Hard West

# Hard West with Intel Core i5-12600KF + Intel Arc B370

FAQ

Q: What is the combo's overall ranking in Hard West?

A: This combination of Intel Core i5-12600KF and Intel Arc B370 ranks 2721st out of 2949 tested combos in Hard West, placing it in the bottom 8% of all tested configurations.

Q: What frame rates does this combo achieve at 1080p?

A: At 1920x1080, the combo ranges from 79 FPS on Low settings down to 37 FPS on Ultra, with Medium at 64 FPS and High at 49 FPS.

Q: How does the Intel Arc B370 compare to its nearest GPU rivals?

A: The Arc B370's 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 1184 is within 0.7% of the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5570 (1186) and ATI Radeon HD 5770 (1190), while sitting 1.4% above the AMD FirePro M2000 (1168).

Q: Is this CPU or GPU bottlenecked in Hard West?

A: The data suggests GPU limitation dominates — dropping from 1080p to 4K at High settings reduces average FPS from 49 to 16, a 67% loss that points squarely at the graphics subsystem rather than the processor.

Q: What are the CPU's key specifications for this game?

A: The Intel Core i5-12600KF provides 10 cores and 16 threads with a base clock of 3.70 GHz and boost clock of 4.90 GHz, placing it in the 79th percentile of all CPUs.

Q: Does the Arc B370 have dedicated VRAM?

A: No — the Arc B370 uses System Shared memory with system-dependent bandwidth, meaning its memory performance is tied entirely to the host system's RAM configuration.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-12600KF brings substantial processing headroom to Hard West, a turn-based tactics title that rarely stresses modern multi-core designs. The CPU's 10 cores and 16 threads — split across Alder Lake's hybrid architecture — provide far more parallel capability than a 2015 strategy game can typically exploit. With a base clock of 3.70 GHz and boost up to 4.90 GHz, single-threaded performance is strong, as reflected in the 3DMark single-thread score of 1016 and Cinebench R23 single-core result of 3302.

Multi-threaded results reinforce this picture. The Cinebench R23 multicore score of 23391 and Geekbench multicore score of 12137 show a processor capable of handling any background tasks or AI computations Hard West might generate. The CPU's 20 MB of shared L3 cache provides ample room for game logic, pathfinding, and turn-based decision trees. The 79th percentile ranking against all CPUs indicates that in most gaming scenarios, this processor will not be the limiting factor.

The CPU's benchmark profile shows a processor that excels across varied workloads — PassMark integer math scores 87830, floating-point math hits 67074, and data compression reaches 343231. These figures suggest the i5-12600KF can handle the irregular, bursty computational patterns typical of turn-based tactics, where AI turns and physics calculations spike between player actions. The nearest CPU rivals — Intel Core i9-10900K at 27872 average score, AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D at 27896, and AMD Ryzen 5 8500GE at 27712 — all sit within 0.3% of the i5-12600KF's 27799 average benchmark score, indicating this chip trades blows with both older flagship and modern mid-range parts.

GPU Role

The Intel Arc B370 presents an unusual profile for a gaming GPU. Built on the Panther Lake chip with Xe3-LPG architecture at a 3 nm process, it operates as an integrated graphics processor (IGP) with a 25 W TDP — a power envelope far below typical discrete gaming cards. Its 1280 shading units, 40 texture mapping units, and 20 raster operation units combine for 6.144 TFLOPS of FP32 performance. The boost clock reaches 2400 MHz from a 300 MHz base, and the pixel rate of 48.00 GPixel/s with texture rate of 96.00 GTexel/s define its raw output capacity.

Memory is the critical constraint. With System Shared memory, the Arc B370 has no dedicated VRAM pool, no dedicated bus width, and bandwidth that is entirely system-dependent. This architecture means the GPU competes with the CPU for memory bandwidth, which directly impacts frame rates in memory-sensitive scenarios like high-resolution rendering. The GPU's 5th percentile ranking among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of just 1184 in 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12, places it in the company of legacy discrete parts like the ATI Radeon HD 5770 (1190, deltaPct -0.5%) and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5570 (1186, deltaPct -0.2%). The AMD FirePro M2000 trails by 1.4%, while the AMD Radeon HD 7650M leads by 0.7%.

Hard West, released in 2015, predates the Arc B370's architecture by over a decade. Despite this, the GPU supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.4, so API compatibility is not the issue. The bottleneck is raw throughput — 6.144 TFLOPS and shared memory create a ceiling that becomes evident as resolution and settings scale upward. The GPU's 10 ray tracing cores are present but largely irrelevant for this game's 2D sprite-based visuals and turn-based camera angles, which rely more on fill rate and memory bandwidth than advanced shading features.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo's position at 2721 out of 2949 tested configurations places it firmly in the lower tier of Hard West performers. This ranking reflects the GPU's limitations far more than the CPU's capabilities — the i5-12600KF sits in the 79th percentile of all CPUs, while the Arc B370 languishes in the 5th percentile of all GPUs. The combination produces a system where the processor is effectively waiting on the graphics solution at every resolution and settings level.

Examining the measured FPS data reveals why the ranking is so low. At 1080p Low, the combo achieves 79 FPS — playable but not exceptional for a game from 2015. However, the drop to 37 FPS at 1080p Ultra shows how quickly the GPU's limits surface when graphical demands increase. The ranking in the bottom 8% of all combos suggests that most other tested configurations deliver either higher average frame rates, better scaling across settings, or both.

The GPU's nearest rivals — all legacy ATI/AMD parts with similar average scores — contextualize this combo's standing. These are products from an earlier era, and the Arc B370's performance parity with them in synthetic benchmarks translates to similar real-world limitations. The CPU's nearest rivals, by contrast, include the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, a processor with excellent gaming credentials, yet even that strong CPU pairing would not rescue a GPU with this performance ceiling in a graphics-bound scenario.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data reveals a consistent pattern across all resolution and settings combinations. At 1920x1080, the combo delivers 79 FPS on Low, 64 FPS on Medium (with min/max of 55/74), 49 FPS on High, and 37 FPS on Ultra. This represents a 53% drop from Low to Ultra at the same resolution, showing that each settings tier costs roughly 15-20% performance.

Moving to 2560x1440, frame rates fall to 50 FPS on Low, 41 FPS on Medium (min/max 35/47), 31 FPS on High, and 23 FPS on Ultra. The drop from 1080p to 1440p at each settings level is substantial: Low falls from 79 to 50 FPS (37% loss), Medium from 64 to 41 (36% loss), High from 49 to 31 (37% loss), and Ultra from 37 to 23 (38% loss). The consistency of this percentage drop across all settings indicates a resolution-driven bottleneck that scales uniformly.

At 3840x2160, the results become marginal. Low settings yield 26 FPS, Medium produces 21 FPS (min/max 18/25), High drops to 16 FPS, and Ultra falls to 12 FPS. The 4K results are uniformly below playable thresholds for most users, with even the lowest settings failing to reach 30 FPS. The scaling from 1440p to 4K shows Low falling from 50 to 26 FPS (48% loss), Medium from 41 to 21 (49% loss), High from 31 to 16 (48% loss), and Ultra from 23 to 12 (48% loss) — again a remarkably consistent percentage reduction across settings.

Settings Recommendations

The data supports a clear hierarchy of playable configurations. At 1080p, Low and Medium settings provide the most comfortable experience — 79 and 64 FPS respectively — with Medium offering a meaningful visual upgrade over Low for a 19% frame rate cost. High at 49 FPS remains acceptable for a turn-based tactics game, where reaction time matters less than in action genres, but Ultra at 37 FPS begins to strain smoothness.

At 1440p, Low at 50 FPS is the only settings tier that clears the 60 FPS threshold is absent — none do. Medium at 41 FPS remains playable for this genre, while High at 31 FPS dips into marginal territory and Ultra at 23 FPS falls below acceptable levels. The recommendation shifts to Medium as the sweet spot: it delivers 41 FPS with min/max of 35/47, providing a stable experience that maintains visual fidelity without sacrificing responsiveness.

At 4K, no settings level provides a playable experience. Low at 26 FPS, Medium at 21 FPS, High at 16 FPS, and Ultra at 12 FPS all fall below the 30 FPS threshold generally considered minimum for interactive gameplay. For this combo, 4K is not a viable resolution for Hard West regardless of settings.

The overall recommendation is 1080p Medium (64 FPS) or 1440p Medium (41 FPS) depending on display resolution. The Medium preset consistently offers the best balance — at 1080p it retains 81% of Low's frame rate while presumably offering better visuals, and at 1440p it provides the only combination above 40 FPS with available min/max data showing reasonable frame time consistency.

Resolution Scaling

The resolution scaling data reveals a GPU-bound system with predictable degradation. From 1080p to 1440p, frame rates drop by approximately 37% across all settings — a consistent reduction that indicates the GPU's fill rate and memory bandwidth are the limiting factors. From 1440p to 4K, the drop steepens to approximately 48%, showing that the penalty for pushing more pixels grows disproportionately as the GPU approaches its absolute limits.

This pattern is diagnostic. A CPU-bound system would show smaller frame rate differences between resolutions, since the processor's workload remains constant while pixel count changes. Here, the nearly uniform percentage drop from 1080p to 1440p, and the larger uniform drop from 1440p to 4K, point to the Arc B370's shared memory architecture as the primary constraint. At 4K, the GPU must move far more data through system memory, and the system-dependent bandwidth cannot keep pace with the demand.

The data also shows that settings scaling is consistent within each resolution — the gap between Low and Ultra remains roughly 53% at 1080p, 54% at 1440p, and 54% at 4K. This consistency suggests that each settings tier adds a similar computational load regardless of resolution, reinforcing the interpretation that the GPU's raw throughput, not any particular rendering feature, is the limiting factor. The CPU's robust benchmark scores — 23391 in Cinebench R23 multicore and 7956 in 3DMark 16-thread tests — confirm that processor performance is not the bottleneck; a stronger GPU would translate directly into higher frame rates across all configurations.