Thief

The Intel Core i7-12700KF and AMD Radeon RX 9060 pairing produces solid result for Thief, ranking 2113 out of 3720 tested combinations. At 1080p, Medium settings hold an average of 130 FPS with a recorded minimum of 110, which is smooth enough for any display. However, performance falls off sharply at higher resolutions: 4K Medium drops to 52 FPS, and the Ultra preset never reaches playable levels beyond 60 FPS in any resolution. This data indicates a GPU-dominated workload, with the CPU offering ample headroom to push higher frames when visual load is light. The following sections dissect the measured numbers and what they mean for practical gameplay.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS reveals a clear hierarchy: Medium stands out as the best preset across all resolutions. At 1920×1080, Medium yields 130 FPS average with a minimum of 110 and maximum 149. High preset captures 99 average, while Ultra manages only 94. The gap between Low and Medium is also informative: Low hits 171 FPS, a 31% jump over Medium, but that extra speed comes with a quality loss to textures and shadows that most players will notice in a stealth title like Thief. At 2560×1440, Medium shows 89 FPS (min 76, max 102) versus High’s 68 and Ultra’s 65. The extra headroom of Medium remains evident: the minimum is still above 70 FPS. At 3840×2160, Medium is 52 FPS (45–60), while High and Ultra sink to 40 and 38 respectively. Medium provides a playable experience at 4K, whereas High and Ultra are borderline unplayable. Because the only settings with both a sustained average and a clear minimum are Medium and Low, choosing Medium is the most reliable option—it yields a high average without the visual sacrifice of Low.

The Ultra preset is never more than a few FPS ahead of High, yet it consistently consumes around 30–40% of the frame budget. In contrast, Medium is a clear "sweet spot": it offers roughly 30% more speed than High while only stepping down one level of visual intensity. For players aiming for 60 FPS or above on a 1440p monitor, this means Medium is the only viable preset. The below-mentioned figures show the gap: 130/99/94 at 1080p, 89/68/65 at 1440p, and 52/40/38 at 4K. So the setting rank order is consistent, but the magnitude of loss from Medium to Ultra is huge. The game is responsive on Medium, with the minimums staying within a controllable range.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 9060 is a mid-range graphics card built on RDNA 4.0, featuring a Navi 44 silicon. Its memory subsystem includes 8 GB of GDDR6, a 128-bit mechanism, and 286 GB/s bandwidth. The GPU clock steps run 1700 MHz base, 2400 MHz game, and 2990 MHz boost, while the memory spins at 2250 MHz (18 Gbps effective). Compute is rated at 21.43 TFLOPS FP32 and 21.43 TFLOPS FP16, with a pixel Rate of 191.4 GPixel/s and texture rate 334.9 GTexel/s. These specs feed into a Passmark G3D score of 17631 and a percentile of 59, placing it above 59% of tested GPUs. Its nearest rival is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which trails by -0.7% in average benchmark score—a nearly identical performance.

In Thief, the GPU is the dominant factor, as the measured FPS responds sharply to settings and resolution changes. The 4K Ultra result of 38 FPS uses 11% of the 1080p Ultra average (94 FPS), corresponding to the 4x pixel count of 4K compared to 1080p. Similar scaling holds for all presets: at 3840×2160 the Low preset produces 69 FPS, Medium 52, High 40, Ultra 38—all well under the 1080p values. This indicates that the GPU’s fill-rate and compute capacity are saturated once pixel volume rises. The 288.0 GB/s bandwidth and 128-bit bus do not appear to be a limiting combat, as the frame-rate percentages scale proportionally with resolution, not data transport. The VRAM capacity of 8 GB is ample for this 2014 title at any of the tested settings, as the measured frame orient does not corrupt due to memory swapping.

Resolution Scaling

Reducing resolution has a direct and systematic effect on FPS. From the measured streams: at High settings, 1080p produces 99 FPS, 1440p yields 68 FPS, and 4K outputs to 40 FPS—a 48% drop from 1080p to 4K. For Medium, the sequence is 1080p 230, 1440 89, 2160 52, a 60% overall drop. Low settings show 171/117/69 for an 60% drop. This pattern of roughly 60% loss from 1080p to 4K across all settings implies that the bottleneck is the GPU's stable pixel pipeline, not its memory interface or CPU. Since the frame times are inversely proportional to pixel count, we can interpret that single-thread CPU power is not withstanding the render resolution.

The uniformity of the scaling factor (~0.48 per 4K step for most settings) suggests that the RX 9060’s shading units are the active. At 1440p, the average is about 68% of 1080p on every preset, and 4K is down to 27–40% of 1080p. This indicates that resolution is the most sensitive performance tweak; a player dropping from 4K to 1440p would see roughly 50% more FPS, depending on settings. Similarly, turning down settings from Ultra to Medium increases frame rate by ~30% at the same resolution.

Insert a proportional reasoning: The exact ratio of:

• 1080p Low 171 vs 1440p Low 117: 117/171 = 0.684
• 1440p Low 117 vs 4K Low 69: 68/117 = 0.582

• 1080p Medium 130 vs 1440p Medium 89: 89/130 = 0.684
• 1440p Medium 89 vs 4K Medium 52: 52/89 = 0.584

• 1080p High 99 vs 1440p 68: 68/99 = 0.687
• 1440p 68 vs 4K 40: 40/68 = 0.588

• 1080p Ultra 94 vs 1440p 63: 65/94 = 0.691
• 1440p 65 vs 4Kp 38: 38/65 = 0.585

The consistency of these ratios (0.68 and 0.58) strongly argues that the GPU is the bottleneck; otherwise the ratios would vary with settings if the CPU were involved.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The following table lists all recorded frames. Where a minimum or maximum was recorded, it is shown; missing values indicate the data does not include them.

| Resolution | Settings | Avg FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS |

|------------|-----------|---------|--------|--------|

| 3840x2160 | Low | 69 | - | - |

| 3840x2160 | Medium | 52 | 45 | 60 |

| 3840x2160 | High | 40 | - | - |

| 3840x2160 | Ultra | 38 | - | - |

| 2560x1440 | Low | 117 | - | - |

| 2560x1440 | Medium | 89 | 76 | 102|

| 2560x1440 | High | 68 | - | - |

| 2560x1440 | Ultra | 65 | - | - |

| 1920x1080 | Low | 171 | - | - |

| 1920x1080 | Medium | 130 | 110 | 149|

| 1920x1080 | High | 99 | - | - |

| 1920x1080 | Ultra | 94 | - | - |

From this data, the highest FPS ever recorded is 171 at 1920×1080 Low, while the lowest is 38 at 4K Ultra. At each resolution, Medium has a clear performance advantage over High and Ultra, reducing the difference by about 30–40 frames at 1080p. The Medium settings also produce the only measured minima: 110 (1080), 76 (1440), 45 (4K), which is a sign of a stable frame pacing to players.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo as a whole ranks 2113rd out of 3720 tested configurations in Thief. That places it at the 56.7th percentile of all combinations (2113/3720), i.e., it outperforms about 43% (1607) of tested combos. While not among the top 5, it is a decent position for a mid-tier pairing. The CPU (i7-12700KF) alone has a benchmark average score of 35365 and ranks above 85% of all CPUs, while the GPU (RX 9060) has a score of 16014 and ranks above 59% of GPUs. The lower combined rank relative to the CPU rank indicates that in Thief the GPU is the limiting performance attribute that drags the global score down. By contrast, the CPU's roomy headroom could be expected to deliver a higher rank if the GPU were stronger. Looking at the benchmark deltas: the i7-12700KF is just 0.2% off the i7-12700K, and the RX 9060 is on par with RTX 3060 Ti (-0.7%), so this rank reflects the SIM product pair relatively.

Based on the data, a user seeking better standing would need a higher tier GPU, as the CPU it's near the top percentile.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i7-12700KF has 12 cores with Hyper-Threading (20 threads base) and a base clock of 3.60GHz that can boost to 5.00GHz. It is built on Alder Lake-S, with a 25 MB L3 cache and supports a dual-channel memory bus. Its benchmark list includes a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 12,111 for single 4,071, and Geekbench multicore 44,367. The Passmark single-thread score is 3984 and multithread 34092; it ranks above 85% of CPUs. This chip is clearly a capable multi-core performer.

In Thief, the CPU’s effect is best observed by comparing the 1080p Low FPS with the High/Ultra results. At 1080p Low, the 171 FPS average is enough to max out a 144Hz monitor, while the same resolution at Ultra only achieves 94 FPS. The gap of 77 FPS cannot be attributed to the CPU, as the same processor is used in both cases; it must be the GPU workload. This indicates the CPU has enough single-thread strength to push frame rates well above modern 60 Hz. The cpu boost of 5.00GHz is certainly a factor, as is its bread-and-butter 4K connection. However, the measured FPS at 4K is 38–