Red Dead Redemption 2

How This Combo Ranks

The Intel Core i7-12700KF paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 secures the 314th position out of 1,687 tested combos in Red Dead Redemption 2. This places the pairing comfortably within the top quintile of all configurations evaluated, indicating a strong overall capability for this title. The ranking reflects a balanced platform where neither component acts as a severe bottleneck, allowing the game's engine to utilize the available hardware efficiently.

Benchmark data for the individual components reinforces this standing. The CPU's average benchmark score of 35,355 places it in the 89th percentile among all processors, with its nearest rivals—the Intel Core i5-14400 at 35,336 and the Intel Core i9-12900HX at 35,289—being statistically indistinguishable, showing deltas of just 0.1% and 0.2% respectively. The GPU, with an average score of 41,687, sits in the 83rd percentile of all graphics cards, closely matching the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090, which trails by only 0.6%. This near-parity in component-level performance translates directly to the combo's competitive placement in the game-specific rankings.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 is built on the Blackwell 2.0 architecture using a 5 nm process at TSMC, housing 31,100 million transistors on a 263 mm² die. Its memory configuration consists of 12 GB of GDDR7 on a 192-bit bus, delivering a bandwidth of 672.0 GB/s. The memory clock runs at 1750 MHz, which translates to 28 Gbps effective. These specifications provide ample data throughput for Red Dead Redemption 2's expansive open-world environments, which stream textures and geometry continuously.

The GPU's base clock is 2325 MHz, boosting to 2512 MHz under load. With 6,144 shading units, 192 texture mapping units, and 80 raster output units, the card offers substantial raw compute. Its FP32 performance is rated at 30.87 TFLOPS, and the pixel rate is 201.0 GPixel/s. In this game, the GPU's role becomes increasingly dominant as resolution and settings escalate. The measured frame rates show a clear pattern: at 1080p with Low settings, the combo reaches 163.3 FPS, but this drops to 36.8 FPS at 4K Ultra—a decline of over 77% that directly reflects the GPU's workload scaling with pixel count and shader complexity.

The 12 GB VRAM capacity is sufficient for this title's highest texture quality at 4K, as evidenced by the playable 50.5 FPS average at High settings in 3840x2160. The memory bandwidth of 672.0 GB/s supports the high-resolution texture streaming without causing significant frame time spikes, although the data does not include min/max FPS figures to confirm frame pacing stability.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS progression across resolutions reveals a predictable yet informative scaling pattern. Starting at 1920x1080 with High settings, the combo delivers 103.3 FPS. Moving to 2560x1440, this drops to 75.4 FPS, a reduction of 27%. At 3840x2160, the average falls further to 50.5 FPS, representing a 33% decrease from 1440p. This scaling is consistent with a GPU-bound scenario, where the processing load increases roughly with the pixel count.

The Low settings data emphasizes this trend even more starkly. At 1080p Low, the system achieves 163.3 FPS. At 1440p Low, it maintains 121.2 FPS, and at 4K Low, it still produces 83.4 FPS. The relatively smaller percentage drops at lower settings—from 163.3 to 121.2 is a 25.8% decline, and from 121.2 to 83.4 is a 31.2% decline—suggest that at Low settings, the CPU has more headroom to feed the GPU, yet the GPU still remains the primary limiter at higher resolutions.

The Ultra settings curve shows the steepest degradation. At 1080p Ultra, the average is 76.6 FPS; at 1440p Ultra, it falls to 57.0 FPS; and at 4K Ultra, it bottoms out at 36.8 FPS. This 52% total drop from 1080p to 4K indicates that the combination of maximum draw distance, shadow quality, and post-processing effects at Ultra creates a workload that heavily taxes the GPU's shading units and memory subsystem. The data suggests that for smooth 60 FPS gameplay at 4K, users would need to select Medium settings, which yield 62.3 FPS.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combination performs robustly across all quality presets. Low settings produce an average of 163.3 FPS, Medium achieves 124.3 FPS, High delivers 103.3 FPS, and Ultra drops to 76.6 FPS. The spread from Low to Ultra is 86.7 FPS, indicating that the GPU scales well with the reduced shader complexity at lower presets, while the CPU's 12 cores and 20 threads provide ample processing power to avoid becoming a constraint even at the highest frame rates.

Moving to 2560x1440, the averages are 121.2 FPS at Low, 93.7 FPS at Medium, 75.4 FPS at High, and 57.0 FPS at Ultra. The relative performance between presets remains consistent, with Medium being 22.6% faster than High, and Ultra being 24.4% slower than High. This resolution represents a sweet spot for the combo, as even the demanding Ultra preset stays above 50 FPS, making it viable for high-refresh-rate monitors when settings are moderated.

At 3840x2160, the GPU's limitations become apparent. Low settings yield 83.4 FPS, Medium drops to 62.3 FPS, High averages 50.5 FPS, and Ultra falls to 36.8 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra widens to 46.6 FPS, compared to 64.3 FPS at 1080p, showing that at 4K, the GPU's absolute performance ceiling restricts the upper bound, compressing the differences between presets. The 50.5 FPS at High is borderline for smooth gameplay, while Medium at 62.3 FPS offers a more comfortable margin.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i7-12700KF is a 12-core, 20-thread processor based on the Alder Lake architecture, manufactured on Intel's 10 nm process. It operates with a base clock of 3.60 GHz and a boost clock of 5.00 GHz, with a TDP of 125 W. The cache hierarchy includes 80 KB of L1 per core, 1.25 MB of L2 per core, and 25 MB of shared L3 cache. This configuration provides substantial single-thread and multi-thread performance, as evidenced by its Cinebench R23 scores of 4,091 single-core and 28,979 multi-core.

In Red Dead Redemption 2, the CPU's role is primarily to feed the GPU with draw calls and physics calculations. The game's engine is known to scale well with multi-core processors, and this CPU's 20 threads handle the simulation load effectively. At 1080p Low, where the GPU is less stressed, the CPU enables the system to reach 163.3 FPS, indicating that it can sustain high frame rates without becoming a bottleneck. Its PassMark multi-thread score of 34,092 and 3DMark max threads score of 9,983 confirm strong parallel processing capability.

The processor's 89th percentile ranking among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 35,355, places it just 0.1% above the Intel Core i5-14400 and 0.2% above the Intel Core i9-12900HX. This close clustering suggests that in GPU-bound scenarios like 4K Ultra, the CPU choice has minimal impact on the final frame rate. However, at 1080p High, the CPU's ability to maintain 103.3 FPS—a 26.7% improvement over the 4K High result—demonstrates that it keeps pace with the GPU's output at lower resolutions, ensuring the combo's consistent ranking across all tested settings. The 20 threads and 25 MB of L3 cache are particularly suited to the game's open-world streaming, which benefits from the large shared cache for frequently accessed game data.