Minimum

The Intel Core i7-14700F pairs a 20-core, 28-thread configuration with a 2.10 GHz base clock and a 5.40 GHz boost clock. This Raptor Lake Refresh part, built on Intel’s 10 nm process, combines 8 performance cores with 12 efficient cores, which is a hybrid design that matters for a 2014 third-person shooter like Minimum. The game’s engine was not designed for modern many-core processors, but the benchmark results show the CPU still delivers headroom at lower resolutions. At 1080p Low, the combo reaches 410 FPS, indicating that the processor’s high boost clock and 33 MB of shared L3 cache are sufficient to feed the GPU without bottlenecking in this older title. The 65 W TDP and locked multiplier suggest this is a power-conscious part, yet the data shows it does not struggle in a game that is primarily GPU-bound at higher settings.

The CPU’s benchmark scores reinforce its position as a high-end desktop part. Its Cinebench R23 multicore score of 35443 and single-core score of 5003 place it in the 94th percentile of all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 54097. Compared to its nearest rivals, the i7-14700F trails the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X by just 0.6% and the Ryzen 9 9900X3D by 1.1%, while leading the Intel Xeon Phi 7290 by 1.2% and the AMD EPYC 7313P by 1.7%. This near-parity with top-tier desktop chips means the CPU is not the limiting factor in Minimum, especially since the game’s thread count demands are modest. The PassMark multithread score of 41765 and single-thread score of 4261 further confirm that both lightly-threaded and heavily-threaded workloads are handled competently.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the Intel Core i7-14700F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 ranks first overall in Minimum, placing at position 1 out of 1733 tested combos. This top ranking is not surprising given the GPU’s status as the current flagship, but the CPU’s role in achieving this position should not be understated. At 1080p Ultra, the combo produces 200.9 FPS, and at 1440p Ultra it drops to 127.4 FPS, showing that even with a 94th-percentile CPU, the game’s ultra settings impose a significant load. The data indicates that this combo is unrivaled in this title, as the nearest rival GPUs—like the RTX 5090 D with a 0.1% higher average benchmark score—do not appear in the measured FPS data for this specific pairing.

The rank of 1 out of 1733 combos is a categorical statement about performance supremacy, but the measured FPS values provide the nuance. At 4K High, the combo achieves 93.9 FPS, which is playable but not exceptionally high for a flagship setup. The fact that this combo still leads all others despite these numbers suggests that no other tested CPU-GPU pairing can extract more performance from Minimum at these settings. The GPU’s own percentile rank of 94 among all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 84306, places it just behind the RTX 5090 D in synthetic tests, but the in-game results favor this specific configuration.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data across resolutions reveals a classic scaling pattern that shifts the bottleneck from the CPU to the GPU as resolution increases. At 1080p Low, the combo produces 410 FPS, which drops to 260.7 FPS at 1440p Low and 139.1 FPS at 4K Low. This represents a 66% reduction from 1080p to 4K at Low settings, indicating that the GPU’s rasterization throughput becomes the dominant constraint as pixel count quadruples. The RTX 5090’s 32 GB of GDDR7 memory and 1.79 TB/s bandwidth are ample for this game, but the raw compute demand of 4K still cuts deeply into the frame rate.

At High settings, the scaling is more moderate: 263.7 FPS at 1080p, 172.1 FPS at 1440p, and 93.9 FPS at 4K. The percentage drop from 1080p to 4K is 64.4%, nearly identical to Low settings, which suggests the GPU is consistently the limiting factor across these presets. However, the absolute numbers tell a different story about CPU headroom. At 1080p High, the 263.7 FPS figure is still far below the 410 FPS seen at Low, meaning the game’s lighting and shadow calculations at High settings add a GPU-side cost that scales with resolution. The i7-14700F, with its 5.40 GHz boost clock, does not appear to cap performance at any resolution tested, as the FPS drops are proportional to resolution increases rather than hitting a CPU-imposed ceiling.

FAQ

*Q: What is the best resolution to play Minimum with this combo for the highest frame rate?*

A: The data shows 1080p Low yields the highest average FPS at 410, while 1080p Ultra still delivers 200.9 FPS. For a balance of quality and speed, 1440p High at 172.1 FPS is a strong option.

Q: How does the i7-14700F compare to its closest rival in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The i7-14700F has an average benchmark score of 54097, which is 0.6% lower than the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X’s 54450 and 1.1% lower than the Ryzen 9 9900X3D’s 54681, but it leads the Intel Xeon Phi 7290 by 1.2%.

*Q: Does the RTX 5090’s 32 GB VRAM matter for Minimum?*

A: The game is from 2014 and does not require modern VRAM capacities, but the 32 GB GDDR7 memory ensures there is no texture streaming or memory bandwidth bottleneck, even at 4K Ultra settings where the combo still produces 71.4 FPS.

Q: What is the FPS difference between Low and Ultra settings at 4K?

A: At 4K, Low settings produce 139.1 FPS, while Ultra settings drop to 71.4 FPS. This represents a 67.7 FPS reduction, or approximately 51% lower performance, when moving from the lowest to the highest preset.

Q: Is the CPU or GPU the limiting factor in this game?

A: Based on the scaling data, the GPU is the limiting factor at higher resolutions. At 1080p Low, the CPU can drive 410 FPS, but at 4K Ultra, the GPU limits performance to 71.4 FPS, showing the RTX 5090’s compute load is the primary constraint.

Q: How does this combo’s rank compare to other tested configurations?

A: This combo ranks first out of 1733 tested combinations in Minimum, indicating no other CPU-GPU pairing in the database achieves higher measured FPS in this game.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 is the defining component in this combo’s performance, and its specifications reveal why it dominates Minimum. The GPU features 21760 shading units, 680 TMUs, and 176 ROPs, with a boost clock of 2407 MHz and a base clock of 2017 MHz. Its 32 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 512-bit bus delivers 1.79 TB/s of bandwidth, which is far more than this 2014 title requires. The GPU’s 104.8 TFLOPS of FP32 performance and 92,200 million transistors on a 5 nm TSMC process place it in the 94th percentile of all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 84306. This is 0.1% lower than the RTX 5090 D’s 84241 but 1.3% higher than the AMD Radeon PRO W6600’s 83209, showing that even minor synthetic differences translate to meaningful in-game performance.

In Minimum, the GPU’s role is to translate its massive compute resources into frame rate, and the data shows it does so effectively across all settings. At 1080p, the RTX 5090 produces between 200.9 FPS at Ultra and 410 FPS at Low, while at 4K it ranges from 71.4 FPS at Ultra to 139.1 FPS at Low. The 4K Ultra result of 71.4 FPS is the only sub-90 FPS figure in the dataset, indicating that even a flagship GPU with 176 ROPs and a 423.6 GPixel/s pixel rate is taxed by the game’s ultra settings at maximum resolution. The GPU’s 575 W TDP and 950 W suggested PSU requirement reflect its power appetite, but the benchmark results justify this for users seeking the highest possible frame rates in Minimum.

The RTX 5090’s architecture, Blackwell 2.0, includes 170 RT cores and 680 tensor cores, though these features are irrelevant for a game that does not support ray tracing or DLSS. Instead, the GPU’s raw rasterization throughput—1,636.8 GTexel/s texture rate and 104.8 TFLOPS—drives the results. The measured FPS data confirms that the GPU scales predictably with resolution and settings, with the largest performance gap occurring between Medium and Ultra at 4K: 108.3 FPS versus 71.4 FPS, a 36.9 FPS drop. This suggests that Ultra settings introduce shading or post-processing effects that disproportionately increase GPU load, while the CPU remains idle with headroom. For a game from 2014, the RTX 5090 is overkill, but the data proves it delivers category-leading performance, securing the combo’s rank of 1 out of 1733.