Undisputed

Undisputed is the first serious boxing simulation the PC has had in over a decade, and it arrives with a hardware profile that matches the sport it simulates: economical, technical, and far less punishing than its presentation suggests. Steel City Interactive built the game on Unreal Engine 4, shipped it through early access into its 2023 debut, and packed it with licensed fighters from Muhammad Ali to Oleksandr Usyk. Across 3,718 measured CPU and GPU combinations in our database, the average system records 114 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 82 FPS at 1440p Ultra, and 52 FPS at 4K Ultra. The fastest combinations reach 956 FPS at 1080p Low, while the slowest measured configuration manages only 12 FPS at 1080p Ultra, a reminder that even a light game has a floor. For a modern licensed sports title, these are forgiving numbers, but the spread between that floor and ceiling tells the real story about what the engine asks of your machine.

Unreal Engine 4 in a two-man sport

Boxing is a strange case for engine load. There is no open world, no streaming terrain, no crowd of AI agents. The simulation is two fighters, a referee, a ring, and an arena. That sounds trivial, and at the GPU level it mostly is. The render thread handles a pair of high-detail character models with skin shading, sweat, cloth simulation on shorts and ropes, arena lighting, and a crowd that is present but not simulated at depth. This is UE4 doing what UE4 does well, and it is why the averages sit above 100 FPS at 1080p.

The CPU side is where Undisputed behaves like an Unreal Engine game in the less flattering sense. Animation blending, physics on bodies and ropes, hit detection, and the stamina and damage systems all run through a main thread that still leans on single-thread performance. The practical consequence in our data is that frame-time consistency, not average frame rate, is what separates a good Undisputed experience from a bad one. A mid-range CPU with strong per-core speed holds steady; a weak quad-core paired with an expensive graphics card still produces the hitches players report during clinch breaks, knockdowns, and the camera-heavy moments between rounds. Memory demand is modest by modern standards. 16 GB of dual-channel DDR5 is comfortable, 8 GB works but is not what we would build with in 2026, and there is no evidence in our measurements that 32 GB buys anything in this game specifically. Storage is similarly undramatic: an NVMe SSD shortens loads into and out of fights, and that is the whole story.

1080p: high refresh for almost everyone

The 114 FPS average at 1080p Ultra is the headline number, and it means exactly what it appears to mean: most gaming PCs from the last several years run Undisputed smoothly at maximum settings at this resolution. A 144Hz monitor is a realistic target for a mid-range build, and this is one of the few current licensed sports titles where that statement requires no asterisk.

The floor matters more than the average for some readers, though. The 12 FPS minimum in our data comes from the slowest measured combination, hardware well below the game's official requirements, and it marks the line where Undisputed stops being playable at Ultra. The more useful reading of the low end is this: if your system is anywhere near a modern entry-level spec, the answer at 1080p is not "will it run" but "which settings do I trim for consistency." At the other extreme, the 956 FPS ceiling at 1080p Low shows how completely the engine unbinds when visual load is removed on top-tier hardware. That figure is academic for play, but it confirms that nothing in the game engine artificially caps performance, which matters for the competitive crowd chasing input latency on 240Hz monitors. Boxing is a reaction game. Counters are timed in frames, and the difference between 60 FPS and 200+ FPS is visible in how the game feels, not just how it looks.

1440p and 4K: still gentle, but the GPU starts to matter

At 1440p Ultra the average falls to 82 FPS, a 28 percent drop from 1080p, and that scaling tells you the game is well behaved. A pure GPU-bound title loses roughly a third of its frame rate making that jump; Undisputed loses less because the CPU never fully lets go of the constraint. For most builds this is good news. The same mid-range graphics card that drives 144Hz at 1080p will hold 80 to 100 FPS at 1440p Ultra, which is comfortably inside the sweet spot for a 144Hz display with a little tuning.

The 4K picture is more selective. The 52 FPS average at 4K Ultra sits just below the 60 FPS line, which means a mid-range card at 4K needs either upscaling or settings work. UE4 titles support temporal upsampling well, and community FSR and DLSS solutions extend that further; enabling upscaling at 4K in this engine class typically recovers 30 to 50 percent of frame rate at a modest cost to image sharpness on a sports game where you are rarely pixel-peeping. The honest framing for the best graphics card for Undisputed at 4K is that you do not need a flagship. You need a solid upper-mid-range card, upscaling, and a willingness to drop two or three settings that cost more than they show. Chasing native 4K Ultra at a locked 60 is the expensive version of an experience that upscaled 4K gets you for hundreds of dollars less.

Recommended settings: where to trim and where to leave alone

Undisputed's settings menu follows the UE4 pattern, and the costs are distributed predictably. Post-processing and effects quality are the expensive options relative to what they contribute in a boxing ring; dropping them from Epic to High buys back meaningful frame rate with almost no visible change during actual play. Shadows are the next lever: arena lighting is static in practice, and shadow quality one step down is invisible from the gameplay camera. Anti-aliasing is worth keeping high because the ring ropes, canvas lines, and fighter outlines shimmer badly without it, and aliasing artifacts are genuinely distracting in a game where you read small shoulder movements to time counters. Texture quality is essentially free on any card with 8 GB of VRAM or more and should stay at maximum; the fighter models and skin detail are the game's visual identity.

For competitive play, the priority shifts from average FPS to latency. Cap your frame rate slightly below your monitor's ceiling if you use variable refresh, keep settings that affect frame-time consistency trimmed, and do not chase the 956 FPS Low-config numbers from our data; those exist to measure engine overhead, not to describe a sane way to play. A locked, consistent 144 FPS beats an erratic 200 every time in a game decided by reaction windows.

What hardware do you need?

Entry level: A modern entry-level build, a recent 6-core CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a budget current-generation graphics card, sits above the 1080p Ultra average of 114 FPS territory at reduced settings and delivers a genuinely good experience. This is one of the most accessible licensed sports games in our database. If you are assembling a budget gaming PC build with boxing in mind, your money is safe almost anywhere sensible you put it.

Mid-range: The natural home for this game. A mid-range graphics card behind a competent 6 or 8-core processor drives 1080p Ultra well past 100 FPS and 1440p Ultra around the 82 FPS average. Pair it with a 144Hz monitor and you are playing Undisputed the way it deserves to be played, with headroom left over.

High-end: At this tier the question becomes resolution and refresh. Strong cards hold 1440p at 144 FPS plus, and 4K with upscaling clears 60 comfortably. The CPU upgrade question starts to matter here: if you are pairing a flagship card with an older quad-core and seeing hitches during knockdown sequences, the processor, not the GPU, is the part to replace.

Flagship: Top-tier hardware at 4K Ultra sits well above the 52 FPS average, and with upscaling you can drive a 4K 120Hz display. This is overkill for Undisputed by any honest measure, but if the card is already in your machine for heavier games, the game will use every bit of it at native 4K.

Laptop playability

Undisputed is one of the friendlier games in our library for laptops, which follows directly from its engine profile. A gaming laptop with a mid-range mobile GPU handles 1080p Ultra near or above the 114 FPS average territory, since mobile cards in that class perform closest to their desktop counterparts at this resolution. The two laptop-specific cautions are thermals and memory configuration. Long sessions in a sustained-load game will pull some thin chassis into thermal throttling, which shows up exactly like the CPU hitches described earlier, so a laptop that benchmarks well for five minutes may not hold its numbers through a twelve-round title fight. And single-channel memory, still common in cheaper gaming laptops, costs measurable frame-time consistency in UE4 titles; a second stick of RAM to restore dual-channel operation is one of the cheapest real upgrades available for this game on a laptop. Integrated graphics and ultrabooks are the hard floor: below that line, the 12 FPS end of our data is where you live, and no settings profile rescues it.

Streaming and content creation

Boxing is an unusually good streaming game from a production standpoint: short rounds, natural breaks between them for commentary, and a fixed camera that reads well on broadcast. From a hardware standpoint, Undisputed's light GPU load is a gift for a streaming setup because it leaves encoder headroom everywhere. The recommendation is the standard one and it applies cleanly here: use the hardware encoder. NVENC on GeForce cards and AMF on Radeon cards produce clean 1080p60 output at negligible performance cost, and in a reaction-timing game you do not want x264 stealing CPU cycles from the main thread that handles hit detection. Software x264 encoding is only defensible on a dedicated dual-PC setup, which is beyond what this game demands. For players who clip knockdowns for video content, Undisputed's low system load also means you can run recording overhead, replay buffers, and even light video editing on the same machine without the game noticing. It is, frankly, one of the least stressful games to produce content around in our entire benchmark database.

Common problems and fixes

Hitches during knockdowns, clinch breaks, or between-round sequences: this is the CPU main thread, not your graphics card. Lower post-processing and effects first, and if the stutter persists on an older quad-core, no GPU settings will touch it. That is a processor limitation.

Frame rate well below our averages with matching hardware: check for single-channel memory first, especially on laptops and prebuilts. One stick of RAM is the most common silent performance killer we see in systems that should run this game easily.

Aliasing shimmer on ropes and canvas: raise anti-aliasing before touching anything else. This game needs AA more than it needs effects.

Long loads between menus and fights: move the install to an NVMe SSD if it is still on a hard drive. It will not change frame rate, but it removes the most annoying friction in the game.

Online matches feeling worse than offline at identical FPS: that is netcode and latency, not hardware. The game is sensitive to connection quality, and no component upgrade fixes a bad peer connection.

Upgrade priorities for Undisputed players

If your system underperforms our data, the order is clear. First, memory configuration: 16 GB in dual-channel, which is cheap and fixes the most common cause of frame-time problems. Second, the CPU if you are on an older quad-core; a CPU upgrade to a modern 6-core is the single biggest jump in consistency this game offers, and it pays off across every other UE4 and UE5 title you own. Third, the graphics card, but only if you are targeting 1440p high refresh or 4K; at 1080p, the mid-range already saturates the experience. Fourth, storage, purely for load-time quality of life. What you should not do is buy a flagship GPU for Undisputed alone. The 114 FPS average at 1080p Ultra exists precisely because the game does not need it, and the money does more for you literally anywhere else in your setup.

Frequently asked questions

Q: What are the average FPS numbers for Undisputed?

A: Across 3,718 measured CPU and GPU combinations, the average is 114 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 82 FPS at 1440p Ultra, and 52 FPS at 4K Ultra. The slowest configuration measured 12 FPS at 1080p Ultra, and the fastest reached 956 FPS at 1080p Low.

Q: Is Undisputed CPU or GPU intensive?

A: Lightly GPU intensive and moderately CPU dependent. The GPU load is gentle for a modern sports title, but frame-time consistency depends on the CPU main thread, so weak quad-cores hitch during knockdowns and cutscenes even behind strong cards.

Q: Can Undisputed run at 144Hz or 240Hz?

A: At 1080p, yes for 144Hz on most mid-range builds, since the 114 FPS Ultra average already sits in that range and tuned settings go higher. 240Hz requires a strong CPU and reduced settings, but the engine imposes no cap, as the 956 FPS ceiling in our data shows.

Q: Do I need a high-end graphics card for Undisputed at 4K?

A: No. The 52 FPS average at 4K Ultra means an upper-mid-range card with upscaling enabled clears 60 FPS. Native 4K Ultra at high refresh is the only scenario that justifies flagship hardware, and it is a luxury, not a requirement.

Q: Will more RAM or faster storage help?

A: 16 GB of dual-channel memory is the right target and helps frame-time consistency, especially on laptops. Beyond that, no. An NVMe SSD improves load times noticeably but does not affect FPS.

Q: Is Undisputed a good game to stream?

A: One of the best. Its light GPU load leaves headroom for NVENC or AMF hardware encoding at 1080p60 with effectively zero performance cost, and the round structure suits commentary. Avoid x264 software encoding, which competes with the CPU thread the game depends on.

The bottom line

In 2026, Undisputed occupies a comfortable place in the PC library: the boxing sim the platform waited a decade for, still supported by a licensed roster no competitor matches, and still one of the easiest modern sports titles to run well. The numbers define its character. A 114 FPS average at 1080p Ultra across 3,718 combinations means almost any sensible gaming PC delivers the experience the developers intended, and the 82 FPS at 1440p extends that generosity up a resolution tier. Only 4K asks real questions, and even there the 52 FPS average is a settings menu away from 60. The trap to avoid is overspending in the wrong place: this game rewards a balanced build, dual-channel memory, and a decent CPU far more than it rewards a flagship graphics card. Spend accordingly, trim post-processing and effects if you need headroom, and Undisputed will give you back every frame its reaction-driven gameplay demands. For a sport decided in split seconds, that is the only hardware verdict that matters.