Lockdown Protocol

# Lockdown Protocol with Intel Core i5-12400F + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090

The pairing of Intel's Core i5-12400F with NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 5090 produces a striking contrast in Lockdown Protocol: a mid-range 6-core processor from early 2022 driving the most powerful consumer GPU available, with a 32 GB GDDR7 memory buffer and a 512-bit bus. The benchmark data, measured at four quality presets across three resolutions, reveals a system that is overwhelmingly GPU-limited at higher settings but increasingly CPU-bound as resolution drops and frame rates climb past 270 FPS. This combination ranks 44th out of 1,637 tested combos in the game, placing it in the top 2.7% of all configurations, a position that reflects both the GPU's immense throughput and the CPU's ability to keep pace in most scenarios.

FAQ

Q: What is the best resolution and settings combination for this system in Lockdown Protocol?

A: Based on the measured FPS data, 2560x1440 on Low settings delivers 246.8 FPS average, which is the highest frame rate achieved at that resolution. At 1920x1080, the Low preset reaches 271.3 FPS, the absolute peak across all tested configurations. For visually demanding play, 2560x1440 High still holds 173.3 FPS.

Q: How does the RTX 5090's VRAM capacity affect Lockdown Protocol performance?

A: The GPU features 32 GB of GDDR7 memory with a 1.79 TB/s bandwidth. Benchmark results show that even at 3840x2160 Ultra, which is the most demanding tested setting, the system maintains 84 FPS average, indicating that the memory subsystem is not a bottleneck at any tested configuration.

Q: What is the performance gap between Low and Ultra settings at 4K?

A: At 3840x2160, the Low preset averages 180.2 FPS, while Ultra drops to 84 FPS. This represents a 96.2 FPS difference, or a 53.4% reduction in frame rate when moving from the lowest to the highest quality preset.

Q: How does the Core i5-12400F compare to its nearest rivals in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The CPU's average benchmark score is 19,221, which places it 0.1% above the Intel Core i7-8700K (19,210) and 0.3% above the Intel Core i5-1335U (19,167). It trails the AMD Ryzen 5 7533HS by 0.7% (19,364) and leads the AMD EPYC 7773X by 1.3% (18,979).

Q: Is this combo more limited by the CPU or GPU in Lockdown Protocol?

A: The data indicates a shift in bottleneck behavior. At 4K Ultra, the GPU is clearly the limiting factor with 84 FPS, while at 1080p Low, the CPU becomes the constraint, capping performance at 271.3 FPS. The RTX 5090's synthetic scores (39,650 in Passmark G3D) far exceed the i5-12400F's multithreaded results (19,433 in Passmark), confirming the CPU as the weaker link in this pairing.

Q: What does the combo's rank of 44 out of 1,637 signify?

A: It means this specific CPU-GPU pairing outperforms 1,593 other tested combinations in Lockdown Protocol. The rank reflects the RTX 5090's dominant GPU-side performance, which compensates for the i5-12400F's more modest processing power.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 is the dominant component in this pairing, and its specifications explain the measured frame rates. Built on the Blackwell 2.0 architecture with a 5 nm process, the GPU operates at a base clock of 2017 MHz and boosts to 2407 MHz. Its 32 GB GDDR7 memory runs at 1750 MHz (28 Gbps effective) across a 512-bit interface, yielding 1.79 TB/s of bandwidth. This memory configuration is critical for Lockdown Protocol, as the game's asset streaming at high resolutions demands substantial VRAM throughput.

The GPU's raw compute capabilities are equally impressive: 21,760 shading units, 680 texture mapping units, and 176 raster operations pipelines deliver 104.8 TFLOPS of FP32 performance. The 170 ray tracing cores and 680 tensor cores support the game's visual effects, while the 423.6 GPixel/s pixel rate and 1,636.8 GTexel/s texture rate ensure that even the most complex scenes render without fill-rate bottlenecks.

In the measured results, the RTX 5090's role shifts depending on settings. At 4K Ultra, the GPU is fully saturated, producing 84 FPS. As settings drop to Low at 4K, frame rates jump to 180.2 FPS, demonstrating the GPU's headroom when shading complexity decreases. At 1080p Low, the GPU is no longer the limiting factor—the 271.3 FPS ceiling is imposed by the CPU. The GPU's benchmark scores reinforce this: its Passmark G3D score of 39,650 and 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 14,411 place it in the 94th percentile of all GPUs, far exceeding the CPU's 77th percentile ranking.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of Intel Core i5-12400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 achieves a rank of 44 out of 1,637 tested combos in Lockdown Protocol, placing it in the 97.3rd percentile of all configurations. This ranking is notable because the CPU is not a top-tier processor—its average benchmark score of 19,221 places it in the 77th percentile of all CPUs, with nearest rivals including the Intel Core i7-8700K (19,210, 0.1% delta) and AMD Ryzen 5 7533HS (19,364, -0.7% delta). The GPU, by contrast, sits in the 94th percentile with an average score of 84,306, edging out the RTX 5090 D by 0.1% (84,241) and the RTX 5050 Mobile by 0.2% (84,171).

The rank of 44 indicates that this combination outperforms the vast majority of systems, including many with theoretically stronger CPUs. This is a direct consequence of the RTX 5090's dominance in GPU-bound scenarios. In Lockdown Protocol, where high-resolution rendering is the primary workload, the GPU's massive shading and memory resources outweigh the CPU's modest 6-core/12-thread configuration. The i5-12400F's 3DMark scores (5,912 max threads, 909 single thread) are sufficient to feed the GPU in most cases, preventing the CPU from becoming a severe bottleneck that would drag the combo down the rankings.

However, the rank also reveals the ceiling of this pairing. Systems ranked above it likely feature CPUs with higher single-thread performance, which become crucial at lower resolutions where frame rates exceed 250 FPS. The 271.3 FPS maximum at 1080p Low suggests the CPU is already nearing its limit in this game, a constraint that would not exist with a higher-end processor.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the system delivers its highest frame rates across all settings. The Low preset averages 271.3 FPS, while Medium achieves 241 FPS, High reaches 232.9 FPS, and Ultra drops to 175.5 FPS. The spread from Low to Ultra at 1080p is 95.8 FPS, indicating that the GPU has ample headroom at this resolution, and the CPU becomes the primary limiter at the lower presets.

Moving to 2560x1440, the frame rates remain high but show a clear scaling pattern. Low averages 246.8 FPS, Medium 199 FPS, High 173.3 FPS, and Ultra 130.8 FPS. The transition from 1080p to 1440p reduces performance by 9.0% at Low (271.3 to 246.8 FPS), 17.4% at Medium (241 to 199 FPS), 25.6% at High (232.9 to 173.3 FPS), and 25.5% at Ultra (175.5 to 130.8 FPS). The larger percentage drops at higher settings indicate that the GPU is becoming more heavily utilized as resolution increases.

At 3840x2160, the system shows its most demanding results. Ultra averages 84 FPS, High 110.4 FPS, Medium 129.5 FPS, and Low 180.2 FPS. The 4K Ultra result of 84 FPS is playable but not at the high refresh rates achievable at lower resolutions. The 4K Low result of 180.2 FPS demonstrates that even at maximum resolution, the GPU can deliver high frame rates when visual complexity is reduced.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate drops from 1080p to 4K reveal the system's bottleneck characteristics. At Low settings, the transition from 1920x1080 (271.3 FPS) to 3840x2160 (180.2 FPS) represents a 33.6% reduction. At Medium, the drop is 46.3% (241 to 129.5 FPS). High settings show a 52.6% reduction (232.9 to 110.4 FPS), while Ultra sees a 52.1% decrease (175.5 to 84 FPS).

These scaling patterns indicate that at Low settings, the CPU is the limiting factor. The relatively modest FPS drop from 1080p to 4K at Low (33.6%) suggests that the i5-12400F cannot generate enough frames to fully stress the RTX 5090 even at 1080p, so the GPU has spare capacity that partially masks the resolution increase. As settings rise to Medium, High, and Ultra, the GPU becomes progressively more saturated, and the frame rate reduction approaches the theoretical scaling of pixel count—4K has 4 times the pixels of 1080p, but the actual FPS drops range from 46% to 53%, not the 75% that would occur with perfect scaling. This indicates that the CPU still provides some limitation, but the GPU is clearly the dominant constraint at higher presets.

The 1440p results sit between these extremes. At Low, 246.8 FPS is only 9.0% below the 1080p figure, confirming CPU limitation. At Ultra, 130.8 FPS is 25.5% below 1080p, showing the GPU taking over as the primary bottleneck. The data suggests that for this combo, 2560x1440 with High or Ultra settings provides the best balance of visual quality and frame rate, with 173.3 and 130.8 FPS respectively, both comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold and within range of high-refresh-rate monitors.