Minimum

How This Combo Ranks

Within the benchmark database for Minimum, this pairing of the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti holds the 1490th position out of 1733 tested combinations. That places it in the lower third of all recorded configurations, a ranking that reflects a significant bottleneck: the GPU is the limiting factor in nearly every scenario, while the CPU’s substantial compute headroom goes largely unused. The combo’s percentile standing among all GPUs (55th) and CPUs (93rd) underscores this mismatch — the processor is elite-tier hardware, but the graphics card is merely mid-pack.

The data shows a configuration where the Ryzen 9 7900X’s 12-core, 24-thread architecture and 5.60 GHz boost clock are effectively wasted in a game that leans heavily on the graphics pipeline. The CPU’s nearest rivals in average benchmark score — the Intel Core Ultra 5 235 (delta -0.1%), AMD Ryzen 9 5900XT (delta -0.4%), and Intel Core i7-13850HX (delta -0.5%) — all perform within a single percentage point, yet none of that CPU differentiation translates to measurable FPS gains here. The ranking is essentially dictated by the GTX 1660 Ti’s position among its peers: it sits within 0.8% of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 and 0.4% of the AMD Radeon RX 570X, meaning the combo’s placement is stable across a narrow performance band. For a game released in 2014, this pairing delivers playable but unremarkable results, and the rank reflects that reality.

GPU Role

The GTX 1660 Ti is the clear performance arbiter in this configuration. Its 6 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus provides 288.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which proves adequate for Minimum’s modest textures but becomes strained at higher resolutions. The GPU’s base clock of 1500 MHz and boost clock of 1770 MHz are modest by modern standards, and the 12 nm Turing chip (TU116) delivers 5.437 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. These specifications place the card in the 55th percentile of all GPUs, and its average benchmark score of 13925 is nearly identical to rivals like the NVIDIA RTX A2000 Mobile (delta 0.8%) and NVIDIA Tesla K10 (delta -0.7%).

In Minimum, the GPU’s role is dominant across all measured settings. The gap between the CPU’s capability and the GPU’s output is stark: the Ryzen 9 7900X scores 50556 on average benchmarks, while the GTX 1660 Ti manages only 13925. This means the graphics card is operating at roughly 27% of the CPU’s potential in synthetic workloads, and in game FPS terms, that imbalance shows up as a hard ceiling. The GPU’s pixel rate of 84.96 GPixel/s and texture rate of 169.9 GTexel/s are sufficient for 1080p and 1440p gaming, but the 4K results reveal where the card’s limits lie — the 48 ROPs simply cannot sustain high fill rates at 3840x2160. The memory bandwidth, while respectable for a 2019 card, becomes a constraint when the engine requests larger frame buffers at higher resolutions.

Settings Recommendations

Benchmark results indicate that the Medium preset offers the best balance of visual fidelity and frame rate for this combo. At 1080p, Medium delivers 100.6 FPS average — comfortably above the 64.7 FPS of Ultra and within 30.8 FPS of Low’s 131.4. At 1440p, Medium holds 65.4 FPS, which remains smooth, while High drops to 58.2 and Ultra falls to 40.8. The step from Medium to High at 1440p costs 7.2 FPS, a modest penalty, but the jump from Medium to Ultra costs 24.6 FPS — a severe drop that suggests diminishing returns from the extra settings.

For users prioritizing frame rate over visuals, Low is the recommended preset. It produces the highest averages at every resolution: 131.4 FPS at 1080p, 84.9 FPS at 1440p, and 48 FPS at 4K. However, the visual compromise is significant, and the data shows that Low only outperforms Medium by 30.8 FPS at 1080p — a large margin but one that may not justify the graphical downgrade for a 2014 title. The High preset is a middle ground, but it fails to maintain 60 FPS at 4K (29.1 FPS) and only barely exceeds 60 at 1440p (58.2 FPS). Given that the game’s genre is a Third-Person Shooter, where reaction time matters, Medium at 1440p or High at 1080p are the practical sweet spots. Ultra is not viable at any resolution above 1080p, and even at 1080p it dips to 64.7 FPS, which is borderline for competitive play.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the data shows a clear progression of performance across settings. Low leads at 131.4 FPS, followed by Medium at 100.6 FPS, High at 86.8 FPS, and Ultra at 64.7 FPS. The delta between Low and Ultra is 66.7 FPS, indicating that the GPU’s shading units and texture units are taxed heavily by the Ultra preset’s additional effects. Interestingly, the gap between Medium and High (13.8 FPS) is smaller than the gap between High and Ultra (22.1 FPS), suggesting that Ultra introduces a disproportionately heavy workload.

Moving to 2560x1440, the averages drop predictably but non-linearly. Low produces 84.9 FPS, Medium 65.4 FPS, High 58.2 FPS, and Ultra 40.8 FPS. The percentage drops from 1080p to 1440p are substantial: Low falls 35.4%, Medium 35.0%, High 32.9%, and Ultra 36.9%. This consistency across settings indicates that resolution scaling is the primary driver of performance loss, not the settings themselves. At 1440p, Low remains playable above 60 FPS, but Medium barely crosses the threshold, and High and Ultra are firmly below it.

At 3840x2160, the GTX 1660 Ti’s limitations become pronounced. Low averages 48 FPS, Medium 36.1 FPS, High 29.1 FPS, and Ultra 23.9 FPS. No setting achieves 60 FPS, and even Low fails to hold a stable 50 FPS. The drop from 1440p to 4K is severe: Low loses 36.9 FPS (43.5%), Medium loses 29.3 FPS (44.8%), High loses 29.1 FPS (50.0%), and Ultra loses 16.9 FPS (41.4%). These figures confirm that 4K is beyond the card’s capability for this title, regardless of settings.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K reveals a GPU-bound system with no CPU headroom to compensate. At 1080p Low, the combo achieves 131.4 FPS; at 4K Low, it falls to 48 FPS — a 63.5% reduction. For Medium, the drop is from 100.6 to 36.1 FPS (64.1% reduction); for High, from 86.8 to 29.1 FPS (66.5% reduction); and for Ultra, from 64.7 to 23.9 FPS (63.1% reduction). The consistency of these percentage drops — all between 63% and 67% — points to a uniform bottleneck: the GPU’s memory bandwidth and pixel throughput.

The scaling pattern suggests that the Ryzen 9 7900X is not contributing to frame rate limitations at any resolution. If the CPU were the bottleneck, we would expect the FPS drop from 1080p to 4K to be smaller, as higher resolutions shift the load to the GPU. Instead, the linear scaling across all settings indicates that the GTX 1660 Ti is saturated even at 1080p, and the CPU’s 83.2 GB/s memory bandwidth and 64 MB L3 cache are irrelevant to the outcome. The 4K results are particularly telling: dropping from High to Low at 4K improves FPS by 18.9 FPS (64.9% increase), but even that best-case scenario leaves the combo below the 60 FPS threshold.

The limiting component is unambiguously the GPU. Its 288.0 GB/s memory bandwidth, while decent for 1080p, cannot feed the render pipeline at 4K, and the 5.437 TFLOPS of compute power is insufficient for the pixel shader workload at higher resolutions. The CPU’s near-parity with rivals (all within 0.8% in average benchmark score) has zero observable effect on these FPS numbers. For users of this combo, the practical takeaway is that 1080p and 1440p are the only viable resolutions, with Medium settings providing the best experience — and that any upgrade path must prioritize the GPU over the CPU, as the Ryzen 9 7900X has ample headroom for far more powerful graphics cards.