Valorant

The Intel Core i7-14700K paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER delivers an exceptionally strong performance profile in Valorant, a game where high frame rates are paramount. The benchmark data shows this combination is capable of pushing well beyond the refresh rates of even the most demanding gaming monitors, with the measured average FPS across all tested settings and resolutions never falling below 441.1. This places the combo in the top tier of tested configurations, ranking 60th out of 1,650 combos.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data indicates that Valorant is remarkably forgiving of GPU load, allowing for significant setting increases without proportional frame rate penalties. The most compelling case for a specific preset comes from comparing the Low and Ultra settings at each resolution. At 1080p, the Low preset achieves an average of 679.2 FPS, while the Ultra preset still delivers a highly respectable 561.8 FPS. The gap narrows at 1440p, with Low at 647.6 FPS and Ultra at 533.8 FPS. Even at 4K, the Ultra preset maintains an average of 441.1 FPS, which is still far above the threshold for competitive play.

Given that the performance delta between the most demanding and least demanding settings is relatively modest, the Ultra preset is the recommended choice for the best overall experience. The data shows that the penalty for enabling maximum visual fidelity is a performance drop of roughly 17% at 1080p, but the absolute frame rates remain so high that the visual upgrade is essentially free. For players with 144Hz or 240Hz monitors, the Ultra preset at 1440p, delivering 533.8 FPS, provides an immense headroom buffer that ensures frame times stay consistently low. Furthermore, the High preset at 4K, with an average of 461.8 FPS, is the optimal choice for users with high-refresh-rate 4K displays, as it offers a substantial improvement over the Low preset’s 600.3 FPS but still provides more than enough performance for smooth gameplay.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, built on the Ada Lovelace architecture, plays a supporting role in this pairing, as Valorant’s engine is not heavily GPU-bound. The card features 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus, providing a bandwidth of 504.2 GB/s. This memory configuration is more than sufficient for the game’s texture and asset loading requirements, and the data confirms that VRAM capacity is not a limiting factor at any tested resolution or settings combination. The GPU’s boost clock of 2475 MHz and its 7168 shading units provide ample raw compute power, but the benchmark results suggest that the processor is the primary driver of frame generation.

The GPU’s average benchmark score of 42,576 places it in the 84th percentile of all GPUs, indicating strong overall performance. Its nearest rivals include the NVIDIA RTX A6000, which scores 42,653, a 0.2% difference, and the AMD Radeon RX 7650 GRE, which scores 42,723, a 0.3% difference. These minuscule deltas confirm that the RTX 4070 SUPER is positioned in a highly competitive performance tier. In the context of Valorant, the GPU’s role is to ensure that frame rendering is never a bottleneck. The data shows that even at the Ultra preset, the GPU is not saturated, as frame rates remain high and consistent. This suggests that the card’s 35.48 TFLOPS of FP32 performance and 554.4 GTexel/s texture rate are more than adequate for the game’s visual complexity, allowing the CPU to dictate the ultimate frame rate ceiling.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i7-14700K is unequivocally the star of this benchmark show, acting as the primary performance driver in Valorant. This processor, part of the Core 14th Gen series with a Raptor Lake architecture, features 20 cores and 28 threads, with a base clock of 3.40 GHz and a boost clock of 5.60 GHz. Its high single-thread performance is critical for a game like Valorant, which relies heavily on CPU logic and physics calculations. The processor’s benchmark scores reflect this strength, with a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 6,287 and a multi-core score of 44,534. Its PassMark single-thread score of 4,472 further underscores its capability in lightly-threaded workloads.

The CPU’s overall average benchmark score of 70,074 places it in the 96th percentile of all CPUs, highlighting its elite status. Its nearest rivals are the Intel Core i7-14700KF with a score of 70,104 (a 0% difference), and the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X with a score of 70,420 (a 0.5% disadvantage for the 14700K). This close grouping suggests that the 14700K is at the very top of the consumer performance stack. In Valorant, the data demonstrates that the CPU is the limiting factor, as frame rates scale more with resolution (which affects GPU load) than with settings changes. The high boost clock of 5.60 GHz allows for rapid instruction processing, which translates directly into higher frame generation. The 33 MB of shared L3 cache also helps by keeping frequently accessed data close to the cores, reducing latency and improving frame pacing.

How This Combo Ranks

The combined performance of the Intel Core i7-14700K and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is exceptional, securing a rank of 60 out of 1,650 tested combinations in Valorant. This places the pairing in the top 3.6% of all configurations, proof of the synergy between the high-end CPU and the robust GPU. The ranking is primarily driven by the CPU’s dominance in the game’s single-threaded workloads, with the GPU providing enough headroom to ensure that no GPU-related bottleneck occurs. The data shows that this combo outperforms the vast majority of alternatives, including those with more powerful GPUs, because Valorant’s frame rates are so sensitive to processor speed.

The benchmark results indicate that the combo’s performance is consistent across all settings, with the frame rate differences between Low and Ultra being relatively small compared to the differences seen in more graphically intensive titles. This consistency suggests that the pairing is well-balanced for this specific game, with neither component causing a significant performance cliff. The rank of 60 signifies that the combination is not just powerful, but also optimally matched for the game’s specific demands. Users can expect a highly responsive experience with minimal frame time variance, which is essential for competitive play. The fact that it achieves these results without any obvious thermal or power throttling issues, given the CPU’s 125W TDP and the GPU’s 220W TDP, further solidifies its position as a top-tier choice.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals a clear pattern where performance degrades as resolution increases, but the degradation is less severe than typical for most games. Scaling from 1080p to 1440p, the Ultra preset drops from 561.8 FPS to 533.8 FPS, a reduction of 5%. Moving from 1440p to 4K, the same preset drops from 533.8 FPS to 441.1 FPS, a more substantial reduction of 17.4%. This pattern indicates that the GPU begins to take on a more significant role at higher resolutions, but the CPU still remains the primary bottleneck. The Low preset shows a similar trend, with a 4.9% drop from 1080p to 1440p (679.2 to 647.6 FPS) and a 7.3% drop from 1440p to 4K (647.6 to 600.3 FPS).

The relatively small frame rate drops when moving from 1080p to 1440p, especially at lower settings, suggest that the CPU is still the limiting factor at those resolutions. The larger drops observed when moving to 4K indicate that the GPU’s pixel throughput becomes increasingly important, but the absolute frame rates remain extremely high. For instance, the 4K Ultra preset’s 441.1 FPS is still far beyond what most displays can show. This data suggests that the limiting component for this combo in Valorant is the CPU, particularly at lower resolutions. The RTX 4070 SUPER has enough performance headroom to handle the game’s graphics load at 1080p and 1440p without significantly impacting the frame rate, but at 4K, its workload increases enough to cause a measurable, albeit still small, performance dip. This makes the combo ideal for high-refresh-rate gaming at 1440p, where it can maintain near-peak performance, and it remains highly capable at 4K for users who prioritize visual fidelity over the absolute maximum frame rate.