Lockdown Protocol

The Intel Core i3-12100F paired with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti delivers a mid-pack performance tier for Lockdown Protocol, securing the 988th position out of 1,637 tested CPU-GPU combinations. This places the combo in the 60th percentile of all tested systems, indicating it outperforms the majority of setups while still leaving substantial headroom before reaching top-tier configurations. The ranking reflects a balance where neither component is the primary bottleneck across all settings, but the system’s overall capability is firmly anchored by the legacy GPU architecture rather than the modern CPU.

How This Combo Ranks

The 988th rank out of 1,637 combos shows a system that is competitive but not exceptional in the Lockdown Protocol benchmark hierarchy. The data places this pairing in the upper-middle segment of the tested pool, with roughly 60% of all recorded combinations performing below it. This positioning is consistent with a GPU that ranks in the 61st percentile among all graphics cards, paired with a CPU that sits in the 72nd percentile among all processors. The gap between these percentiles suggests the GPU is the more limiting factor in determining overall in-game performance, particularly at higher resolutions where pixel throughput demands exceed what the Pascal architecture can deliver. The combo’s rank is not a reflection of any single metric but rather an aggregation of how these two components interact across the measured FPS spectrum.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti operates with 11 GB of GDDR5X memory across a 352-bit bus, yielding a memory bandwidth of 484.4 GB/s and effective clock speeds of 11 Gbps. The GPU’s base clock runs at 1481 MHz with a boost up to 1582 MHz, and it delivers 11.34 TFLOPS of FP32 performance. This memory configuration is critical for Lockdown Protocol because the game’s texture-heavy environments and particle effects demand substantial bandwidth; the 484.4 GB/s figure allows the card to maintain consistent frame times even when asset streaming spikes. The GPU’s shading units number 3,584, with 224 texture mapping units and 88 raster output units, which directly influence how efficiently the card processes the game’s lighting and geometry.

In benchmark results, the GTX 1080 Ti scores 18,600 in Passmark’s G3D test and 83,108 in Geekbench Vulkan, placing it in the 61st percentile of all GPUs. Its nearest rival, the NVIDIA TITAN Xp, scores 19,184 with a 1.1% higher average, while the GTX 780 matches almost exactly at 19,405 with a 0% delta. This proximity to older architectures underscores that the 1080 Ti’s strength lies in raw rasterization rather than modern features like ray tracing or DLSS, which Lockdown Protocol does not appear to leverage heavily. The GPU’s 250 W TDP and 600 W suggested PSU requirement are not performance metrics but contextualize why this card can sustain high clocks under sustained load without thermal throttling, which is evident in the measured FPS stability across resolutions.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i3-12100F provides 4 cores and 8 threads, running at a base clock of 3.30 GHz and a boost clock of 4.30 GHz. This Alder Lake-S architecture, built on Intel’s 10 nm process, includes 12 MB of shared L3 cache and supports dual-channel DDR4 or DDR5 memory. In synthetic benchmarks, the CPU achieves a Cinebench R23 multicore score of 11,912 and a single-core score of 1,681, with a Passmark multithread score of 14,015. These results place the processor in the 72nd percentile of all CPUs, with its nearest rival being the Intel Core i7-7700K, which scores 13,280 with a 1.8% lower average.

For Lockdown Protocol, the CPU’s 4-core/8-thread configuration is sufficient to feed the GTX 1080 Ti at lower resolutions but becomes less relevant as resolution increases. The single-thread performance of 893 in 3DMark single-thread and 2,224 in Geekbench single-core indicates strong per-core capability, which the game’s engine likely utilizes for physics calculations and AI pathfinding. However, the 3DMark 16-thread score of 4,051 and 8-thread score of 4,026 show that the CPU’s multithreaded scaling plateaus quickly, meaning it cannot compensate for GPU limitations at 4K. The CPU’s TDP of 58 W and PCIe Gen 5 support are forward-looking features, but in this pairing, the i3-12100F’s role is to avoid becoming the bottleneck at 1080p while yielding to the GPU’s constraints at higher resolutions.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo delivers an average of 178.6 FPS on Low settings, 128.1 FPS on Medium, 111.1 FPS on High, and 85.3 FPS on Ultra. These figures show a clear degradation curve as settings increase, with the drop from Low to Ultra representing a 52.2% reduction in frame rate. The 1080p results demonstrate that the CPU can push the GPU to its limits, as the 178.6 FPS Low figure is close to what the GPU’s raw fill rate can sustain, while the 85.3 FPS Ultra result indicates the added shading and post-processing effects begin to tax the pixel rate of 139.2 GPixel/s.

Moving to 2560x1440, the average FPS drops to 130.7 on Low, 96.5 on Medium, 83.1 on High, and 63.1 on Ultra. The transition from 1080p to 1440p shows a performance scaling factor of approximately 0.73 across all settings, meaning the GPU is now more heavily loaded as the pixel count increases by 77.8%. At 1440p Ultra, the 63.1 FPS average is still playable but shows the GPU’s memory bandwidth of 484.4 GB/s is nearing its effective ceiling for this workload.

At 3840x2160, the averages fall to 82.6 FPS on Low, 63.6 FPS on Medium, 51.3 FPS on High, and 43.1 FPS on Ultra. The 4K Low result of 82.6 FPS is notable because it still exceeds 60 FPS, but the Ultra setting at 43.1 FPS drops below the standard smoothness threshold. The 4K figures highlight the GPU’s 11 GB VRAM as sufficient, but the 352-bit bus and 484.4 GB/s bandwidth become the limiting factor, as the pixel rate of 139.2 GPixel/s cannot keep pace with 4K’s 8.3 million pixels per frame.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS scaling from 1080p to 4K reveals a pronounced GPU bottleneck at higher resolutions. At Low settings, the frame rate drops from 178.6 FPS at 1080p to 82.6 FPS at 4K, a reduction of 53.8%. At Ultra settings, the drop is from 85.3 FPS to 43.1 FPS, a 49.5% reduction. These percentages are nearly identical, indicating that the resolution increase imposes a consistent load on the GPU regardless of graphical complexity, which is characteristic of a fill-rate-limited scenario.

The scaling factor from 1080p to 4K is approximately 0.46 across all settings, meaning the GPU delivers roughly half the frame rate when pixel count quadruples. This aligns with the GTX 1080 Ti’s 88 ROPs and 354.4 GTexel/s texture rate, which cannot scale linearly with the 4x pixel increase. The CPU’s role diminishes as resolution rises; the i3-12100F’s 3DMark 4-thread score of 2,859 and 2-thread score of 1,659 are sufficient to feed the GPU at 1080p, but at 4K, the GPU’s frame time dominates, and the CPU’s contribution to overall system latency becomes negligible.

The data shows that at 1080p Low, the system achieves 178.6 FPS, which is 2.1x higher than the 4K Low result of 82.6 FPS. This ratio is consistent with the GPU’s 16 nm Pascal architecture, which was designed for 1080p and 1440p gaming in its 2017 release era. The 4K Ultra result of 43.1 FPS, while below 60, still demonstrates the card’s ability to render the game at playable levels, but the 51.3 FPS High and 63.6 FPS Medium figures at 4K suggest that users targeting 4K must compromise on settings to maintain smoothness. The measured data indicates that the sweet spot for this combo is 1440p, where it achieves 130.7 FPS Low and 83.1 FPS High, providing a balance between visual fidelity and frame rate that the CPU can still support.