Hey everyone! My husband and I are comparing our gaming rigs as he's thinking about upgrading his CPU, and we've encountered a puzzling issue. Here's what we have:
My setup includes 32GB of DDR4 RAM, an Intel i7-10700K, an AMD Radeon 9070XT GPU, and an MSI MPG Z490 Gaming Plus motherboard. On the other hand, he has the same amount of RAM, but his CPU is an Intel i5-14600K, paired with an Nvidia RTX GeForce 4070 Super and an Asus Prime H610M-A-D4 motherboard.
We also have different monitor setups—I'm running dual monitors at 2560x1440 resolution, while he has a single ultrawide monitor at 5120x1440. Recently, we built his brother a rig with an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and an Nvidia 5070, which performed remarkably with an average FPS of around 230 in Cyberpunk 2077. However, my setup only managed around 216 FPS, and his was significantly lower at about 120 FPS.
Why is there such a big gap in performance? Userbenchmark suggested that our GPUs aren't too different. We even tried running the game at 2560x1440, and it only improved his FPS by 10-15. We haven't switched monitors yet, and we did need to flash the BIOS on his new CPU. Could that be a factor?
3 Answers
The 4070 isn’t particularly powerful for ultrawide 1440p gaming, so that could definitely play a part. More pixels mean more power is needed. Also, I'd take Userbenchmark results with a grain of salt; they can be pretty misleading. Plus, H610 motherboards are generally more suited for low-power builds and might throttle performance for gaming since they typically have fewer power stages.
I think the issue likely stems from his monitor setup. Are you running the game across both of your 1440 monitors, or just using one for the game and the other for stuff like Discord? The 5120x1440 monitor has way more pixels to push than a standard 2560x1440, which is probably why his FPS is lower—it demands more from the GPU.
Have you checked if his machine is more CPU-bound or GPU-bound? That might give you some insight into where the bottleneck could be.
That was our initial thought too, but even when we set the game to 2560x1440, the difference was only about 10-15 FPS. We tested in both borderless windowed and windowed modes, and those changes didn't help much either.