Minimum

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700X paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti delivers a remarkably consistent experience in Minimum, a 2014 third-person shooter that remains highly sensitive to both CPU and GPU capabilities. The data shows a configuration that scales predictably across resolutions, with the GPU becoming the primary bottleneck only at the highest fidelity settings. This analysis breaks down the measured performance, contextualizes the combo’s standing among 1,733 tested configurations, and examines the specific roles each component plays in generating these frame rates.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate progression from 1080p to 4K reveals a classic shift in system bottleneck. At 1920x1080 with Low settings, the combo produces 328 FPS, which drops to 213 FPS at 2560x1440 and further to 113.7 FPS at 3840x2160. This represents a 65.3% reduction in performance from 1080p to 4K, indicating that at lower resolutions, the CPU is heavily taxed, while the GPU still has headroom. The scaling is less severe with High settings: 208.3 FPS at 1080p falls to 134 FPS at 1440p and 71.3 FPS at 4K, a 65.8% drop. This near-identical percentage decline suggests that the game’s engine scales resolution demands uniformly, regardless of quality preset.

The most telling data point is the Ultra preset. At 1080p, the combo manages 158.3 FPS, which is still high but significantly lower than the Low preset’s 328 FPS. Moving to 1440p drops Ultra to 103 FPS, and at 4K it collapses to 52.8 FPS. The 66.6% reduction from 1080p to 4K under Ultra settings shows that the RTX 4070 Ti’s 12 GB of GDDR6X memory and 504.2 GB/s bandwidth are being saturated. The gap between Low and Ultra at the same resolution is also telling: at 1080p, Ultra is 51.7% slower than Low, but at 4K, that gap widens to 53.6%. This indicates that as resolution increases, the GPU’s compute and memory subsystems become the limiting factor, with the CPU’s role diminishing.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the database of 1,733 tested CPU-GPU combinations, this pairing holds the 226th position in Minimum. This places it in the top 13% of all tested combos, a strong showing for a mid-range CPU from 2022 paired with an end-of-life GPU from 2023. The combo’s rank is impressive given that the CPU alone sits at the 83rd percentile among all processors, while the GPU is at the 85th percentile among all graphics cards. The combination of an 8-core, 16-thread Zen 3 processor with a 40.09 TFLOPS Ada Lovelace GPU creates a balanced platform that avoids severe bottlenecks in this particular title.

The rank becomes more meaningful when considering the context of the game’s age. Minimum was released in 2014, and modern hardware far exceeds its original requirements. A rank of 226 suggests that many other combos—likely featuring newer, higher-end CPUs or GPUs—can push higher frame rates, particularly at lower resolutions where CPU speed matters most. However, the data indicates that this combo is far from the bottom, and its performance at 4K Ultra, while below 60 FPS, is still playable for many users. The delta between the combo’s rank and the component percentiles suggests that Minimum is more GPU-bound than CPU-bound at higher settings, which aligns with the resolution scaling data.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700X is an 8-core, 16-thread processor based on the Zen 3 architecture, codenamed Vermeer. It operates with a base clock of 3.40 GHz and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz, and its 32 MB of shared L3 cache is substantial for a 2014-era game. In synthetic benchmarks, the CPU’s single-thread score of 921 in 3DMark and 3,193 in Cinebench R23 indicate strong per-core performance, which is critical for a game like Minimum that may not fully utilize all 16 threads. The multi-threaded scores—6,858 in 3DMark’s 16-thread test and 22,620 in Cinebench R23—show that the CPU has ample headroom for heavily threaded workloads, but the game’s engine likely relies more on single-core speed.

The measured FPS data supports this interpretation. At 1080p Low, the combo hits 328 FPS, a figure that is likely near the maximum the CPU can feed to the GPU, given that the RTX 4070 Ti is far more capable. The 3DMark 2-thread score of 1,821 and the PassMark single-thread score of 3,385 suggest that the CPU’s per-thread performance is sufficient to maintain high frame rates without becoming a hard limit. However, the 0.1% deltaPct compared to the Intel Core i9-11900KF in average benchmark scores indicates that the 5700X is effectively tied with its closest rival, meaning that swapping CPUs would yield negligible gains in this title. The CPU’s 65 W TDP and 7 nm process node also contribute to consistent performance without thermal throttling, which can affect frame pacing in longer sessions.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a comprehensive view of performance across three resolutions and four quality settings. At 1920x1080, the combo delivers 328 FPS on Low, 247.5 FPS on Medium, 208.3 FPS on High, and 158.3 FPS on Ultra. The step-down from Low to Medium is 24.5%, while the step from High to Ultra is 24.0%, showing a consistent scaling pattern. At 2560x1440, the numbers are 213 FPS (Low), 163.5 FPS (Medium), 134 FPS (High), and 103 FPS (Ultra). The relative drops are similar, with Ultra being 51.6% slower than Low, confirming that the game’s settings have a linear impact on GPU load.

At 3840x2160, the performance becomes more constrained: 113.7 FPS on Low, 88.7 FPS on Medium, 71.3 FPS on High, and 52.8 FPS on Ultra. The gap between Low and Ultra at 4K is 53.6%, which is slightly larger than at lower resolutions, indicating that the GPU’s memory bandwidth is becoming a limiting factor. The jump from 1440p to 4K at the same settings is substantial: 46.6% slower on Low, 45.8% slower on Medium, 46.8% slower on High, and 48.7% slower on Ultra. This consistent ~47% reduction across all settings reinforces that resolution is the primary performance driver, with the RTX 4070 Ti’s 192-bit memory bus being the likely constraint. For context, the GPU’s PassMark G3D score of 31,624 and its 85th percentile ranking among all GPUs suggest it is a high performer, but 4K Ultra pushes it to its limits.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is built on the Ada Lovelace architecture and features 7,680 shading units, 240 texture mapping units, and 80 raster output pipelines. Its boost clock of 2,610 MHz and 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus provide 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth. In synthetic tests, the GPU achieves a 3DMark Steel Nomad score of 5,024 and a PassMark G3D score of 31,624, placing it at the 85th percentile among all GPUs. The nearest rival data shows a deltaPct of -0.6% compared to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Mobile, indicating that the 4070 Ti is effectively on par with that mobile flagship in average benchmark scores.

In Minimum, the GPU’s role becomes more pronounced as resolution increases. At 1080p, the GPU is underutilized, as evidenced by the 328 FPS Low result, which is likely CPU-limited. However, at 4K Ultra, the GPU is clearly the bottleneck, with 52.8 FPS being the lowest result in the dataset. The transition from High to Ultra at 4K causes a 25.9% drop, from 71.3 to 52.8 FPS, while the same transition at 1080p causes a 24.0% drop. This subtle difference suggests that the GPU’s 80 ROPs and 208.8 GPixel/s pixel rate are sufficient for lower resolutions but struggle to maintain fill rates at 4K. The 40.09 TFLOPS of FP32 performance is impressive, but the game’s rendering pipeline appears to be more sensitive to memory bandwidth and pixel throughput, which are the GPU’s relative weaknesses compared to its compute capabilities. The GPU’s 285 W TDP and dual-slot design indicate it is a power-hungry part, but the measured FPS data shows it delivers consistent performance without erratic frame drops, even at the most demanding settings.