Undisputed

Undisputed is a sports title that behaves less like a typical fighting game and more like a mid-range PC workload, where both the CPU and GPU have meaningful roles depending on the resolution and quality preset. Based on the measured data for the Intel Core Ultra 5 235 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 combination, the system delivers a highly playable experience across most settings, but the performance curve reveals clear bottlenecks and optimization opportunities that any builder should consider before locking in their settings.

Settings Recommendations

The measured frames per second (FPS) data for this combo shows a clear hierarchy across the four available presets. At 1920x1080, the Low preset produces an average of 271 FPS, while Medium drops to 195 FPS, High to 162 FPS, and Ultra to 104 FPS. The jump from Low to Medium is a 76 FPS loss, while the step from High to Ultra costs 58 FPS. This suggests that the Ultra preset is disproportionately heavy, likely due to effects or shadow quality that tax the GPU far more than the visual difference justifies. For competitive or high-refresh-rate play, the Medium preset at 1080p is the sweet spot: it still delivers 195 FPS average with a minimum of 166 FPS, which is well above the typical 144 Hz threshold, and it retains more visual fidelity than Low.

At 2560x1440, the pattern shifts slightly. Low averages 196 FPS, Medium averages 141 FPS with a minimum of 120 FPS, High averages 117 FPS, and Ultra drops to 75 FPS. Here, Medium is the recommended preset for a balanced experience, as it maintains a 141 FPS average and a 120 FPS minimum, ensuring smooth gameplay on 120 Hz or 144 Hz monitors. High is still playable at 117 FPS average, but the minimum is not recorded, so frametime consistency is less certain. Ultra at 1440p is borderline for fast-paced action, with a 75 FPS average that could dip below 60 on demanding scenes.

At 3840x2160, the situation becomes more constrained. Low averages 124 FPS, Medium averages 89 FPS with a minimum of 76 FPS, High averages 74 FPS, and Ultra drops to 48 FPS. For 4K gaming, Medium is the only preset that guarantees a minimum above 60 FPS (76 FPS), making it the recommended choice for a consistent experience. High is technically playable at 74 FPS average, but the lack of a recorded minimum means there is no assurance against stutters. Ultra at 4K should be avoided entirely, as a 48 FPS average falls below the standard 60 FPS target.

The data indicates that the Medium preset offers the best balance of visual quality and performance across all three resolutions, with the caveat that 4K users must accept Medium or lower to maintain smoothness. High is a viable option at 1080p and 1440p for those prioritizing visuals over headroom, but the step to Ultra is rarely worth the substantial FPS penalty.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 is the primary driver of the FPS differences between presets, particularly at higher resolutions. The GPU features 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus, with a bandwidth of 272.0 GB/s. The memory clock runs at 2125 MHz with 17 Gbps effective speed. The card has a boost clock of 2460 MHz and a base clock of 1830 MHz, with 3072 shading units, 96 texture mapping units, and 48 render output units. It also includes 24 ray tracing cores and 96 tensor cores, though the measured FPS data does not indicate whether ray tracing is enabled in any preset.

The VRAM capacity of 8 GB is a critical factor in Undisputed, as the game’s Ultra preset at 4K pushes the average FPS down to 48, which is a 46% drop from the High preset’s 74 FPS. This suggests that the Ultra preset at 4K may be exceeding the available VRAM or GPU compute capacity, causing a severe performance cliff. At 1080p, the Ultra preset still manages 104 FPS, indicating that the GPU is not completely overwhelmed at lower resolutions, but the 4K Ultra result shows a clear limit. The RTX 4060’s 48 ROPs and 118.1 GPixel/s pixel rate are adequate for 1080p and 1440p, but at 4K, the pixel throughput becomes a bottleneck when combined with high-quality settings.

The GPU’s performance percentile is 61st among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 17639. Its nearest rivals include the AMD Radeon HD 7790 (0.2% lower score), AMD Radeon 780M (0.3% higher), and AMD Radeon Pro 560 (0.5% higher), which are all significantly older or lower-tier parts. This indicates that the RTX 4060 is a mid-range card that competes with older high-end models, and the measured FPS data confirms that it can handle Undisputed at high refresh rates on 1080p and 1440p, but requires settings reduction at 4K.

FAQ

Q: Can this system run Undisputed at 4K with high settings?

A: Yes, but just barely. The measured average FPS at 3840x2160 with High settings is 74 FPS. However, the minimum FPS is not recorded, so there is no guarantee against drops below 60 FPS. For a safer experience, Medium at 4K provides an 89 FPS average with a 76 FPS minimum.

Q: What is the best preset for a 144 Hz monitor at 1440p?

A: Medium is the ideal choice. At 2560x1440, Medium delivers a 141 FPS average with a 120 FPS minimum, which comfortably exceeds the 144 Hz refresh rate in most scenes. High averages 117 FPS, which may not fully saturate a 144 Hz panel.

Q: Is the Ultra preset worth the FPS penalty?

A: Only at 1080p, where Ultra averages 104 FPS. At 1440p, Ultra drops to 75 FPS, and at 4K, it falls to 48 FPS. The visual gains from Ultra are not specified in the data, but the performance cost is substantial, making Medium or High the more practical choices for higher resolutions.

Q: How does the RTX 4060 compare to its nearest rivals in raw performance?

A: The RTX 4060 has an average benchmark score of 17639, which is 0.2% lower than the AMD Radeon HD 7790, 0.3% higher than the AMD Radeon 780M, and 0.5% higher than the AMD Radeon Pro 560. These are all near-identical scores, indicating that the RTX 4060 sits in a tight performance band with those parts.

Q: Does the CPU bottleneck the GPU at any resolution?

A: The data suggests that the CPU is not the primary bottleneck at higher resolutions. At 1080p Low, the system achieves 271 FPS, which is likely CPU-limited, but at 4K Ultra, the FPS drops to 48, indicating a GPU limit. The CPU’s single-thread score of 2085 in Cinebench R23 suggests it is capable of high framerates, but the GPU becomes the limiting factor as resolution increases.

Q: What is the minimum FPS recorded for this combo?

A: The only presets with recorded minimum FPS values are Medium at all three resolutions. At 1080p, the minimum is 166 FPS; at 1440p, it is 120 FPS; and at 4K, it is 76 FPS. Other presets do not have recorded minimums in the data.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a complete picture of performance across all resolutions and settings. At 1920x1080, the Low preset achieves an average of 271 FPS, which is the highest recorded value for this combo. Medium drops to 195 FPS with a minimum of 166 FPS and a maximum of 225 FPS. High averages 162 FPS, and Ultra averages 104 FPS. The gap between Low and Medium is 76 FPS, while the gap between High and Ultra is 58 FPS, showing that the preset scaling is not linear.

At 2560x1440, Low averages 196 FPS, which is a 75 FPS drop from 1080p Low. Medium averages 141 FPS with a minimum of 120 FPS and a maximum of 162 FPS. High averages 117 FPS, and Ultra averages 75 FPS. The scaling from 1080p to 1440p is more pronounced at higher settings: High loses 45 FPS, and Ultra loses 29 FPS, while Low loses 75 FPS, indicating that the CPU is handling the lower settings well but the GPU becomes more stressed at higher presets.

At 3840x2160, Low averages 124 FPS, Medium averages 89 FPS with a minimum of 76 FPS and a maximum of 103 FPS, High averages 74 FPS, and Ultra averages 48 FPS. The drop from 1440p to 4K is significant: Low loses 72 FPS, Medium loses 52 FPS, High loses 43 FPS, and Ultra loses 27 FPS. This pattern shows that the GPU is the limiting factor at 4K, as the absolute FPS losses are smaller for the already-low Ultra preset.

Notably, the Medium preset is the only one with recorded minimum and maximum FPS values across all resolutions. This suggests that the data collection focused on Medium as a representative setting, or that other presets had too much variance to record stable minimums. The Medium preset’s minimum FPS (166 at 1080p, 120 at 1440p, 76 at 4K) shows a consistent 46-47 FPS drop for each resolution step, indicating predictable scaling.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals the nature of the bottleneck in this system. At Low settings, the average FPS drops from 271 at 1080p to 196 at 1440p (a 27.7% decrease) and then to 124 at 4K (a 36.7% decrease from 1440p). This large drop at low settings suggests that the CPU is the limiting factor at 1080p, as the GPU has headroom, but as resolution increases, the GPU becomes more involved, causing larger relative drops.

At Medium settings, the average FPS drops from 195 at 1080p to 141 at 1440p (a 27.7% decrease) and then to 89 at 4K (a 36.9% decrease from 1440p). The scaling is nearly identical to Low, indicating that the GPU is still not fully saturated at 1080p Medium, and the resolution increase is the dominant factor.

At High settings, the average FPS drops from 162 at 1080p to 117 at 1440p (a 27.8% decrease) and then to 74 at 4K (a 36.8% decrease from 1440p). The consistency across Low, Medium, and High suggests that the game’s rendering load scales nearly linearly with pixel count, with the GPU becoming the primary limiter above 1080p.

At Ultra settings, the average FPS drops from 104 at 1080p to 75 at 1440p (a 27.9% decrease) and then to 48 at 4K (a 36.0% decrease from 1440p). The Ultra preset follows the same scaling pattern as the other presets, which is surprising given that it likely has more demanding effects. This indicates that the RTX 4060’s GPU compute and VRAM are the consistent limiting factors across all presets, and the resolution scaling is the dominant variable.

The near-identical percentage drops across all presets (approximately 28% from 1080p to 1440p and 37% from 1440p to 4K) suggest that Undisputed’s rendering pipeline is heavily pixel-bound. Neither the CPU nor the GPU shows a disproportionate bottleneck at any resolution, but the absolute FPS numbers indicate that the CPU is capable of higher framerates than the GPU can sustain at higher resolutions.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 5 235 is a 14-core, 14-thread processor based on the Arrow Lake architecture, with a base clock of 3.40 GHz and a boost clock of 5.00 GHz. It has 24 MB of shared L3 cache and 3 MB of L2 cache per core, with a 192 KB L1 cache per core. The CPU supports DDR5 memory with dual-channel bandwidth of 102.4 GB/s, and it uses the Intel Socket 1851. It has a TDP of 65 W and is built on a 3 nm process with 17,800 million transistors on a 243 mm² die.

In Undisputed, the CPU’s role is most evident at 1080p Low settings, where the system achieves 271 FPS. This high framerate indicates that the CPU can drive the game at very high frame rates when the GPU is not the limiting factor. The CPU’s Cinebench R23 single-core score of 2085 and multi-core score of 14769 show strong performance, with a PassMark single-thread score of 4516. The CPU’s percentile rank is 89th among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 46062, which is nearly identical to its nearest rivals: the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 (0.1% higher), Intel Core i9-13900HX (0.1% lower), AMD EPYC 4364P (0.2% higher), and AMD EPYC 7303 (0.2% higher).

The measured FPS data shows that the CPU is not a bottleneck at higher resolutions or settings. At 4K Ultra, the FPS drops to 48, which is clearly a GPU limit, as the CPU’s performance would not degrade with resolution. At 1080p Low, the 271 FPS result suggests that the CPU can handle the game’s single-threaded or lightly-threaded workload efficiently, but the lack of multi-threading (14 threads for 14 cores) means that the game likely does not utilize all cores. The CPU’s PassMark multi-thread score of 37816 indicates strong overall performance, but in a fighting game like Undisputed, the single-thread performance is more relevant, as evidenced by the high 1080p Low FPS.

The CPU’s boost clock of 5.00 GHz is critical for maintaining high framerates in games that rely on single-core performance. The data shows that at 1080p Low, the system is likely CPU-bound, as the GPU would not be stressed at such a low preset. However, as resolution increases, the GPU becomes the limiting factor, and the CPU’s role diminishes. This is typical for sports titles, where the simulation logic is often single-threaded, but the rendering load scales with resolution.

The CPU’s launch MSRP is $257, and it is part of the Core Ultra Series 2, released on 2025-01-06. It is a desktop processor with a production status of Active, and it is not multiplier unlocked. The 14-core, 14-thread configuration is unusual (no hyperthreading), which may explain why the multi-core benchmarks are not exceptionally high relative to rivals, but the single-core performance is sufficient for high-FPS gaming.