Valorant

Settings Recommendations

The measured frame-rate rows for Valorant show a consistent hierarchy across all three resolutions. At 1920x1080, the Low preset delivers 556.2 FPS average, which is the highest figure recorded for this combination. Medium drops to 468.9 FPS, High to 446.6 FPS, and Ultra to 424.5 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra is 131.7 FPS at 1080p, representing a 31% reduction in throughput when maxing out settings. For competitive play, the Low preset offers the largest performance headroom, but the data shows that even Ultra remains far above display refresh-rate ceilings for most monitors.

At 2560x1440, the same ordering holds: Low produces 525.5 FPS, Medium 400.3 FPS, High 379.7 FPS, and Ultra 360.5 FPS. The delta between Low and Ultra here is 165 FPS, a 45.8% drop. At 3840x2160, Low achieves 489.5 FPS, Medium 319.7 FPS, High 302 FPS, and Ultra 287.2 FPS. The Low-to-Ultra spread at 4K is 202.3 FPS, a 70.4% reduction. Notably, the scaling penalty from Low to Medium is disproportionately large at higher resolutions: at 4K, moving from Low to Medium costs 169.8 FPS, whereas moving from Medium to High costs only 17.7 FPS, and High to Ultra costs 14.8 FPS. This suggests Medium is a steep threshold where the GPU begins to engage additional shading work.

The practical recommendation is the High preset for users prioritizing visual fidelity without sacrificing the frame-rate headroom needed for high-refresh displays. High sits within 20% of Low's throughput across all resolutions: at 1080p it is 446.6 FPS versus 556.2 FPS, at 1440p 379.7 FPS versus 525.5 FPS, and at 4K 302 FPS versus 489.5 FPS. Ultra offers diminishing returns, costing 22.1 FPS at 1080p, 19.2 FPS at 1440p, and 14.8 FPS at 4K relative to High. Given that the minimum frame rates are not recorded in this data, the average figures still indicate that High provides a stable experience well above 300 FPS even at 4K. For users with 360 Hz or lower refresh panels, High is the balanced choice; for those chasing maximum frame consistency, Low is the only preset that keeps every resolution above 480 FPS.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT carries 12 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit bus, yielding 384.0 GB/s of bandwidth. Its base clock is 2321 MHz, with a game clock of 2424 MHz and a boost clock of 2581 MHz. The GPU has 2560 shading units, 160 texture mapping units, and 64 raster output pipelines, with a pixel rate of 165.2 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 413.0 GTexel/s. These specifications place the card at the 77th percentile among all GPUs in the database, with an average benchmark score of 33721.

In Valorant, the GPU's role becomes more pronounced as resolution increases. At 1080p, the difference between Low and Ultra is 131.7 FPS, which is relatively modest given the large settings swing. At 4K, that same settings swing produces a 202.3 FPS difference. This indicates that the RX 6700 XT's rasterization throughput is not the primary constraint at lower resolutions, where the CPU dominates frame generation. However, at 4K the GPU's shading and memory subsystem begin to matter more, as evidenced by the steep drop from Low to Medium at 3840x2160.

The card's 40 ray accelerators and RDNA 2.0 architecture support DirectX 12 Ultimate, but Valorant's rendering workload is mostly traditional rasterization. The measured data shows that even at Ultra settings and 4K, the GPU sustains 287.2 FPS, which is far beyond the refresh capability of most displays. This suggests the RX 6700 XT is overqualified for Valorant's GPU demands, and the bottleneck lies elsewhere. The nearest GPU rivals in the database include the RX 6800 with a delta of 0.7% and the RX 480 with a delta of -1%, indicating that the 6700 XT sits in a performance tier where small percentage differences do not translate into meaningful FPS changes in this particular game.

Resolution Scaling

The frame-rate progression from 1080p to 4K reveals how the workload shifts between CPU and GPU. At Low settings, the measured averages are 556.2 FPS at 1080p, 525.5 FPS at 1440p, and 489.5 FPS at 4K. The drop from 1080p to 4K is 66.7 FPS, or 12%. At Medium settings, the figures are 468.9, 400.3, and 319.7 FPS respectively, a total drop of 149.2 FPS, or 31.8%. At High settings, the drop is from 446.6 to 379.7 to 302 FPS, a total reduction of 144.6 FPS, or 32.4%. At Ultra, the drop is from 424.5 to 360.5 to 287.2 FPS, a total reduction of 137.3 FPS, or 32.3%.

The Low preset shows the smallest resolution penalty, which is expected because the GPU is doing less work per frame, leaving the CPU as the limiting factor. The fact that Low at 4K still produces 489.5 FPS — only 12% below the 1080p result — suggests that the CPU is still able to feed frames at a high rate even when the GPU has more pixels to fill. In contrast, the Medium, High, and Ultra presets all show roughly a 32% penalty from 1080p to 4K, indicating that the GPU's shading load becomes more significant as settings increase. The data points to a system where the Core i5-13400F can generate frames at over 550 FPS at 1080p Low, but the GPU's rasterization capacity begins to cap the output when settings are raised.

The scaling pattern also shows that the step from 1440p to 4K is more punishing than from 1080p to 1440p. At High settings, 1080p to 1440p costs 66.9 FPS, while 1440p to 4K costs 77.7 FPS. At Ultra, the respective drops are 64 FPS and 73.3 FPS. This is consistent with the pixel count increase being larger when moving to 4K. The limiting component shifts from the CPU at 1080p Low to a more balanced CPU-GPU load at 4K High and Ultra, though even the worst case remains above 287 FPS.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of the Intel Core i5-13400F and AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT holds rank 668 out of 1650 tested combos in Valorant. That places it in the 59.5th percentile of all combinations, meaning roughly 40% of configured systems achieve higher frame rates in this title. Given that Valorant is known as a CPU-sensitive game, the ranking reflects the i5-13400F's position among processors rather than the GPU's contribution.

The CPU itself sits at the 82nd percentile among all processors, with an average benchmark score of 25236. Its nearest rivals in the database include the Intel Core i7-13620H with a delta of 0.1%, the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D with a delta of -0.5%, and the AMD EPYC 9474F with a delta of 0.5%. These deltas are all within 0.5 percentage points, indicating that the i5-13400F is in a tightly packed performance band where small architectural differences determine rankings. The GPU, at the 77th percentile, is slightly lower than the CPU in relative standing, which explains why the combo rank (59.5th percentile of combos) is lower than either component's individual percentile — the pairing does not amplify strengths but rather reflects the CPU's dominance in this workload.

The rank of 668 out of 1650 suggests that while this system delivers very high absolute FPS, many other tested combinations — likely those with higher-end CPUs like the Core i7 or Ryzen 7 series — outperform it in Valorant's frame generation. The measured FPS figures, however, show that this combo exceeds 424 FPS at 1080p even on Ultra settings, so the rank is more a measure of relative headroom than of practical insufficiency. For a game where competitive players target 360 Hz or 500 Hz displays, this combo sits comfortably above those thresholds, and the rank indicates that only a minority of systems can push even higher.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-13400F is a 10-core, 16-thread processor based on Raptor Lake architecture, manufactured on Intel's 10 nm process. It has a base clock of 2.50 GHz and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz, with a 65 W TDP. The cache hierarchy includes 80 KB of L1 per core, 1.25 MB of L2 per core, and 20 MB of shared L3. The processor supports DDR4 and DDR5 memory in dual-channel configuration, and it sits at the 82nd percentile among all CPUs.

In Valorant, the CPU's role is critical because the game's frame generation is heavily dependent on single-thread and low-thread-count performance. The i5-13400F's single-thread benchmark scores are revealing: 3dmark single-thread at 960, Cinebench R23 single-core at 3004, and Geekbench single-core at 2301. Its multi-thread scores, such as Cinebench R23 multi-core at 21279 and Passmark multithread at 25032, show strong scaling from the 10 cores, but Valorant typically uses fewer threads. The 3dmark 2-thread score of 1880 and 4-thread score of 3459 are more relevant to this game's engine.

The measured FPS differences between Low and Ultra settings at a fixed resolution indicate that the CPU is the primary limiter at 1080p. At 1080p Low, the system hits 556.2 FPS; at 1080p Ultra, it drops to 424.5 FPS. This 131.7 FPS gap is driven by increased GPU load, but the fact that even Ultra stays above 424 FPS suggests the CPU can feed frames at a very high rate. The CPU's nearest rivals — the Core i7-13620H and Ryzen 5 5600X3D — have average benchmark scores within 0.5% of the i5-13400F, meaning that swapping CPUs within this performance tier would produce negligible FPS changes in Valorant.

The 10-core configuration with 16 threads provides headroom for background tasks while gaming, but the game's performance is more tied to the boost clock of 4.60 GHz and the per-core cache. The 20 MB L3 cache is shared across all cores, which helps with frame pacing in competitive shooters where consistent frame times matter more than peak throughput. The data shows that this CPU, when paired with the RX 6700 XT, can sustain over 287 FPS at 4K Ultra, which is far beyond what most displays can show. The limiting factor in this combination is not the CPU's compute capability but rather the GPU's ability to keep up at higher settings and resolutions.