Thief

The AMD Ryzen 5 7600 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER combination delivers a workable but hardly impressive Thief experience, as measured in the benchmark database. Medium settings produce a playable 91 avg FPS at 1080p, but the GPU becomes the limiting factor at 1440p and especially at 4K, where even Low only yields 48 avg FPS. The combo’s overall ranking of 3179 out of 3720 tested combinations places it near the bottom of the pile, indicating that most other hardware pairings captured in the dataset run Thief at higher frame rates. It is a pairing that works for 1080p gaming at medium-to-low settings, but nothing more, and the results hold some lessons about where the bottleneck sits.

Resolution Scaling

The measured frame rates tell a clear story about resolution scaling. At 1920x1080 High, the combo produces 69 avg FPS; at 2560x1440 High that drops to 47 avg FPS (a 32% decrease); and at 3840x2160 High it falls further to 28 avg FPS (a 40% decrease from 1440p). Even Low settings show the same pattern: 1080p Low is 120 avg FPS, 1440p Low is 82 avg FPS, and 4K Low is 48 avg FPS. The delta from 1440p to 4K is proportionally larger than that from 1080p to 1440p. From 63% of 1080p FPS at 1440p for Low, the 4K number drops to 40% of the 1080p value. The drop pattern strongly suggests the GPU is the principal constraint once the pixel count rises. Medium settings confirm this: 1080p Medium 91 avg FPS, 1440p Medium 62 avg FPS (68% of 1080p), and 4K Medium 37 avg FPS (41% of 1080p). Ultra is similarly steep: 1080p Ultra 66 avg, 1440p Ultra 45 avg (68%), and 4K Ultra 27 avg (41%). These ratios are nearly identical across all four charted settings, indicating that the game’s frame rate at 1440p and above is dictated by the GPU’s fill rate, texture throughput, and related bandwidth, not by CPU limitations. The GTX 1660 SUPER’s 6 GB GDDR6 memory at 336.0 GB/s bandwidth becomes restrictive as the resolution demands more data fetch per frame.

How This Combo Ranks

Thief falls within a dataset of 3,720 CPU-GPU combinations. The Ryzen 5 7600 + GTX 1660 SUPER pair placed at rank 3179, putting it in the bottom 14.5% of all measured combos. That is a weak showing, and it clearly reflects the GPU’s age and tier rather than the CPU’s capability. The 7600 is a modern six-core, 12-thread chip from the Zen 4 architecture, and it moves more than enough data for a 2014 stealth title. But the 1660 SUPER, based on the Turing architecture (GF116 chip), puts only 1408 shading units on the die, with a maximum boost clock of 1785 MHz and a texture rate of 157.1 GTexel/s. Compare this to the GPU’s nearest rivals in the database — for instance, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Mobile and AMD Radeon 580, which both show a delta of 0.4% in average score — but no amount of analysis of those numbers can change the fact that this GPU sits in the margin of the ensemble. The CPU performing far stronger than the GPU is corroborated by the CPU’s percentile rank (78% better than all CPUs) while the GPU’s percentile is a mediocre 53rd percentile with an average benchmark score of 12986. The wide disparity between these two parts explains why the combo ranks low: the CPU is wasted in a game like Thief, which does not stress multiple threads, while the GPU is the overwhelming payload limiter.

GPU Role

The GTX 1660 SUPER is the star and the sentence of this build. With 6 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus, it delivers 336 GB/s bandwidth. But Thief itself is not that memory hungry at most settings; the bottleneck is raw computing. The GPU's maximum measured scores — 5.027 TFLOPS FP32 and 10.05 TFLOPS FP16 — are modest. At 1080p Low, the card produces 120 avg FPS, which is the sweet spot for high refresh display. At 1080p Medium, the card yields 91 avg FPS, still very plausible. The beast begins at 1440p: 82 avg FPS at Low, 62 at Medium, 47 at High, and 45 at Ultra. To hit 4K, essentially all stays below 60: 48 Low, 37 Medium, 28 High, 27 Ultra. The GPU’s Niche 1 x 8-pin power connector and 125 W TDP are consistent with its class, and the 12 nm TU116 chip pumps out those sorts of numbers only at 1080p. The v-saw of measured frame times across Medium settings (e.g., 4K Medium 31 min, 42 max) further illustrates the card’s instability once resolution pressures the fill rate. The game’s own workload appears to be a mix of fill-bound and bandwidth-bound stages, which explains why the GPU’s texture rate 157.1 GTexel/s becomes a limiting factor as the pixel count increases. The 1080p Low 120 avg proves that the 16GHz memory side is still capable; only the shader throughput can’t keep up.

Settings Recommendations

If you want to push this combination to its best experience, the measured rows have a clear answer. At 1080p, Medium is the highest practical preset: 91 avg FPS is above the 60 FPS threshhold and the frame spikes stay within 77 to 105. Ultra at 1080p only yields 66 avg FPS, and the game is already old enough that the stable 91 is more preferable. At 1440p, Low is the only way to keep a high refresh; 82 avg FPS is fine for most, but Medium drops to 62 and High to 47, the latter reaching into the zone where the CPU cannot feed the GPU because of the 1080p resolution scaling? That’s not meant to be factual — regardless, the measured data shows that Low is best 1440p, Medium is at the edge. At 4K, only Low is worthwhile at 48 avg FPS, and Medium (37) and High (28) run below what most gamers consider smooth. Therefore, without assuming any shadow of doubt, the best balanced experience is 1080p Medium. It gives a solid 91 FPS average with an acceptable margin for drop lows. If the player tries 1440p, Low is the winner. No 4K preset should be considered on this hardware; even the best number—48 FPS—is below 50. The boost clock of the GPU at 1785 MHz does not mitigate the deficiency in pixel generation.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The recorded data shows a table of three resolutions and four presets. All numbers in this section come directly from the benchmark run.

At 1920x1080, there are four entries. Low gives 120 avg FPS. Medium gives 91 avg FPS with a minimum of 77 and a maximum of 105. High shows 69. Ultra shows 66. This sequence demonstrates that all settings stay above 60, with the delta from Low to Ultra of 54 FPS (from 120 down to 66).

At 2560x1440, the same four settings: Low 82, Medium 62 (min 53, max 72), High 47, and Ultra 45. Here the gap from Low to Ultra is 37 FPS, and only Low and Medium remain above 60, but barely.

At 3840x2160, the rows are: Low 48, Medium 37 (min 31, max 42), High 28, and Ultra 27. The delta from Low to Ultra is 21 FPS. The highest FPS at 4K is 48 (Low) and the lowest 27 (Ultra), a range that falls almost entirely below the 60 FPS target.

Notice the deltaFPS from 1080p to 1440p varies by setting. Low: 120 to 82 = 38 FPS drop. Medium: 91 to 62 = 29 FPS drop. High: 69 to 47 = 22 FPS drop. Ultra: 66 to 45 = 21 FPS drop. The higher the settings, the smaller the drop percentage, inversing the image: at Low the CPU provides a buffer, while at Ultra the GPU is already strained.

From 1440p to 4K, the pattern remains: Low 82 to 48 (43% drop), Medium 62 to 37 (40% drop), High 47 to 28 (40% drop), Ultra 45 to 27 (40% drop). This homogeneous drop across all presets at this transition indicates the GPU is hitting a fixed limit—the pixel fill rate, specifically 85.68 GPixel/s. That number, when divided by the number of pixels displayed, explains the cardinal relationship in the averages.

The Medium preset is the only one that includes minFps and maxFps. That reveals the drop—1077-72 and 31-42 for 4K, and 31 for the minimums. The ranges are tight at 1080p, moderate at 1440p, and narrow at 4K. This suggests a stability problem: at 4K the frame times are wavering between almost 31 and 42, indicating that the GPU is at the edge of its memory bandwidth.

The CPU Role

Let’s address the CPU role as it appears in context of Thief. The Ryzen 5 7600 has 6 cores and 12 threads, with a base clock of 3.80 GHz and a burst clock of 5.10 GHz. It runs on the AMD 7000 series in the AM5 socket, uses DDR5 memory (dual-channel, 83.2 GB/s bandwidth), and has 32 MB L3, 64KB L1, 1MB L2 per core. In terms of compute benchmarks, the CPU scores 999 on single-thread 3dmark, 1938 on 2-thread, 3686 on 4-thread, 5508 on 8-thread, and 6503 max. On Geekbench, it scores 2521 single-core and 13413 multi-core. Cinebench R23 multi-core is 12735, single-core 1852. Passmark multi-thread 27058, single-thread 3910, compression 304942, etc. For Thief, a game released in 2014, the engine is likely to be more single-threaded than multi-threaded. The 7600’s single-core performance is stellar. A passmark single-thread score of 3910 places it is way above what Thief would need from its CPU-bound scenes. The data implies that the Ryzen 5 7600 would easily keep up with even 4K Low or Ultra, as the frame-rate drops are due to the GPU’s output limit. Section C's measured FPS at 1080p Low is 120; at 1080p Ultra is 66. With the GPU at 1080p Ultra only 66, that default is the pixel limit, not a CPU limit. The CPU’s percentile rank among all CPUs is 78, meaning it’s above the median. In nearest rivals, its closest competitors are the Ryzen 9 6900HX (0.2% higher average score), Ryzen 7 7435HS (-0.3%), Intel Core i9-11900KF (0.8% higher), and the Ryzen 5 8540U (0.5%). Those deltas are sub-1%, so the 7600 sits in a very tight performance band. Looking at the K THRED. The CPU’s 5.10 GHz boost clock and 12 threads are far beyond the needs of most 2014 titles. In fact, the only possible scenario where a more powerful CPU might help in Thief is when resolution scales to low and the CPU has to handle more draw calls? But the data (each resolution Low setting keeps uniform scaling) doesn’t indicate any CPU-bound stage. The low settings on 4K produce 48 FPS, which is probably the maximum the GPU can crouch out of that setup.

So the conclusion is stark: the 7600’s role is a security blank. It is not the limit. The limit is the GPU—specifically, its 5.027 TFLOPS FP32 and 1785 MHz boost. The CPU role is to have enough headroom to fully push the GPU at all settings. At 1080p Medium, the minimum is 77 FPS which is high enough that the CPU is never waiting. The only sign of CPU activity is avoided. The average benchmark score of 26324 places the CPU in the 78th centile, while the GPU is in 53rd. The CPU gives you more. So for Thief, this pairing is about one thing: 1080p. The CPU is the silent butler, ready to push the GPU, but the GPU bows early.

In short, when you analyze the scaling between resolutions, the CPU has nothing left to give but the 1660 SUPER‑part. The 7600’s 6 cores are superfluous, its 12 threads merely idle; what matters is the 192-bit bus and 1408 ASIC___ The numbers speak loudly.