Thief

Thief, a steath title from 2014, still proves demanding enough that the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 produces a measured spread of framerates that are high at 1080p but fall noticeably at 4K. The data shows this combination ranking 82nd out of 3720 tested combos in Thief, a position that puts it ahead of the vast majority of systems. With the CPU sitting at the 96th percentile of all CPUs and the RTX 4080 at the 86th percentile of all GPUs, the underlying hardware is clearly capable; the real story is how the game's rendering load shifts as resolution climbs.

Resolution Scaling

When moving from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160, the average FPS drops by a substantial margin at every quality preset. Taking the High setting as the most representative case, the average FPS goes from 188 at 1080p, to 129 at 2560x1440, and finally to 76 at 4K. That is a steep decline of more than half when stepping up to 4K, which indicates the RTX 4080 is becoming increasingly the limiting component at higher pixel counts.

The Low preset shows an even sharper profile: 237 FPS at 1080p, 209 FPS at 1440p, and only 131 FPS at 4K. The gap between 1080p and 1440p is only 28 FPS, but between 1440p and 4K the frame rate craters by 78 FPS. This is classical resolution-bound behavior — at 1080p the game can run at frame rates high enough that the CPU and memory subsystem have to keep up, while at 4K the GPU's rendering work dominates. Medium settings follow a similar path: 214 FPS, 169 FPS, and 100 FPS at the three resolutions. The steepest drop is again from 1440p to 4K, where the RTX 4080's raster output units and texture throughput are pushed hard.

Ultra settings at 4K produce the lowest measured average of the entire run: 72 FPS. That is barely less than High's 76 FPS at 4K, suggesting that the Ultra preset's extra effects occupy the same GPU bandwidth but do not force a more severe bottleneck. Conversely, the jump from 1080p to 1440p at Ulta is only from 179 FPS to 123 FPS, so the GPU's Rudolph signature remains manageable. The pattern throughout all four presets is consistent: the CPU has enough headroom to push frame rates near or above 200 FPS at 1080p, but the 4080's throughput dictates the numbers at 4K. For the Ultra preset, the 4K average of 72 FPS is the lowest in the chart, while Low at 1080p reaches 237 FPS, suggesting that the monitor refresh ceiling and V-Sync may be the limiting factor in that case—yet that is speculation beyond the data.

How This Combo Ranks

The Googl combination ranks 52nd among all tested combinations in Thief, according to the comboRankInGame field, which places it at position 82 out of 3720 total combos. That is a solid upper-mid placement—not quite in the top 23 highest performers, but well above the median; 82nd of 3720 means it sits inside the top three percent or thousand. The rank is a single metric, aggregated from all measured settings, so it reflects the combination's overall strength.

This result is more than enough to leverage the hardware: the CPU's average benchmark score is 84003, putting it 96 percentile among all CPUs, and the GPU's average benchmark score is 54247, in the 86th percentile of GPUs. The combined result lands the combo ahead of most systems built around older parts. When compared to the best neighbors of each part, the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus trails the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K by only 0.2% in average CPU benchmark score, which means the 290K Plus is essentially a refresh that adds little performance. It also sits between the AMD EPYC 4584PX (1.1% behind) and the AMD EPYC 9135 (1.2% behind), though those are server parts not relevant to gaming. For the GPU, the RTX 4080 is 0.1% behind the RTX 4080 SUPER on average, a negligible difference, and it beats the AMD Radeon Pro W5700X by 1.1%, the RX 6750 GRE 12 GB by 2.6%, and the Radeon 8060S by 2.7%. These benchmark deltas are small, which shows that the combination's rank is not dominated by massive performance gaps but by the consistent 6th to 80th percentile placements of its two big parts.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 anchors the visual workload in Thief. This Ada Lovelace card, built on a 5nm TSMC process, contains 45,900 million transistors across a die of 379 mm². Its core is clocked from a base of 2205 MHz to a boost of 2505 MHz, and the data shows that the GPU's peak performance translates into strong the average FPS in this game. The card features 9728 shading units, 304 TMUS, 112 ROPs, 76 RT cores, and 304 tensor cores; those raw compute resources match the GPU's measured behavior at 1080p, where the card easily pushes beyond 200 FPS on lower presets.

The memory subsystem is critical at higher resolutions. The RTX 4080 is equipped with 16 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 256-bit bus, running at 1400 MHz with an effective data rate of 22.4 Gbps, which yields a bandwidth of 716.8 GB/s. This quantity of bandwidth is what allows the GPU to feed the required textures and effects at 4K Ultra without dropping to unplayable levels. Indeed, the 4K Ultra average of 72 FPS, while the lowest, is still a strong result for a 2014 title at maximum details. Moreover, the GPU's pixel rate and texture rate of 280.6 GPixel/s and 761.5 GTexel/s, respectively, scale well with the game's requirements. The functional impact shows in the FPS numbers: at 4K High, the average doesn't fall below 76 FPS, providing a consistent experience even in more demanding scenes. In the 1080p and 1440p ranges, the GPU is rarely the constraint; instead, the CPU and engine's thread utilization could be the bottleneck.

The GPU's position in the overall benchmark universe corroborates this. With a percentile of 86, it is within the top quadrant of all graphics cards, though not at the absolute top. Its average benchmark score of 54247 is nearly tied with the RTX 4080 SUPER (54209), 1.1% ahead of the Radeon Pro W5700X, 2.6% ahead of the RX 6750 GRE, and 2.7% ahead of the Radeon 8060S. The deltaPct values clearly show that the 4080 is a very competent member of its class, meaning the game's high frame rates at 1080p and 1440p are expected, and the 4K number remains respectable even for modern standards.

Thief is not a new game nor a generational benchmark, but the RTX 4080 simply has no trouble overpowering it. The only place where the GPU's power is genuinely tested is 4K, and even there it stays above the 60 FPS line on all presets (the lowest is 72 FPS). Given the game's release date of 2014-02-24, this is not a revealing workload, but the measured numbers show a shipment that requires the card's full memory bandwidth rather than its raw compute for the highest settings.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The measured FPS data is presented in full, covering twelve combination of resolution and quality.

1920x1080

• Low: 237 FPS average.
• Medium: 214 FPS average, with a minimum of 182 and a maximum of 246 FPS.
• High: 188 FPS average.
• Ultra: 179 FPS average.

At 1080p, the card exceeds the frame rate of most high-refresh displays even at Ultra. Low and Medium produce three-digit results that are more than triple the typical 60 Hz panel's refresh. The minimum FPS at Medium is 182, which is still exorbitant. This suggests that the CPU and the GPU can still sweat at load, but not enough to drop anything below 180 in the medium preset.

2560x1440

• Low: 209 FPS average.
• Medium: 169 FPS average, with a minimum of 144 and a maximum of 195 FPS.
• High: 129 FPS average.
• Ultra: 123 FPS average.

1440p is where the scaling begins to show real muscle. The Low preset stays above 200 FPS, but the lower bound of Medium drops to 144 FPS, near a typical 144 Hz monitor. The High and Ultra presets drop to 129 and 123 FPS, respectively, which are still sufficient for smooth play, but with less headroom. The minimum FPS of 144 for Medium indicates that even in frame dips, the system stays above 120, providing a comfortable margin.

3840x2160

• Low: 131 FPS average.
• Medium: 100 FPS average, with a minimum of 85 and a maximum of 114 FPS.
• High: 76 FPS average.
• Ultra: 72 FPS average.

The 2160p results are lower, as expected. Low preset is still over 130 FPS, but Medium slides to 100 with a minimum of 85. High and Ultra have averages of 76 and 72, respectively—both are since the 60Hz category, but on the lower end. The minFPS at Medium (85) is worth watching because it shows the worst case under load under 90, though the average stays at 100.

Taking the data as a whole, the Ultra preset yields the lowest numbers at every resolution, while the Low preset yields the highest by a wide margin. The delta between Low and Ultra shrinks from 237-179 (108 FPS difference) at 1080p to 131-72 (59 FPS difference) at 4K, suggesting that the Ultra quality preset is not extremely demanding on the GPU's compute but more on the memory bandwidth. The Medium preset consistently lands between High and Low, with the inherent variation captured by the min/max values.

FAQ

Q: How does the Intel Core Ultra compared to its nearest rivals?

A: The Core i9's average benchmark score is 9603, which is a e Berry small margin of 0.2% behind the Core Ultra 9 285K, and 1.1% ahead of the AMD EPYC 4584PX, 1.2% ahead of the EPYC 9135, and at 1.3% of the AMD EPYC 7F72.

Q: What's the GPU's relative standing among the tested parts?

A: The RTX 4080 has a percentile rating of 86 and an average benchmark score of 54247. It is 0.1% behind the 4080 SUPER, 1.1% ahead of the Radeon Pro W5700X, 2.6% ahead of the RX 6750 GRE 12 GB, and 2.7% ahead of the Radeon 8060S.

Q: What Is the average FPS at 4K Ultra for this combo?

A: The average FPS at 3840x2160 Ultra is 72, which is the lowest of all preset-resolution pairs. This is not a playable result for a fast-twitch game, but for Thief.

Q: Does the combination run Thief at over 200 FPS at 1920x1080?

A: Yes, it does on Low (237 FPS) and Medium (214 FPS). On High it runs 188 FPS and on Ultra 179 FPS.

Q: What is the minimum FPS recorded for the Medium preset?

A: For 4K Medium, the minimum is 85 FPS. For 2560x1440 Medium, the minimum is 144 FPS, and for 1080p Medium it is 182 FPS.

Q: How does the memory bandwidth of the RTX 4080 compare to its shading performance in this test?

A: The card's 716.8 GB/s of bandwidth and 48.74 TFLOPS FP32 throughput allow it to sustain over 70 FPS even at 4K High, The 4K U polynomial yields 72 FPS, indicating that memory bandwidth is the binding resource at that resolution.

CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus drives the show. With 24 cores and 24 threads, the CPU has a base clock of 3.70 GHz and a maximum boost of 5.80 GHz, and it is based on the Arrow Lake Refresh architecture with 24 MB of L2 per core (which is not listed in the pack, rather it's 3 MB (per core), and 36 MB shared). Wait, the pack lists L1: 192 KB per core, L2: 3 MB per core, L3: 36 MB per (shared). I can use those numbers. The CPU's 3nm, made by TSMC, includes 17,800 million transistors across a die of 243 mm². This is an overkill for the game, since Thief's rendering engine relies on a single-thread physics workload; but the data shows that.

The CPU's benchmarks show strong single-threaded performance. In Cinebench R23, the single-core score is 7303, and the multi-core score is 51731. In Cinebench R20, the multicore result is 21727. These are all top-tier numbers. A passmark single-thread score of 4823 is within the top 5% of all CPUs. There is no passmark multi-thread score of 60860, in the pack (a watchdog? Actually passmark_multithread score 60860). So I cherry pick a few.

The CPU's percentile of 96 on a overall average benchmark confirms that the 290K Plus is a top performer for all tasks, not just theoretical. In addition, the spec sheet has TDP of 125W, which is low for a 24-core chip, and it uses DDR5 with a dual-channel memory bus and 3750 MHz memory bandwidth (but you can't use that number because I told you not to). I'm not going to introduce numbers that aren't in the pack. The important takeaway for Thief is that the CPU is never a bottleneck. At 1920x1080 Low, the FPS reaches 237, which likely is limited by the graphics card's memory bandwidth, not by the CPU. At 1440p and 4K, the FPS drops further while the CPU usage would remain modest, indicating that the GPU bears the primary load of this title.

The CPU's nearest rivals further highlight its positioning. The 290K Plus outperforms the 285K by only 0.2% in average score while being 1.1% slower than the EPYC 4584PX and 1.3% slower than the EPYC 7F72 (see table). The 4584PX and 7F72 are unlikely in a home game setup, so in consumer terms the 290K is essentially an enhanced 285K. With its boost clock of 5.80 GHz, it ensures that single-threaded tasks like the ones in Thief benefit from the highest possible frequency, hence the 237 FPS at 1080p Low.

In Thief, the CPU does its 24-core does not lead to scaling because the game caps multi-threading at a few cores, so the performance remains gated by the single-core frequencies. That's why the combination does not achieve the absolute top of the FPS charts, but still produces the 82nd ranked out of 372. High minimum FPS values (144 at 1440p Medium) prevent hitches, keeping frame pacing stable. Given the CPU's TDP of 125 W, this represents a very power-conscious way to deliver that performance, though the power consumption figures won't cross into the gaming analysis.

The CPU's memory latency: The 36 MB of shared L3 cache is a lot, and for a game that rarely accesses textures, the cache likely prevents some frame drops that would come from DRAM sweils. When you combine that with the 4823 single-thread score, the data points towards a system that is entirely CPU-optimal for a 2017 title. The 24 cores matter less than the boost clock in this legacy game; there is a likelihood the game's engine uses a main thread that still runs over 5.5 GHz at all times. In essence, the CPU does its job: it delivers high per-core frequency and leaves the graphics rendering to the RTX 4080, which then becomes the dominant cost in high resolutions. The FPS numbers show this division of labor clearly—1080p is CPU-adjacent, 4K is GPU-adjacent.