Arknights Benchmarks

Hardware Tested

The following CPUs were tested:

My Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra was also thrown in for one of the tests just as a reference of what a decent "native" phone experience would be like

All configurations were tested with NVIDIA GeForce GPUs, specifically a GeForce GTX 1660 and GeForce RTX 4070. As Arknights is not a graphically demanding game, the performance difference between these GPUs does not meaningfully change any of the results.

Testing Methodology

I quickly noticed simply measuring and comparing framerate is not a good way to measure Arknights performance, most of the time the FPS is good but the game still feels sluggish and unresponsive.
So I devised the following 3 tests:

Framerate in 11-6 Adverse is taken as an average of 2 full runs. Friend base switching time is an average of 4 base switches.

More detail on how each test was performed can be found in the spoiler below.

11-6 Adverse Framerate Results

The lineup is as expected here, with typically stronger CPUs being faster. And with even older CPUs such as the Ryzen 5 2600 being adequate for a decently smooth experience.

11-6 Adverse Loading Time Results

The stage loading times are again, just as expected, though the gaps narrow down towards the faster CPUs. That said, a somewhat recent budget CPU like the Ryzen 5 3600 won't be all that much slower than the fastest CPUs you can buy today.

Friend Base Switching Time Results

The base switching results paint a very similar picture, anything faster than the Ryzen 5 3600 is perfectly usable and you won't be missing out. This time I also included my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra as a reference, and turns out you don't really need a super fast PC to match a phone, even though you have all the Android emulation overhead on PC. Worth noting this is the Exynos version of the S22 Ultra.

Windows Core Isolation Findings

During my testing I ran into a curious issue regarding Windows' relatively new "Virtualization Based Security" features, that being Core Isolation and Memory Integrity.

Usually this is a feature that reduces performance a little bit - and even though it does that, I would never recommend disabling security features like these. But that seems to be different for Bluestacks, at least on the Ryzen 5000 series CPUs.
With Core Isolation disabled, the game performed much worse. This is interesting as other emulators such as LDPlayer explicitly warn you and ask you to disable this feature as it can cause performance issues.

Regardless of the cause, I recommend turning it on if you are using Bluestacks. If you are using LDPlayer, the recommendation is to turn it off, but I won't recommend that.

Emulator Comparison

Lastly I decided to also do a quick emulator comparison of the two popular ones - Bluestacks and LDPlayer, but I also threw in Google Play Games Beta as it is a first party Google product, which you would expect to be very performant for Android game emulation.

I did this comparison mainly out of interest, but also because I noticed some of these results myself back when I switched from LDPlayer to Bluestacks and wanted to put it into presentable numbers.

First is the framerate test, where Bluestacks has a clear win on both my Intel and AMD test system. Google Play Games Beta is in last place at only 60 FPS, not because it is slow, but because it has a 60 FPS limit that you currently can't remove or increase. For that reason I did not bother testing the framerate again on the Core i7-12700KF.

In the loading test, Bluestacks and LDPlayer are matched up pretty much as expected (at least from my experience with both emulators, but the mindset of LDPlayer being the fastest is very strong out there). This time we can see Google Play Games Beta be in first place as the fastest emulator here.

Last is the base switching test, which stacks up about the same as the stage loading test, though the lead of Bluestacks and Google Play Games Beta over LDPlayer is quite a bit larger than I expected, but it does match up with my personal impressions from over a year ago - base switching is where I noticed it the most.

Conclusion

There are a few conclusions to take away. First is the obvious one - faster CPU is better. The second one is regarding GPUs, as that is often the more important piece of hardware for games, but not for Arknights. In my testing the GeForce GTX 1660 was more than enough to push over 180 FPS at 3840x2160 while remaining at under 30% utilization since the limiting factor was the CPU - the Ryzen 9 7900X3D was tested with the GeForce GTX 1660 as an example.

There are also a few takeaways with regards to emulators - in my testing I found Google Play Games Beta to be the most performant one from a snappiness perspective, but due to its 60 FPS cap, I can't quite recommend it over Bluestacks. However, LDPlayer has some catching up to do.
I did test with Windows Core Isolation enabled even for LDPlayer, which probably did negatively impact it, but I don't believe disabling critical security features is something you should do when there are clear alternatives that perform just fine with those features enabled.

Now, if you want the fastest possible Arknights experience, judging by my results, your CPU of choice is likely the Intel Core i9-14900K or the KS variant. The considerably weaker Intel Core i7-12700KF gives the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D a run for its money, but unfortunately for AMD there isn't really anything higher than the Ryzen 9 7900X3D as Arknights does not care about core count beyond like 4 cores.
I tested with only 6 cores enabled on the Ryzen 9 7900X3D (Both with V-Cache and without) and the framerate and switching times were roughly the same, which also indicates that the Ryzen 5 7600 is likely the best choice for Arknights on a reasonable budget. As for GPU, that was already made pretty clear - you don't have to worry about it much.

Thank you for your time to read this and I hope you found this useful or at least interesting!