Thief

The Intel Core i5-12400F paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER delivers a highly capable 1080p experience in Thief, but the data shows that the optimal settings depend heavily on your target refresh rate and resolution. The measured FPS rows indicate that the Medium preset at 1920x1080 provides an excellent balance, delivering 117.3 FPS average, which is a substantial improvement over the High preset’s 87.5 FPS while still looking markedly better than Low. For players with 144Hz displays, the Low preset at 156.7 FPS is the only configuration that fully saturates such a high refresh rate, but the visual compromise is significant. At 2560x1440, the Medium preset offers a very playable 80.7 FPS, making it the sweet spot for higher-resolution monitors. The Ultra preset is only advisable at 1080p where it hits 88.7 FPS, but the 1.2 FPS difference between Ultra and High at that resolution suggests diminishing returns that favor the High preset for most users.

Settings Recommendations

The benchmark results clearly indicate that the Medium preset is the most efficient choice for this combination across all tested resolutions. At 1920x1080, Medium achieves 117.3 FPS, which is 29.8 FPS higher than High and only 39.4 FPS lower than Low, offering a strong compromise between visual fidelity and frame rate. The data shows that moving from Medium to High at 1080p costs 29.8 FPS, while the jump from High to Ultra costs just 1.2 FPS, revealing that Ultra provides negligible gains over High at that resolution. At 2560x1440, Medium’s 80.7 FPS is comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay, while High drops to 59.6 FPS and Ultra falls to 57 FPS. For 4K gaming, the Low preset is the only viable option if you demand 60 FPS, as it delivers 64.8 FPS, whereas Medium drops to 49.8 FPS and High/Ultra fall below 35 FPS. The recommendation is straightforward: use Medium for 1080p and 1440p, and reserve Low for 4K if you prioritize frame rate over visuals.

GPU Role

The RTX 2060 SUPER’s 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus with 448.0 GB/s bandwidth provides ample headroom for Thief’s textures, as evidenced by the consistent scaling from Low to Ultra settings. The GPU’s base clock of 1470 MHz and boost clock of 1650 MHz, combined with 2176 shading units, drive the rendering workload, and the data shows that the card is the primary bottleneck at higher resolutions. At 4K Ultra, the average FPS drops to 33.4, which is a 62.1% reduction from 1080p Ultra’s 88.7 FPS, indicating that the GPU’s compute resources are being saturated by the pixel count. The TU106 chip’s 7.181 TFLOPS of FP32 performance is sufficient for 1080p and 1440p gaming but struggles to maintain playable frame rates at 4K with high-quality settings. The benchmark results show that the GPU’s memory bandwidth becomes a limiting factor at 4K, where the 448.0 GB/s figure is insufficient to feed the rendering pipeline at Ultra settings, resulting in the sub-35 FPS averages observed.

Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data reveals a steep performance drop as resolution increases, highlighting the GPU-bound nature of this workload. From 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 at High settings, the average FPS falls from 87.5 to 59.6, a 31.9% reduction, while moving to 3840x2160 High further drops to 34.4 FPS, a 60.7% decline from 1080p. The scaling pattern is consistent across all settings presets: at Low, the drop from 1080p’s 156.7 FPS to 1440p’s 109.2 FPS represents a 30.3% loss, and 4K Low falls to 64.8 FPS, a 58.6% reduction from 1080p. This consistent ~30% loss at 1440p and ~60% loss at 4K indicates that the RTX 2060 SUPER is the limiting component, as the CPU’s performance headroom is not being exhausted at lower resolutions. The data suggests that the GPU’s fill rate and memory bandwidth are the constraints, with the pixel rate of 105.6 GPixel/s and texture rate of 224.4 GTexel/s being insufficient to maintain 60 FPS at 4K with medium or higher settings.

How This Combo Ranks

This specific combination of the Intel Core i5-12400F and RTX 2060 SUPER ranks 1193 out of 1642 tested combos in Thief, placing it in the 72.7th percentile of all configurations. This ranking indicates that while the combo is not at the top tier, it outperforms nearly three-quarters of the tested systems, which is respectable given the hardware’s age. The CPU’s percentile vs all CPUs is 77, and the GPU’s percentile vs all GPUs is 63, suggesting that the processor is relatively stronger than the graphics card in this pairing. The combo’s rank is likely constrained by the GPU’s performance at higher resolutions, as the CPU’s benchmark scores—such as the Cinebench R23 multicore score of 16518—indicate substantial headroom that the GPU cannot fully utilize at 4K. In the context of Thief, which is a 2014 title, this combo sits comfortably in the upper-middle range of tested systems, with the measured FPS showing strong 1080p performance that exceeds many modern configurations’ capabilities at that resolution.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-12400F’s six cores and twelve threads, with a base clock of 2.50 GHz and boost clock of 4.40 GHz, provide more than enough processing power for Thief’s workload, as evidenced by the consistent FPS scaling across resolutions. The CPU’s 18 MB of shared L3 cache and Alder Lake architecture deliver strong single-threaded performance, with a 3DMark single-thread score of 909 and a PassMark single-thread score of 3481, which is crucial for a game that primarily relies on a few main threads. The benchmark data shows that the CPU is not the bottleneck in this system, as the FPS drops from 1080p to 4K are proportional to the pixel count increase, indicating the GPU is the limiting factor. At 1080p Low, the CPU manages to feed the GPU sufficiently to achieve 156.7 FPS, and the Cinebench R23 multicore score of 16518 suggests that the CPU can handle even higher frame rates if paired with a stronger GPU. The 3DMark 16-thread score of 5895 and 8-thread score of 4779 indicate that the CPU’s multi-threaded capabilities are well above the requirements for Thief, which was released in 2014 and does not scale significantly beyond a few cores.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the measured average FPS values show a clear hierarchy across settings: Low delivers 156.7 FPS, Medium achieves 117.3 FPS, High reaches 87.5 FPS, and Ultra hits 88.7 FPS. The anomaly where Ultra outperforms High by 1.2 FPS is within measurement variance, but it underscores that the Ultra preset does not impose a meaningful additional load over High at this resolution. Moving to 2560x1440, the averages are 109.2 FPS at Low, 80.7 FPS at Medium, 59.6 FPS at High, and 57 FPS at Ultra, showing a consistent ~30% reduction from 1080p at each corresponding setting. At 3840x2160, the performance drops significantly: Low averages 64.8 FPS, Medium 49.8 FPS, High 34.4 FPS, and Ultra 33.4 FPS. The data indicates that the RTX 2060 SUPER is fully utilized at 4K, with the gap between Low and Medium narrowing to 15 FPS, while the gap between Medium and High widens to 15.4 FPS, suggesting that texture quality and shader complexity have a disproportionate impact at higher resolutions. For 1080p gaming, the Medium preset at 117.3 FPS is the most practical choice, while at 1440p, Medium at 80.7 FPS is recommended, and at 4K, only Low at 64.8 FPS meets the 60 FPS target.