To The Core

The Intel Core i5-12400F paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 delivers exceptional frame rates in To The Core, an Idle title where the measured data shows the combo ranking in the 70th percentile of all tested configurations. The benchmark results indicate that this pairing is heavily GPU-bound at higher resolutions, while the CPU’s strong single-thread performance keeps 1080p frame rates remarkably high.

Settings Recommendations

For the best experience, the data suggests that the High preset offers the most balanced performance across all resolutions. At 3840x2160, the High setting yields an average of 115.4 FPS, which is smooth and only 20.8 FPS below the Medium preset’s 134.6 FPS. The jump from High to Ultra at 4K costs 19.6 FPS (from 115.4 to 95.8), a significant drop for marginal visual gains in an idle game. Similarly, at 2560x1440, High delivers 201.3 FPS, which is 36.9 FPS slower than Medium (238.2 FPS) but 34.2 FPS faster than Ultra (167.1 FPS). The High preset represents a sweet spot where the visual fidelity increase over Medium is justified by only a 36.9 FPS penalty at 1440p.

At 1920x1080, every preset exceeds 240 FPS, making the choice less critical. However, the High setting produces 301.8 FPS, which is 47.1 FPS below Medium (348.9 FPS) but provides better image quality than the Low preset’s 416 FPS. For players with high-refresh-rate monitors, the Medium preset at 1080p (348.9 FPS) offers the best combination of fluidity and visual quality, as the difference between Medium and High (47.1 FPS) is more noticeable than the difference between Medium and Low (67.1 FPS). The Ultra preset at 1080p still achieves 245.5 FPS, which is above the threshold for most 240Hz displays, but the 103.4 FPS gap between Ultra and Medium suggests diminishing returns.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo ranks 531st out of 1756 tested combinations in To The Core, placing it in the 69.8th percentile of all configurations. This is a strong showing, indicating that the i5-12400F and RTX 3080 combination outperforms roughly 70% of the tested hardware pairings in this title. The ranking is particularly impressive given that the CPU’s average benchmark score (19221) places it in the 77th percentile of all CPUs, and the GPU’s average score (35787) puts it in the 80th percentile of all GPUs. The combo’s rank is slightly lower than either component’s individual percentile, suggesting that the game’s performance is not perfectly scaling with raw hardware potential.

Comparing the CPU to its nearest rivals, the i5-12400F scores 0.1% higher than the Intel Core i7-8700K (19210), 0.3% higher than the Intel Core i5-1335U (19167), 0.7% lower than the AMD Ryzen 5 7533HS (19364), and 1.3% higher than the AMD EPYC 7773X (18979). These deltas are minimal, indicating that the CPU is well-matched against its peers in synthetic benchmarks. For the GPU, the RTX 3080 scores 0.2% lower than the AMD Radeon Pro Duo (35860), 0.4% higher than the AMD Radeon 880M (35646), 0.9% lower than the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE (36101), and 1% higher than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Mobile (35435). These narrow margins suggest that the RTX 3080 remains competitive with newer and specialized hardware.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 is built on the Ampere architecture with a GA102 chip, fabricated on Samsung’s 8 nm process. It features 8704 shading units, 272 texture mapping units, and 96 raster output units, along with 68 ray tracing cores and 272 tensor cores. The GPU operates at a base clock of 1440 MHz and boosts to 1710 MHz, with memory running at 1188 MHz (19 Gbps effective). The 10 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 320-bit bus provides a bandwidth of 760.3 GB/s, which is critical for feeding the high pixel rates required at 4K.

In To The Core, the GPU’s role becomes increasingly dominant as resolution increases. At 1080p, the frame rates are so high (245.5 to 416 FPS) that the CPU’s single-thread performance (3dmark_single_thread score of 909) is likely the limiting factor. However, at 1440p and 4K, the RTX 3080’s compute capabilities take over. The GPU’s FP32 performance of 29.77 TFLOPS and texture rate of 465.1 GTexel/s directly correlate with the measured FPS scaling. The transition from 1080p High (301.8 FPS) to 1440p High (201.3 FPS) represents a 33.3% drop, while the transition from 1440p High to 4K High (115.4 FPS) is a 42.7% drop. This non-linear scaling indicates that the GPU’s memory bandwidth (760.3 GB/s) and pixel rate (164.2 GPixel/s) are being increasingly taxed.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the data shows exceptional performance across all settings. The Low preset achieves 416 FPS, Medium reaches 348.9 FPS, High delivers 301.8 FPS, and Ultra maintains 245.5 FPS. The differences between presets are substantial: Low to Medium is a 67.1 FPS gap, Medium to High is 47.1 FPS, and High to Ultra is 56.3 FPS. These numbers suggest that the game is not heavily GPU-limited at this resolution, as even the most demanding Ultra preset stays above 240 FPS.

Moving to 2560x1440, the frame rates remain high but show more separation. Low produces 279.6 FPS, Medium drops to 238.2 FPS, High settles at 201.3 FPS, and Ultra falls to 167.1 FPS. The Low-to-Medium gap narrows to 41.4 FPS, while the Medium-to-High gap is 36.9 FPS, and the High-to-Ultra gap is 34.2 FPS. This pattern indicates that the GPU is starting to become a more significant factor, as the absolute FPS values decrease more uniformly across settings.

At 3840x2160, the performance is still playable but less extreme. Low yields 156.5 FPS, Medium produces 134.6 FPS, High achieves 115.4 FPS, and Ultra drops to 95.8 FPS. The Low-to-Medium difference is 21.9 FPS, Medium-to-High is 19.2 FPS, and High-to-Ultra is 19.6 FPS. The consistent ~20 FPS drops between settings at 4K suggest a more GPU-bound workload, where each preset tier imposes a similar computational cost.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K reveals critical information about the limiting component. At High settings, the performance scales from 301.8 FPS at 1080p to 201.3 FPS at 1440p (a 33.3% decrease) and then to 115.4 FPS at 4K (a 42.7% decrease from 1440p). This pattern is consistent with a GPU-limited scenario, where the RTX 3080’s raw compute power (29.77 TFLOPS) is being saturated by the increasing pixel count.

For the Low preset, the scaling is even more pronounced: 416 FPS at 1080p drops to 279.6 FPS at 1440p (32.8% decrease) and then to 156.5 FPS at 4K (44.0% decrease). The fact that Low settings still show a 156.5 FPS result at 4K indicates that the GPU has enough headroom to handle the geometry and texture loads, but the memory bandwidth (760.3 GB/s) becomes a bottleneck at higher resolutions.

The Ultra preset shows the most significant relative drop: 245.5 FPS at 1080p falls to 167.1 FPS at 1440p (31.9% decrease) and then to 95.8 FPS at 4K (42.7% decrease). The 4K Ultra result of 95.8 FPS is the only measured configuration below 100 FPS, suggesting that this is the most demanding scenario for the combo. The consistent ~30-44% drops across all presets between resolutions confirm that the RTX 3080 is the primary performance driver, while the i5-12400F’s 6 cores and 12 threads (with a boost clock of 4.40 GHz) provide sufficient single-thread performance to avoid becoming a bottleneck at any resolution. The CPU’s Cinebench R23 single-core score of 2332 and multi-core score of 16518 support this interpretation, as the game appears to scale primarily with GPU load rather than CPU thread utilization.