The Technomancer

The Intel Core i7-12700KF paired with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER places 1474th out of 1656 tested combos for The Technomancer. That bottom-decile positioning (roughly the 11th percentile) is striking because the CPU itself sits in the 89th percentile among all processors, while the GPU sits at the 55th percentile. The data suggests a severe bottleneck: the i7-12700KF’s 12 cores and 20 threads are effectively idling while the GTX 1660 SUPER struggles to keep pace. This isn’t a balanced pairing for this title; it’s a CPU that could drive far more demanding workloads, held back by a GPU that was already mid-range at launch in 2019. The result is a combo that ranks lower than either component would alone, which hints that upgrading the graphics card would yield disproportionate gains in this specific game.

How This Combo Ranks

The rank of 1474 out of 1656 combos is a clear signal that this configuration is not optimized for The Technomancer. The CPU’s nearest rivals — the Core i5-14400 (0.1% higher avg score), Core i7-13800H (-0.2% lower), Core i9-12900HX (0.2% higher), and Core i5-13600T (0.3% higher) — all cluster within a fractional percentage of the i7-12700KF’s average benchmark score of 35355. That tight grouping means the CPU is not the differentiator here; any of those processors would likely produce nearly identical frame rates when paired with the same GPU. Conversely, the GTX 1660 SUPER’s nearest rivals — the AMD Radeon RX Vega 11 (-0.2%), Intel Iris Xe MAX Graphics (-0.2%), AMD Radeon Vega 11 (-0.5%), and AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT (-0.7%) — show that the GPU is competitive with integrated and low-end discrete solutions, not with the kind of hardware that pushes high frame rates in a demanding Action RPG. The combo’s low rank, therefore, reflects the GPU’s ceiling, not the CPU’s capability. The data implies that swapping in a faster graphics card would catapult this combo far up the rankings, while changing the processor would do almost nothing.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS rows reveal a clear hierarchy: Low settings are the only way to achieve consistently smooth frame rates across all resolutions. At 1080p, Low yields 110.4 FPS, which is the only setting that clears the 100 FPS threshold. Medium at 1080p drops to 84.7 FPS, High to 71.5 FPS, and Ultra to 59.1 FPS — all playable, but with diminishing returns. The situation worsens at 1440p, where Low hits 73.4 FPS, Medium 53.3 FPS, High 45.8 FPS, and Ultra 37.9 FPS. At 4K, only Low remains above 30 FPS (37.2 FPS), while Medium (28.5 FPS) and High (27.5 FPS) dip below the playable threshold, and Ultra collapses to 17.9 FPS. The data suggests that for a 60 FPS target, 1080p High is the highest setting that achieves it (71.5 FPS), while 1440p requires Low to stay above 60 FPS (73.4 FPS). For 4K, the only viable option is Low at 37.2 FPS, which is acceptable only for slower-paced exploration. The sweet spot for visual quality versus performance is 1080p Medium, which offers 84.7 FPS — a 19% drop from Low but a significant visual uplift over Low, while still leaving headroom above 60 FPS.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K is dramatic and reveals the GPU as the primary limiter. At Low settings, 1080p produces 110.4 FPS, but 4K Low falls to 37.2 FPS — a 66% reduction. At Medium, the drop is from 84.7 FPS to 28.5 FPS (a 66% reduction again), and at High from 71.5 FPS to 27.5 FPS (a 62% reduction). The most extreme case is Ultra, which goes from 59.1 FPS at 1080p to 17.9 FPS at 4K — a 70% loss. These consistent 62-70% reductions across settings indicate that the GPU’s rendering throughput is being saturated as pixel count quadruples from 1080p to 4K. The GTX 1660 SUPER’s 6 GB of GDDR6 memory and 192-bit bus (336.0 GB/s bandwidth) are simply not enough to feed the pixel pipeline at higher resolutions. Notably, the scaling is nearly linear with pixel count, which suggests the CPU is not a constraint at any resolution — if it were, the percentage drops would compress at higher resolutions as the GPU became the bottleneck. Instead, the GPU is always the bottleneck, and the CPU’s 12 cores never come under meaningful load.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the data shows a full range of playable options. Low hits 110.4 FPS, Medium 84.7 FPS, High 71.5 FPS, and Ultra 59.1 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra is 51.3 FPS, meaning Ultra costs 46% of Low’s performance. At 2560x1440, the same settings yield 73.4, 53.3, 45.8, and 37.9 FPS respectively. The Ultra-to-Low gap narrows to 35.5 FPS, but the percentage difference remains similar (48%). At 3840x2160, the numbers fall to 37.2 (Low), 28.5 (Medium), 27.5 (High), and 17.9 (Ultra). The High and Medium settings nearly converge at 4K (27.5 vs 28.5 FPS), suggesting that the GPU is so constrained that the difference between those presets becomes negligible — the fill rate is maxed out regardless. The pattern across resolutions is consistent: Low is always the fastest, Ultra always the slowest, and the relative ordering never changes. But the absolute gaps shrink at 4K, which is characteristic of a GPU hitting its memory bandwidth or shader limits rather than a CPU or driver overhead issue.

GPU Role

The GTX 1660 SUPER’s specifications directly explain its performance ceiling in The Technomancer. Its 6 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus delivers 336.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is sufficient for 1080p but becomes strained at 1440p and especially 4K. The GPU’s boost clock of 1785 MHz (base 1530 MHz) drives 1408 shading units, 88 TMUs, and 48 ROPs, producing 5.027 TFLOPS of FP32 performance. The measured frame rates align with this compute budget: at 1080p Ultra, 59.1 FPS is close to what this hardware can sustain, while 4K Ultra’s 17.9 FPS shows the GPU is overwhelmed. The 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 1278 and Passmark G3D score of 12699 place it at the 55th percentile among all GPUs, but its nearest rivals are all integrated or low-end parts (RX Vega 11, Iris Xe MAX, RX 5500 XT), which confirms it is not built for high-resolution gaming. The GPU’s 12 nm Turing architecture (TU116 chip, 6,600 million transistors) lacks ray tracing cores, but that’s irrelevant for this 2016 title. What matters is raw rasterization throughput, and the data shows that throughput is exhausted at 4K, where even Low settings only reach 37.2 FPS.

FAQ

Q: Is this combo capable of 60 FPS at 1080p in The Technomancer?

A: Yes, but only up to High settings. The measured FPS shows 71.5 FPS at 1080p High, 84.7 FPS at Medium, and 110.4 FPS at Low. Ultra falls short at 59.1 FPS.

Q: Can this system run The Technomancer at 4K?

A: Only at Low settings, and even then it barely reaches 37.2 FPS. Medium (28.5 FPS), High (27.5 FPS), and Ultra (17.9 FPS) are all below 30 FPS, making them effectively unplayable.

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

A: The GPU is the clear bottleneck. The i7-12700KF ranks in the 89th percentile among CPUs, while the GTX 1660 SUPER sits at the 55th percentile. The consistent 62-70% FPS drops from 1080p to 4K across all settings indicate the GPU’s rendering pipeline is saturated.

Q: How does the GTX 1660 SUPER compare to its nearest rivals?

A: Its average benchmark score of 14286 is within 0.7% of the AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT (14389), 0.5% of the AMD Radeon Vega 11 (14352), and 0.2% of both the AMD Radeon RX Vega 11 (14314) and Intel Iris Xe MAX (14315). These are all low-end parts.

Q: What is the best settings preset for a 60 FPS target at 1440p?

A: Low settings at 2560x1440 produce 73.4 FPS, which is the only 1440p preset above 60 FPS. Medium drops to 53.3 FPS, High to 45.8 FPS, and Ultra to 37.9 FPS.

Q: Does the CPU matter at all for this game’s performance?

A: The data suggests it does not. The CPU’s nearest rivals (Core i5-14400, Core i7-13800H, Core i9-12900HX, Core i5-13600T) all have nearly identical average scores (within 0.3%), and the FPS scaling is entirely consistent with GPU-bound behavior.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i7-12700KF is massively overqualified for this pairing. Its 12 cores (20 threads) with a base clock of 3.60 GHz and boost of 5.00 GHz, backed by 25 MB of shared L3 cache, produce a Cinebench R23 multicore score of 28979 and a single-core score of 4091. The Passmark multithread score of 34092 and the 3DMark max-threads score of 9983 place it in the 89th percentile of all CPUs. Yet in The Technomancer, none of this horsepower translates to higher frame rates because the GTX 1660 SUPER becomes the limiting factor at every resolution and setting. The CPU’s nearest rivals — the Core i5-14400 (0.1% higher avg score), Core i7-13800H (-0.2% lower), Core i9-12900HX (0.2% higher), and Core i5-13600T (0.3% higher) — would all perform identically in this game, as the GPU’s 55th-percentile standing (among all GPUs) is what defines the combo’s 1474th-place rank out of 1656. The 125 W TDP and unlocked multiplier suggest this CPU was designed for heavy multitasking and productivity, not for pairing with a modest graphics card in a 2016 Action RPG. The data implies that users with this combo would see zero FPS improvement from a CPU upgrade, and that the only meaningful upgrade path is a faster GPU. The CPU’s 3DMark single-thread score of 1043 and Geekbench single-core score of 2526 are excellent, but The Technomancer’s frame rates are governed by the GPU’s 5.027 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput, not by CPU thread count.