. At 1440p Medium, the 73 FPS average ranged from 62 to 84 FPS. At 4K Medium, the 40 FPS average ranged from 34 to 46 FPS. Other settings tiers recorded average FPS without min/max data.

Q: Does 8 GB of VRAM hold the card back at 4K in this game?

A: The data shows the 4K frame rates scaling consistently with settings, and the card's 448 GB/s of GDDR7 bandwidth keeps pace; however, 4K results at High and Ultra (34 and 27 FPS) indicate the card's rendering throughput is the constraint rather than a specific VRAM cliff, based on the smooth settings progression from 52 FPS down to 27 FPS.

Measured FPS Breakdown

All figures below are measured average frame rates from this database's testing of The Technomancer on the Core Ultra X9 388H plus RTX 5060 combination.

At 1920x1080:

• Low: 146 FPS average
• Medium: 112 FPS average (min 95, max 129)
• High: 96 FPS average
• Ultra: 75 FPS average

At 2560x1440:

• Low: 95 FPS average
• Medium: 73 FPS average (min 62, max 84)
• High: 63 FPS average
• Ultra: 49 FPS average

At 3840x2160:

• Low: 52 FPS average
• Medium: 40 FPS average (min 34, max 46)
• Ultra: 27 FPS average
• High: 34 FPS average

Reading across the tiers, each settings step costs roughly 20 to 30 percent of the frame rate at any given resolution. At 1080p, going from Low to Medium costs 34 FPS; Medium to High costs 16; High to Ultra costs 21. At 1440p the steps are 22, 10, and 14 FPS respectively. At 4K they are 12, 6, and 7 FPS. The diminishing absolute cost at higher resolutions reflects that the GPU is already near its throughput ceiling at 4K even on Low, so additional settings load eats into an already-small frame budget.

The min/max spreads at Medium settings are informative for expected smoothness. At 1080p Medium, the 95-to-129 FPS range means the game never dipped below the 95 FPS floor during the measured run. At 4K Medium, the range of 34 to 46 FPS around a 40 FPS average means dips to the mid-30s are routine — a very different experience from the 1080p result despite the same settings label. Players sensitive to frame-time consistency should treat 4K Medium as a 34 FPS floor in practice, not a 40 FPS one.

For a 60 FPS target, the measured data supports 1080p at any settings tier up to Ultra, and 1440p at Low, Medium, or High. Only 1440p Ultra (49 FPS) and the entirety of the 4K tier miss that bar, though 4K Low at 52 FPS comes close.

CPU Role

The Core Ultra X9 388H is a mobile-class processor from Intel's Core Ultra Series 3, built on the Panther Lake architecture at a 3 nm process node on Intel's own foundry. It carries 16 cores and 16 threads, with a 2.10 GHz base clock boosting to 5.10 GHz, all within a 25 W TDP on the Intel BGA 2540 socket. Cache allocation is generous: 192 KB of L1 per core, 3 MB of L2 per core, and 18 MB of shared L3. Memory support is LPDDR5X over a dual-channel bus delivering 153.6 GB/s of bandwidth, with PCIe Gen 5 across 4 CPU lanes. It also integrates Arc B390 graphics, though the discrete RTX 5060 handles rendering in this pairing.

The CPU's synthetic standing is strong. It posts 2955 in Cinebench R15 multi-core and 309.5 in single-core, 13101 in Cinebench R20 multi-core and 1849 in single-core, and 18911 in Cinebench R23 multi-core with 2200.5 in single-core. PassMark results include a 4280 single-thread score, 36811 multi-thread, 3226 in physics, 112550 in floating point math, 90882 in integer math, 361763 in data compression, 28490 in data encryption, 44010 in random string sorting, 29943 in extended instructions, and 358 in find prime numbers. At the 88th percentile versus all CPUs, this is a high-performing part in aggregate terms.

Here is the key point for this game: The Technomancer's measured results show almost no evidence of CPU limitation. If the 388H were the constraint, raising resolution would not reduce frame rates proportionally — the CPU-side frame cost would dominate and frame rates would flatten at higher resolutions. Instead, the data shows the opposite pattern: frame rates fall by roughly two-thirds from 1080p to 4K at every settings tier, the signature of a GPU-bound pipeline. The 5.10 GHz boost clock and strong single-thread results (309.5 in R15, 2200.5 in R23) mean the CPU has ample headroom to feed the engine's logic, AI, and draw-call submission at frame rates well above what the RTX 5060 renders.

In other words, the 388H is overqualified for this title. Its multi-core results — 18911 in Cinebench R23 — sit alongside rivals like the Core i9-13950HX and Ryzen 5 7500X3D, all within a fraction of a percent on aggregate score, and any of those chips would produce essentially identical frame rates here. The multiplier is locked and the platform is mobile-focused, so there is no tuning path, but none is needed: every measured frame in this dataset was limited by the GPU, and the CPU's role was simply to stay out of the way. That it does comfortably is the correct verdict on its contribution to this pairing's performance in The Technomancer.