Barony

The Intel Core i3-12100F paired with the AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT delivers a wide performance envelope in Barony, scaling from highly playable 4K Ultra to extremely high refresh rate 1080p Low. The data indicates a system that is well-balanced for this roguelike, though the limiting factor shifts depending on the resolution and preset selected.

Resolution Scaling

The measured frame rates show a clear and consistent progression as resolution increases. At 1080p High, the combo produces 193.9 FPS average. Moving to 1440p High, the average drops to 120.6 FPS, which is a 37.8% reduction. Stepping up to 4K High, the average falls further to 62.1 FPS, representing a 48.5% decline from the 1440p figure and a 68% drop from the 1080p baseline.

This scaling pattern reveals a shift in the system's performance bottleneck. At 1080p, the frame rates are exceptionally high across all settings (ranging from 135.2 FPS at Ultra to 296.7 FPS at Low), indicating that the CPU has ample headroom and the GPU is not being saturated by pixel workload. The Core i3-12100F, with its 4 cores and 8 threads boosting up to 4.30 GHz, appears sufficient to feed the Radeon RX 6650 XT at this resolution.

The transition to 1440p shows a more pronounced performance penalty, but the system still maintains high playability. The most significant scaling impact occurs between 1440p and 4K. At 4K, the pixel count quadruples from 1080p, and the GPU's rendering workload becomes the dominant constraint. The RX 6650 XT, with its 8 GB of GDDR6 memory and 280.3 GB/s bandwidth, begins to show its limits, particularly at higher presets. The data suggests that the RDNA 2.0 architecture, built on the 7 nm process with a boost clock of 2635 MHz, is the primary determinant of performance at 4K, whereas the CPU plays a more significant role at 1080p.

Settings Recommendations

The measured rows provide a clear picture of the trade-off between visual fidelity and frame rate. At 1080p, the Ultra preset still yields a very high 135.2 FPS average, making it the optimal choice for users with high refresh rate monitors seeking maximum visual detail without sacrificing smoothness. The High preset at 1080p offers a marginal increase to 193.9 FPS, which is beneficial for competitive play, but the visual difference between High and Ultra is often less impactful than the frame rate gain.

For 1440p, the High preset emerges as the best balance, delivering 120.6 FPS. This is comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay and retains a high level of visual quality. The Medium preset at 1440p produces 142.8 FPS, which is faster but comes with a noticeable reduction in graphical fidelity. The Ultra preset at 1440p drops to 86.2 FPS, which is still playable but shows that the GPU is starting to struggle with the combination of high resolution and maximum settings.

At 4K, the choice becomes more critical. The High preset provides 62.1 FPS, which is just above the standard 60 FPS target and represents the best experience for users prioritizing visual quality at this resolution. The Medium preset at 4K yields 76 FPS, offering a more comfortable margin above 60 FPS while still looking better than Low. The Low preset at 4K produces 97.4 FPS, which is surprisingly high and suggests that the game's low settings are not overly demanding on the GPU, allowing the RX 6650 XT to stretch its legs even at 3840x2160. The Ultra preset at 4K falls to 47.6 FPS, which is below the ideal smoothness threshold and is not recommended for a consistent experience.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT is the central component in determining the upper limits of this combo's performance. Its specifications are directly reflected in the measured frame rates. The GPU features 2048 shading units, 128 texture mapping units, and 64 ROPs, operating at a base clock of 2055 MHz and a boost clock of 2635 MHz. This configuration provides a pixel rate of 168.6 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 337.3 GTexel/s, which are key metrics for rendering the voxel-based environments and particle effects typical of Barony.

The 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus with a bandwidth of 280.3 GB/s is sufficient for this game, as evidenced by the playable frame rates at 4K. The data does not show a catastrophic drop in performance that would indicate a VRAM capacity bottleneck, even at the 4K Ultra preset which demands the most memory. The GPU's 10.79 TFLOPS of FP32 compute power is a strong indicator of its ability to handle the game's shader complexity.

The performance relative to its peers is noteworthy. The GPU's average benchmark score of 29024 places it at the 72nd percentile among all GPUs. Its nearest rivals include the AMD Radeon RX 6800M (scoring 29011, a delta of 0%), the AMD Radeon RX 470 (scoring 28996, a delta of 0.1%), and the Intel Arc A370M (scoring 29175, a delta of -0.5%). This indicates that the RX 6650 XT sits in a very tight performance cluster, with its closest competitors being within a fraction of a percent in synthetic benchmarks. In Barony, this translates to consistent performance that is neither a standout nor a laggard, but rather a solid mid-range contender.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the benchmark database, this specific combination of the Intel Core i3-12100F and AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT holds a rank of 1071 out of 1702 tested combos for Barony. This places the system in the lower half of all tested configurations, which is somewhat surprising given the high absolute frame rates measured.

The rank suggests that while this combo delivers excellent playable performance on its own, many other systems in the database achieve even higher frame rates, likely due to more powerful CPUs or GPUs that are less constrained at the higher resolution and settings tested. The rank of 1071 out of 1702 indicates that the combination is not in the top tier for this specific game, but it is far from the bottom. The data implies that the system is capable of handling the game at high settings, but it is not optimized for the absolute maximum frame rates that other, more expensive combinations can achieve.

This ranking is a relative measure against the entire field of tested hardware. The Intel Core i3-12100F itself has a percentile ranking of 72 against all CPUs, and the RX 6650 XT also has a 72nd percentile ranking against all GPUs. When combined, their synergistic performance in Barony results in a rank that is slightly below what their individual percentiles might suggest, indicating that the game's engine may have a particular sensitivity to one of the components that holds the combo back relative to other pairings.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i3-12100F plays a crucial, yet secondary, role in this combo's performance. With 4 cores and 8 threads, a base clock of 3.30 GHz, and a boost clock of 4.30 GHz, this Alder Lake-S architecture processor is a capable budget-oriented part. Its 12 MB of shared L3 cache and 1.25 MB of L2 cache per core provide adequate data locality for the game's logic.

The CPU's synthetic benchmark scores show a clear strength in single-threaded performance, which is often critical for game logic and physics. It scores 893 in the 3dmark_single_thread test and 1681 in cinebench_r23_singlecore. Its multi-threaded capabilities are also respectable, with a cinebench_r23_multicore score of 11912 and a geekbench_multicore score of 7413. The passmark_multithread score of 14015 further confirms its balanced performance profile.

In the context of Barony, the CPU's role is to maintain a stable frame pacing and handle the game's simulation and AI. At 1080p, the CPU is likely the primary bottleneck, as the GPU has excess capacity. This is evident from the high frame rates at 1080p Low (296.7 FPS), which are likely limited by the CPU's ability to issue draw calls and process game state. The CPU's performance relative to its nearest rivals is tight; the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3975WX scores 13534 (a delta of -0.1%), and the Intel Core i7-7700K scores 13280 (a delta of 1.8%). This shows that the i3-12100F is competitive with much more expensive parts in synthetic tests, but in a real-world game scenario, its 4-core/8-thread configuration may be more limiting than its raw benchmark scores suggest.

As the resolution increases to 4K, the CPU's influence wanes, and the GPU becomes the limiting factor, allowing the CPU to keep up with the lower frame rates. The data indicates a well-matched pairing where the CPU does not severely cripple the GPU's performance at higher resolutions, but it does cap the maximum achievable frame rate at 1080p.