Minimum

The Intel Core i7-12700K paired with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 delivers a playable but constrained experience in Minimum, a Third-Person Shooter released in 2014. The benchmark data reveals a system where the GPU is the dominant bottleneck across most settings, while the CPU’s substantial headroom remains largely untapped. This analysis breaks down the measured FPS to show exactly where this combination excels and where it falls short.

Resolution Scaling

The performance drop from 1080p to 4K is steep and consistent, clearly indicting the GTX 1650 as the primary limiting factor. At High settings, the average frame rate falls from 51.1 FPS at 1920x1080 to 37.1 FPS at 2560x1440, a reduction of 27.4%. The subsequent drop to 4K is even more severe, with the average plummeting to 18 FPS at 3840x2160—a 64.8% decline from the 1440p figure. This pattern is typical of a GPU-bound scenario where the rendering resolution outpaces the shader and memory throughput capabilities of the graphics card.

The scaling behavior is even more telling at the lower preset levels. At Low settings, the transition from 1080p (80.2 FPS) to 1440p (53.4 FPS) represents a 33.4% drop, while moving from 1440p to 4K (26.7 FPS) costs another 50.0% of performance. This non-linear degradation suggests that the 4 GB VRAM buffer and the 128-bit memory interface are being saturated at higher resolutions, exacerbating the load on the GPU’s compute units. The data indicates that 1080p is the only resolution where this combo can maintain consistently fluid frame rates, and even then, only at lower to medium presets. The 4K results, with averages between 16.7 and 26.7 FPS across all settings, are firmly in unplayable territory for a shooter.

GPU Role

The GTX 1650 is the undisputed performance ceiling for this pairing. Its specifications—4 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit bus, yielding 128.1 GB/s of bandwidth—are modest by modern standards. The GPU’s Turing architecture, built on a 12 nm process at TSMC, provides 896 shading units, 56 texture mapping units, and 32 ROPs. The boost clock of 1665 MHz allows for a pixel rate of 53.28 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 93.24 GTexel/s, but these figures are simply insufficient for the pixel throughput demanded by 4K rendering.

The benchmark scores corroborate this assessment. The GPU’s PassMark G3D score of 7880 places it in the 43rd percentile of all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 8713. Its nearest rivals include the NVIDIA Quadro P2200 (deltaPct 0.5) and the AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100 (deltaPct -0.5), indicating that the GTX 1650 sits in a tightly contested mid-range tier. The DirectX 11 PassMark score of 58 and DirectX 12 score of 35 demonstrate that while the card is functional, it lacks the raw compute power for high-fidelity workloads. In Minimum, the GPU’s limitations manifest directly in the FPS numbers: the gap between Low and Ultra settings at 1080p is a massive 42 FPS (80.2 vs 38.2), showing that the card struggles to process the increased shading and texture work as settings rise.

CPU Role

In stark contrast to the GPU, the Intel Core i7-12700K is a high-end desktop processor that is barely challenged by Minimum. With 12 cores (20 threads) based on the Alder Lake architecture and a boost clock of 5.00 GHz, the CPU provides immense computational headroom. The 25 MB of shared L3 cache and support for dual-channel DDR4/DDR5 memory ensure that the processor can feed data to the GPU without becoming a bottleneck in most scenarios.

The CPU’s benchmark results are exemplary. A Cinebench R23 multicore score of 29241 and a single-core score of 4128 place it in the 89th percentile of all CPUs. Its nearest rival, the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5845, has an average score of 35802, a negligible -0.3% delta, showing that these processors are effectively equivalent in general compute. However, the i7-12700K’s PassMark multithread score of 34404 and physics score of 1790 are far beyond what a 2014 title requires. In practice, the CPU’s role in this combo is to ensure that frame times remain consistent when the GPU is not saturated. At 1080p with Low settings, where the GPU is less strained, the CPU’s fast single-thread performance (Geekbench single-core score of 2561) helps achieve the 80.2 FPS result. Yet, the data shows that even at 4K, the CPU is not the limiting factor—the FPS drops are entirely attributable to GPU load, as the CPU’s 20 threads remain largely idle.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data provides a comprehensive picture of the combo’s capabilities across twelve distinct configurations. At 1920x1080, the results are usable but require settings management. Low settings yield an average of 80.2 FPS, which is smooth for a third-person shooter. Medium settings drop to 64.5 FPS, still acceptable, while High settings produce 51.1 FPS, which is playable but approaches the threshold where input latency becomes noticeable. Ultra settings, however, are problematic, with an average of just 38.2 FPS, indicating that the GPU’s 896 shading units are overwhelmed by the maximum graphical features.

Moving to 2560x1440, the performance envelope shrinks considerably. Low settings achieve 53.4 FPS, which is playable, but Medium settings drop to 39.4 FPS. High settings yield 37.1 FPS, and Ultra settings plummet to 27.9 FPS. These numbers suggest that 1440p is only viable with Low presets, as any higher settings push the average below the 40 FPS mark, which is generally considered the minimum for a responsive shooter experience. The 4K results are uniformly poor: Low settings average 26.7 FPS, Medium 21.5 FPS, High 18 FPS, and Ultra 16.7 FPS. These figures are below the threshold for comfortable gameplay, confirming that this combo is not intended for 4K resolution in Minimum.

How This Combo Ranks

In the grand scheme of tested configurations, this pairing ranks 1658 out of 1733 combos, placing it in the bottom 5% of all systems. This low rank is primarily due to the GPU’s limited capabilities, as the CPU alone would rank much higher based on its 89th percentile standing among all CPUs. The GTX 1650’s 43rd percentile ranking among all GPUs drags the overall combo score down significantly.

When compared to other tested systems, the data suggests that the i7-12700K is overqualified for the GTX 1650. The CPU’s nearest rivals, such as the Intel Core i7-13700T (deltaPct 0.6) and the Intel Core i7-13800H (deltaPct 0.8), would perform similarly when paired with this GPU, as the graphics card is the bottleneck. The GPU’s nearest rivals, including the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 A Mobile (deltaPct -0.4) and the AMD Radeon 550X (deltaPct -0.4), would likely produce nearly identical FPS numbers in Minimum when paired with the same CPU. This indicates that the combo’s rank is heavily influenced by the GPU choice rather than the CPU. The practical takeaway is that this system is best suited for 1080p gaming at Medium or High settings, where it can deliver between 51.1 and 64.5 FPS, providing a stable experience that is largely consistent with other configurations featuring the GTX 1650.