Hitman 2

Hitman 2 with the Intel Core i5-12400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 presents a clear case of a modern graphics card being held back by resolution demands rather than CPU limits. The measured data shows a dramatic scaling curve from 1080p to 4K, with the combination ranking in the 849th position out of 1795 tested combos, placing it in the upper-middle tier of the database. This pairing of a 6-core, 12-thread Alder Lake processor with a Blackwell 2.0 GPU demonstrates predictable behavior across the four tested presets, with the most significant insight being where the performance ceiling actually lies.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS progression from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160 reveals a steep and consistent drop that points directly at GPU-bound rendering. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo produces 180.8 FPS, but moving to 1440p Low reduces that to 117 FPS—a 35.3% decrease. The jump to 4K Low further collapses performance to 63 FPS, which is just 34.8% of the 1080p Low figure. This pattern is not an anomaly; it repeats across every settings tier. For High settings, the numbers fall from 105.5 FPS at 1080p to 65.6 FPS at 1440p, then to 35 FPS at 4K. The Ultra preset shows the same trajectory: 78.4 FPS at 1080p, 49.3 FPS at 1440p, and 28.3 FPS at 4K.

This scaling behavior indicates that the Intel Core i5-12400F, with its 6 cores and 12 threads boosting up to 4.40 GHz, is not the limiting factor in this title. The data shows that even at the lowest resolution and settings, the frame rate does not approach the CPU's potential ceiling—the 1080p Low score of 180.8 FPS is substantial but not indicative of a processor bottleneck. Instead, the near-linear degradation as pixel count rises suggests the RTX 5060's 8 GB of GDDR7 memory and 128-bit bus are being saturated. The 4K Ultra result of 28.3 FPS is particularly telling: it is 84.3% lower than the 1080p Low result, a collapse that cannot be attributed to CPU overhead. The GPU's 448.0 GB/s bandwidth and 19.18 TFLOPS of FP32 compute are simply insufficient for 4K Ultra in this title, whereas the CPU's 18 MB of shared L3 cache and 12 threads remain largely underutilized.

Settings Recommendations

The measured rows offer a clear hierarchy for playability, and the data strongly favors Medium settings as the optimal balance. At 1080p, Medium delivers 137.6 FPS, which is 23.3% higher than High's 105.5 FPS and 75.5% higher than Ultra's 78.4 FPS. The gap between Medium and Ultra is even more pronounced at 1440p: 86.6 FPS versus 49.3 FPS, a 75.7% advantage for Medium. This suggests that the jump from Medium to Ultra incurs a disproportionate performance cost relative to the visual uplift in Hitman 2's rendering engine.

At 4K, the recommendation shifts. Medium produces 48.6 FPS, which is playable but not smooth, while High drops to 35 FPS and Ultra falls to 28.3 FPS. For a stealth game where precise timing matters, the data indicates that Low at 4K (63 FPS) is the only preset that maintains a comfortable frame rate above 60 FPS. However, the 1440p Medium score of 86.6 FPS represents the best overall experience when considering both resolution and fluidity. The 1080p High result of 105.5 FPS is also viable, but it sacrifices resolution for marginal frame rate gains over the 1440p Medium setting. The Ultra preset, despite being the highest quality tier, is only recommended for 1080p where it still achieves 78.4 FPS—a figure that remains above the 60 FPS threshold but leaves no headroom for demanding scenes.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo rank of 849 out of 1795 puts this configuration in the 47th percentile of all tested combinations in Hitman 2. This positioning is consistent with the individual hardware benchmarks: the RTX 5060 holds a 73rd percentile ranking among all GPUs, while the Core i5-12400F sits at the 77th percentile among CPUs. The combination's average benchmark scores—30109 for the GPU and 19221 for the CPU—are closely matched with their nearest rivals, suggesting that this pairing is well-balanced for the game's demands.

Looking at the GPU's nearest rivals, the RTX 5060's average score of 30109 is nearly identical to the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT's 30097, a delta of just 0.0%. This means that in synthetic benchmarks, these two cards are effectively interchangeable, and the measured FPS in Hitman 2 likely reflects that parity. The NVIDIA Tesla M60 trails by 0.5%, and the RTX 5070 Mobile is only 0.6% behind, indicating that the desktop RTX 5060 is positioned at the upper edge of its performance class. On the CPU side, the i5-12400F's average score of 19221 is 0.1% ahead of the Intel Core i7-8700K and 0.3% ahead of the Core i5-1335U, while the AMD Ryzen 5 7533HS leads by 0.7% and the EPYC 7773X trails by 1.3%. These small deltas confirm that the processor is neither a standout nor a weak link in this configuration.

The rank itself suggests that while this combo is not in the top tier for Hitman 2, it is far from the bottom. The 849th position out of 1795 means there are 946 combos that perform worse, which is a reasonable outcome for a mid-range GPU paired with a mainstream desktop CPU. The data does not show any anomalous behavior that would push this combo higher or lower; it sits exactly where the individual component percentiles would predict.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The full dataset reveals a consistent pattern across all twelve measured configurations. At 1920x1080, the results are: Low at 180.8 FPS, Medium at 137.6 FPS, High at 105.5 FPS, and Ultra at 78.4 FPS. The step from Low to Medium is a 23.9% reduction, while Medium to High drops another 23.3%, and High to Ultra falls 25.7%. This near-uniform percentage decrease suggests that each settings tier imposes a similar incremental load on the GPU, with no sudden spikes in memory or compute requirements.

At 2560x1440, the numbers are 117 FPS for Low, 86.6 FPS for Medium, 65.6 FPS for High, and 49.3 FPS for Ultra. The percentage drops between tiers are 26.0%, 24.2%, and 24.9%, respectively—remarkably close to the 1080p pattern. This consistency indicates that Hitman 2's settings scaling is purely additive, with each preset level adding a fixed amount of GPU work regardless of resolution. The 4K results deviate slightly from this pattern: Low at 63 FPS, Medium at 48.6 FPS, High at 35 FPS, and Ultra at 28.3 FPS. The drop from Low to Medium is 22.9%, but Medium to High is 28.0%, and High to Ultra is 19.1%. This non-uniformity at 4K suggests that the 8 GB VRAM capacity is becoming a factor at higher settings, with the card potentially hitting memory limits that alter the scaling curve.

The most critical data point is the 4K Ultra result of 28.3 FPS, which is below the 30 FPS threshold often considered the minimum for playable frame rates in slower-paced games. The 1080p Low result of 180.8 FPS, on the other hand, shows the combo's maximum potential when both resolution and settings are minimized. The gap between these extremes—152.5 FPS—highlights the GPU's limited headroom for high-fidelity rendering at elevated resolutions.

GPU Role

The RTX 5060's specifications directly explain the measured performance envelope. With 8 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 128-bit bus delivering 448.0 GB/s, the card has sufficient bandwidth for 1080p and 1440p gaming but struggles at 4K. The 4K Ultra result of 28.3 FPS aligns with the memory bus being saturated, as the 128-bit interface is narrow for a card in this performance class. The GPU's base clock of 2280 MHz and boost clock of 2497 MHz are relatively high, but the 19.18 TFLOPS of FP32 performance is modest for 4K rendering.

The card's 3840 shading units and 120 TMUs provide ample texture throughput for 1080p, which is why the Low preset at that resolution achieves 180.8 FPS. However, the 48 ROPs limit pixel fill rate, and the pixel rate of 119.9 GPixel/s becomes a bottleneck at 4K where pixel count quadruples. The 30 RT cores and 120 tensor cores are present but largely irrelevant for Hitman 2, which does not heavily utilize ray tracing or DLSS in the measured configurations. The GPU's 145 W TDP and dual-slot design are consistent with a mid-range card, and the PCIe 5.0 x8 interface provides ample bandwidth for the game's data transfer needs.

The VRAM capacity is the most telling factor. At 1080p, the 8 GB is sufficient, as evidenced by the Ultra preset still achieving 78.4 FPS. At 1440p, the data shows a 37.1% drop from 1080p at Ultra (78.4 to 49.3 FPS), which is expected. But at 4K, the Ultra preset's 28.3 FPS is 63.9% lower than 1080p Ultra, a more severe drop than the pixel count alone would predict. This suggests that memory pressure is causing additional performance degradation beyond raw compute limits. The card's 28 Gbps effective memory speed is fast, but the 128-bit bus caps total bandwidth, making 4K Ultra an unrealistic target. The GPU's benchmark scores reinforce this: the Passmark G3D score of 20891 places it in the 73rd percentile, but the DirectX 12 score of 77 is notably lower, indicating that the card's performance in modern API workloads is less impressive than its raw compute would suggest.