Thief

Resolution Scaling

Thief’s performance scaling across resolutions tells a clear story about where this combo’s bottleneck lives. Moving from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 at High settings, the average frame rate drops from 137.8 FPS to 111.1 FPS — a 19.4% reduction. That is a modest hit for a 77% increase in pixel count, suggesting the system has enough headroom at 1440p to absorb the added load without collapsing. The jump from 1440p to 4K (3840x2160) is far more punishing: at High settings, the average falls from 111.1 FPS to 68.6 FPS, a 38.3% decline. This steep drop indicates the GPU is becoming the primary limiting factor as pixel throughput demands skyrocket.

The trend is consistent across all settings presets. At Low, the 1080p result is 164.9 FPS, which drops to 147.2 FPS at 1440p (a 10.7% loss) and then to 113.6 FPS at 4K (a 22.8% loss from 1440p). At Ultra, the pattern holds: 137.2 FPS at 1080p, 106.5 FPS at 1440p (22.4% reduction), and 61.7 FPS at 4K (42.1% reduction). The increasingly severe percentage drops as resolution climbs point directly at the GPU as the bottleneck. The RTX 4070 SUPER’s 12 GB of GDDR6X memory and 504.2 GB/s bandwidth are clearly sufficient for 1080p and 1440p, but 4K Ultra starts to strain the memory subsystem and shader throughput.

Notably, the gap between Low and Ultra settings narrows as resolution increases. At 1080p, Ultra runs 16.8% slower than Low (137.2 vs 164.9 FPS). At 4K, that gap widens to 45.7% (61.7 vs 113.6 FPS). This widening delta at higher resolutions confirms that the GPU’s rendering pipeline, not the CPU, is what determines the ceiling when pixel counts soar. The CPU has more time to feed frames at 4K, but the GPU simply cannot keep pace with the geometric and shading complexity of Ultra settings at that resolution.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is built on the Ada Lovelace architecture with a 5 nm process from TSMC. Its boost clock of 2475 MHz and base clock of 1980 MHz drive 7168 shading units, 224 texture mapping units, and 80 ROPs. The memory configuration is 12 GB of GDDR6X on a 192-bit bus, delivering 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth. These specifications explain the measured frame rates in Thief: the card has ample raw throughput for 1080p and 1440p gaming, where it consistently posts averages above 100 FPS across all settings.

At 4K, the GPU’s limits become apparent. The Ultra preset at 3840x2160 yields 61.7 FPS average, which is playable but far from the high-refresh territory seen at lower resolutions. The Medium preset at 4K achieves 90.1 FPS, and High reaches 68.6 FPS — indicating that the card’s 35.48 TFLOPS of FP32 compute and 554.4 GTexel/s texture rate are being fully exercised. The pixel rate of 198.0 GPixel/s is a key constraint at 4K, where the ROP count of 80 must fill over 8.3 million pixels per frame. This is why the Ultra preset, with its additional geometry and post-processing effects, drops to just 61.7 FPS.

The GPU’s benchmark scores corroborate its mid-high tier positioning. It scores 29995 in Passmark G3D and 17108 in GPU Compute, with a 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 4627. Its percentile rank of 84 against all GPUs places it comfortably above average. The nearest rivals in aggregate score are the NVIDIA RTX A6000 (deltaPct -0.2%), AMD Radeon RX 7650 GRE (-0.3%), AMD Radeon Pro 580X (+1.4%), and NVIDIA Tesla M40 (+1.6%) — all within 1.6% of the RTX 4070 SUPER’s average benchmark score of 42576. This clustering indicates that the card sits in a dense performance bracket, though Thief’s results show it handling the game well above the 60 FPS threshold at nearly every configuration tested.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER ranks 351st out of 1642 tested combos in Thief. This places it in the 78.6th percentile of all combinations in the database — a strong showing that reflects the balance between the 8-core CPU and the Ada Lovelace GPU. The rank is not top-tier, but it is well above the median, indicating that this pairing delivers solid performance without any obvious bottleneck dragging down the result.

The CPU’s individual percentile rank of 83 against all processors and the GPU’s rank of 84 against all graphics cards are nearly identical, suggesting a well-matched duo. When one component significantly outranks the other, the lower-ranked part typically becomes the limiting factor. Here, the near-parity in percentile scores means neither CPU nor GPU is grossly over- or under-powered relative to the other. The combo’s 351st place out of 1642 reflects this harmony — it is not a pairing that wastes potential, nor one that surprises with unexpected synergy. It simply performs as the sum of two solid mid-to-high-tier parts.

Breaking down the rank further, the Ryzen 7 5700X’s average benchmark score of 26214 puts it within 0.2% of rivals like the Intel Core i9-11900KF (26196, deltaPct 0.1%) and AMD Ryzen 5 7600X (26272, deltaPct -0.2%). The GPU’s average score of 42576 is similarly tight against its nearest competitors. This clustering means the combo’s rank is not driven by any single component’s outlier performance, but rather by the consistent, predictable behavior of both parts in a legacy DirectX 11-era title like Thief.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo delivers its highest frame rates across the board. Low settings produce 164.9 FPS average, Medium 151.8 FPS, High 137.8 FPS, and Ultra 137.2 FPS. The tight spread between High and Ultra (just 0.6 FPS) suggests that the Ultra preset’s additional effects are largely handled without taxing the GPU further at this resolution. The CPU’s 8 cores and 16 threads, running at a boost clock of 4.60 GHz, have no trouble keeping up with the GPU’s output at 1080p.

Stepping up to 2560x1440, the averages remain strong: Low hits 147.2 FPS, Medium 132.1 FPS, High 111.1 FPS, and Ultra 106.5 FPS. The drop from 1080p to 1440p is most pronounced at High settings (19.4% reduction) and least at Low (10.7%). The 1440p Ultra result of 106.5 FPS still clears the 100 FPS mark, making this resolution an excellent sweet spot for the combo. The GPU’s 12 GB memory buffer is sufficient for the larger frame buffers, and the 192-bit bus does not appear to be a constraint here.

At 3840x2160, the picture changes. Low settings yield 113.6 FPS, Medium 90.1 FPS, High 68.6 FPS, and Ultra 61.7 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra at 4K is a substantial 45.7%, compared to just 16.8% at 1080p. This dramatic widening indicates that the GPU’s shading units and ROPs are saturated at 4K Ultra, while the CPU remains underutilized. The 61.7 FPS average at 4K Ultra is still technically playable, but it is barely above the 60 FPS threshold, and the drop from 90.1 FPS at Medium to 68.6 FPS at High shows how sensitive the card is to settings changes at this resolution.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700X is a Zen 3 architecture processor built on TSMC’s 7 nm node. It has 8 cores and 16 threads, with a base clock of 3.40 GHz and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz. The 32 MB of shared L3 cache and 4,150 million transistors on a 74 mm² die provide strong single-threaded and multithreaded performance. Its TDP of 65 W is modest, and it supports DDR4 memory on the AMD Socket AM4 platform with dual-channel bandwidth of 51.2 GB/s.

In Thief, the CPU’s role is primarily to feed frames to the GPU at lower resolutions. At 1080p, the difference between Low and Ultra is just 27.7 FPS (164.9 vs 137.2), which is a relatively small spread for a game that scales settings heavily. This indicates that the CPU is capable of pushing well over 160 FPS in this title, and the GPU is the limiting factor even at 1080p. The CPU’s single-thread score of 3385 in Passmark and 921 in 3DMark single-thread tests are strong, and its Cinebench R23 single-core score of 3193 confirms robust per-core performance — essential for a 2014-era game that may not scale perfectly across 16 threads.

The CPU’s 16 threads and 8 cores are more than sufficient for Thief, which was released in early 2014 and likely utilizes only a few cores. At 4K, the CPU’s utilization drops further as the GPU struggles to maintain frame rates. The measured FPS at 4K Ultra (61.7) versus 1080p Ultra (137.2) shows a 55% reduction, which is entirely attributable to the GPU’s rendering load, not CPU limitations. The CPU’s average benchmark score of 26214 and percentile rank of 83 place it in the upper echelon of processors, and its nearest rivals in aggregate score — including the Intel Core i9-11900KF and AMD Ryzen 5 7600X — are all within 0.2% of its performance. This means the 5700X is not a weak link in this pairing; it provides ample headroom for the RTX 4070 SUPER to operate at its full potential in Thief.