Archeage

Resolution Scaling — how FPS drops from 1080p to 4K and what it says about the limiting component

The measured FPS data for Archeage shows a steep and consistent decline as resolution increases from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160, but the shape of that decline is strongly settings-dependent. At Low settings, the transition from 1080p to 4K cuts average frame rate from 225.5 FPS to 88.4 FPS, a drop of roughly 61%. At Medium settings, the same resolution sweep goes from 199.4 FPS down to 81.1 FPS, a 59% reduction. High settings move from 138.7 FPS at 1080p to 91.9 FPS at 1440p and finally 54 FPS at 4K, representing a 61% loss from the lowest to highest resolution tested. Ultra settings show the most dramatic scaling: 90.6 FPS at 1080p falls to 64.8 FPS at 1440p and bottoms out at 35.4 FPS at 4K, a 61% decline overall.

The consistency of these percentage drops — all hovering near 60% across four different quality presets — points to a GPU-bound scenario at higher resolutions. If the Intel Core i3-12100F were the primary constraint, the frame rate penalty from raising resolution would shrink or flatten, because the CPU would cap performance regardless of pixel count. Instead, the data shows that each doubling of pixel count (from 1080p to 4K is roughly four times the pixels) exacts a near-proportional toll on frame rate, which is characteristic of a graphics card operating at its fillrate ceiling. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT, with its 459.6 GPixel/s pixel rate and 800.0 GB/s memory bandwidth, is clearly the component doing the heavy lifting as resolution climbs.

However, the gap between Low and Ultra at 1080p is instructive. At 1080p Low, the combo reaches 225.5 FPS, which is well beyond what a 4-core/8-thread processor with a 3.30 GHz base clock and 4.30 GHz boost clock would typically sustain in an MMORPG. The fact that Ultra at 1080p drops to 90.6 FPS — a 60% reduction from Low — suggests that the CPU is not the limiting factor even at the lowest resolution; rather, the GPU's workload from higher-quality shading and effects is what pulls frame rates down. The resolution scaling data therefore indicates a balanced pairing where the GPU takes over as the dominant constraint as pixel count rises, but the CPU still delivers enough single-thread throughput to avoid becoming a bottleneck at 1080p.

GPU Role — VRAM, clocks, and how they relate to this game's results

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT brings 20 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 320-bit bus, yielding 800.0 GB/s of bandwidth. For a 2014-era MMORPG like Archeage, which was released on January 14, 2014, this memory subsystem is extraordinarily generous. The game's textures and geometry are unlikely to stress even a fraction of the available VRAM at any of the tested settings, so the 20 GB capacity is not a limiting factor in any of the measured results. Instead, the GPU's clock behavior and shader throughput are what determine performance.

The card's base clock is 1387 MHz, with a game clock of 2025 MHz and a boost clock of 2394 MHz. The large delta between base and boost — over 1000 MHz — indicates that the card is designed to ramp up aggressively under load, which is typical for RDNA 3.0 architecture. In Archeage, where scenes may vary from sparse outdoor areas to dense player gatherings, the boost clock likely sustains high frequencies during less demanding moments, while the 5376 shading units and 336 texture mapping units handle the game's draw calls and texture fetches. The 192 ROPs, combined with the pixel rate of 459.6 GPixel/s, explain why 4K Ultra performance falls to 35.4 FPS: the fillrate requirement at that resolution and quality exceeds what the card can sustain, even with its substantial compute resources.

The FP32 throughput of 51.48 TFLOPS and the 84 ray accelerators are far beyond anything Archeage requires, as the game predates ray tracing and does not use DirectX 12 Ultimate features aggressively. The 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 5623 and the Passmark G3D score of 29009 confirm that this GPU is a high-end part, ranking in the 82nd percentile among all GPUs. In the context of this game, the GPU's role is to provide headroom at lower resolutions and to be the primary limiter at 4K Ultra. The data shows that between 1080p and 1440p, the card can push well past 60 FPS at High settings (138.7 and 91.9 FPS respectively), but at 4K Ultra it falls below playable thresholds for many users. The 800.0 GB/s bandwidth is sufficient for the game's needs, as evidenced by the smooth scaling from Low to Medium at each resolution (e.g., 88.4 to 81.1 FPS at 4K), where only a modest penalty is incurred for higher texture quality.

CPU Role — cores, clocks, and how they relate to this game's results

The Intel Core i3-12100F is a 4-core, 8-thread processor based on Alder Lake architecture, fabricated on Intel's 10 nm process. Its base clock of 3.30 GHz and boost clock of 4.30 GHz provide strong single-thread performance, which is critical for an MMORPG like Archeage that relies heavily on game logic, server synchronization, and draw call submission — tasks that often scale poorly across many cores. The CPU's single-thread benchmark results are telling: a 3DMark single-thread score of 893, a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 1681, and a Geekbench single-core score of 2224. These scores place the chip above many older desktop processors, and its 72nd percentile ranking among all CPUs reflects solid mainstream performance.

In Archeage, the measured FPS at 1080p Low reaches 225.5 FPS, which is a strong indicator that the CPU is not the primary bottleneck at that resolution. If the i3-12100F were holding back the RX 7900 XT, we would expect to see frame rates plateau regardless of resolution changes. Instead, the data shows that reducing resolution from 1440p to 1080p at Low settings increases frame rate from 153.1 to 225.5 FPS, a 47% improvement. That scaling indicates the GPU is still doing meaningful work at 1080p, and the CPU's 8 threads are sufficient to feed it. The 12 MB of shared L3 cache and 1.25 MB per-core L2 cache provide adequate latency hiding for the game's asset streaming.

However, the CPU's limited core count does show in multi-threaded benchmarks. The 3DMark max-threads score of 4023 is only slightly higher than the 4-thread score of 2859, confirming that the chip has no more than 4 physical cores to draw upon. In Archeage, where player counts in crowded zones can spike CPU load, this could theoretically cause frame dips in heavy scenarios, but the measured average FPS does not reveal such events. The Cinebench R23 multicore score of 11912 and Passmark multithread score of 14015 are respectable for a 4-core part, but they are far below what high-core-count CPUs achieve. The nearest rival data shows the i3-12100F is within 1.8% of the Intel Core i7-7700K in average benchmark score (13516 vs 13280), indicating it holds its own against older quad-core flagships. For this game, the CPU provides enough single-thread performance to avoid limiting the GPU at 1080p, but the resolution scaling data suggests that at 4K, the GPU is so heavily tasked that the CPU's role diminishes further.

Measured FPS Breakdown — resolution by resolution, settings by settings, exact numbers

At 1920x1080, the combo delivers its highest frame rates. Low settings produce an average of 225.5 FPS, Medium drops to 199.4 FPS, High settles at 138.7 FPS, and Ultra falls to 90.6 FPS. The step from Low to Medium costs 26.1 FPS, while the jump from Medium to High costs 60.7 FPS, and High to Ultra costs 48.1 FPS. This pattern shows that the largest performance penalty occurs when moving from Medium to High, suggesting that High settings introduce significant shading or post-processing effects that tax the GPU.

At 2560x1440, the same settings hierarchy holds but with lower absolute numbers. Low averages 153.1 FPS, Medium 135.3 FPS, High 91.9 FPS, and Ultra 64.8 FPS. The relative gap between Low and Medium narrows to 17.8 FPS, while the Medium-to-High drop is 43.4 FPS, again confirming High as the most demanding step. Ultra at 1440p remains above 60 FPS, which is a usable threshold for many displays.

At 3840x2160, performance degrades substantially. Low averages 88.4 FPS, Medium 81.1 FPS, High 54 FPS, and Ultra 35.4 FPS. The Low-to-Medium gap is only 7.3 FPS, indicating that the GPU is already near its limit at this resolution, and additional quality settings have diminishing absolute costs. High settings just miss the 60 FPS target, while Ultra is not playable for smooth motion. The data across all resolutions shows that 1080p and 1440p are well-served by this combo, with even Ultra at 1440p hitting 64.8 FPS, but 4K requires dropping to Medium or Low to maintain acceptable frame rates.

How This Combo Ranks — use comboRankInGame vs other tested combos

The combination of the Intel Core i3-12100F and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT ranks 346th out of 1727 tested combos in Archeage, placing it in the top 20% of all configurations. This rank is notable because the CPU is a budget-oriented quad-core, while the GPU is a high-end enthusiast part with an 82nd percentile ranking among all GPUs. The GPU's avg benchmark score of 38358 is nearly identical to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Mobile (38349, a 0% delta) and slightly ahead of the NVIDIA CMP 70HX (38225, 0.3% delta), but the CPU's avg score of 13516 trails the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3975WX (13534, -0.1% delta) and leads the Intel Core i7-1250U (13462, 0.4% delta) by a similar margin.

The rank of 346 out of 1727 suggests that the GPU is doing most of the heavy lifting in this pairing, as the CPU's 72nd percentile ranking would typically pull a combo lower if the game were CPU-bound. The measured FPS data confirms this: at 1440p High, the combo achieves 91.9 FPS, which is well above the 60 FPS target, and at 1080p High it reaches 138.7 FPS. These results are consistent with a GPU that can deliver high frame rates when paired with a CPU that does not bottleneck it. The fact that the combo ranks in the 80th percentile of all tested configurations, despite the modest CPU, indicates that Archeage's engine rewards GPU throughput more than core count. The deltaPct values for the CPU's nearest rivals are all within 1.8%, meaning the i3-12100F's performance is tightly clustered with several other processors, so the GPU choice is the primary differentiator in this rank.