To The Core

To The Core is an idle-genre title released in early 2024, and pairing it with the Intel Core i5-13400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 produces one of the more lopsided benchmark profiles in the database. The measured data shows the game running at frame rates that dwarf what most hardware is ever asked to deliver in this genre — 432 FPS at 1080p Low, 98 FPS at 4K Ultra — and the interesting question becomes not whether this combo can run the game, but what the scaling pattern reveals about where the performance ceiling actually sits. The following analysis walks through the measured rows, the hardware context, and where this pairing ranks among the many combinations tested for this title.

Resolution Scaling

The resolution scaling data tells a clear story. At 1080p, averages run from 432 FPS on Low to 255 FPS on Ultra. Move to 1440p and the range becomes 290 to 171 FPS. At 4K, it compresses further to 166 down to 98 FPS. In every settings tier the frame rate drops sharply as pixel count rises, and the drops are far too large to be explained by a CPU bottleneck.

Consider the Low preset specifically: 432 FPS at 1080p becomes 166 FPS at 4K, a reduction of well over half the original frame rate. If the Core i5-13400F were the limiting component, raising the resolution would primarily shift work onto the GPU while frame times stayed pinned near the CPU's ceiling — the signature of a processor-limited scenario is flat, barely-declining FPS across resolutions. That is not what the data shows. Instead, each step up in resolution costs a large chunk of throughput, which points squarely at the RTX 4070 as the component setting the pace.

The Medium preset rows reinforce this and add a rare detail: they are the only measurements with minimum and maximum frame rates attached. At 4K Medium the range is 119 to 161 FPS around a 140 FPS average; at 1440p Medium it is 209 to 282 around 245; at 1080p Medium it is 310 to 420 around 365. The gap between minimum and average stays roughly proportional at each resolution, suggesting the variance scales with the workload rather than appearing sporadically — consistent with steady GPU-side rendering load rather than stuttery engine hitches.

One curiosity worth flagging: even at 4K Ultra the average sits at 98 FPS, just under the triple-digit line. For an idle-genre game, that is a remarkably heavy load, and it implies To The Core's renderer (or its effects at Ultra) is doing genuine pixel work that a 12 GB GDDR6X card with 504.2 GB/s of memory bandwidth still has to respect.

How This Combo Ranks

Against the full field of tested hardware pairings for To The Core, this combination ranks 860th out of 3725 — comfortably inside the top quarter of results. That placement is worth interrogating. The RTX 4070 sits at the 81st percentile versus all GPUs in the database, and the i5-13400F sits at the 77th percentile versus all CPUs, so a combined rank in the low-to-mid twenties percentile-wise is roughly what stacking those two positions would predict. The combo is not over- or under-performing its parts; it is delivering in line with them.

The picture sharpens when looking at each component's nearest rivals. The i5-13400F's average benchmark score of 25292 is statistically indistinguishable from the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS (deltaPct 0), essentially tied with the Intel Core 5 120 and AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D (both deltaPct -0.3), and marginally ahead of the AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (deltaPct 0.4). On the GPU side, the RTX 4070's average score of 37648 puts it a hair ahead of the NVIDIA Tesla P4 (deltaPct 0.1) and AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 (deltaPct 0.4), slightly behind the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Mobile (deltaPct -1.3), and ahead of the AMD Radeon PRO W6400 (deltaPct 1.3). In short: a mid-field-plus pairing producing a mid-field-plus result, with enough headroom that rank 860 of 3725 reflects real capability rather than genre-specific favoritism.

GPU Role

The RTX 4070 is built on TSMC's 5 nm process with the AD104 chip, packing 35,800 million transistors on a 294 mm² die — a density of 121.8M transistors per square millimetre. It carries 5888 shading units, 184 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 46 RT cores, and 184 tensor cores, with a base clock of 1920 MHz and a boost clock of 2475 MHz. The 12 GB of GDDR6X rides a 192-bit bus at 21 Gbps effective, yielding 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth, and the card's raw output figures — 158.4 GPixel/s pixel rate, 455.4 GTexel/s texture rate, and 29.15 TFLOPS of FP32 — frame it as a capable mainstream-high rendering part.

How does that relate to To The Core? The measured scaling says the game genuinely uses these resources. The pixel rate is a useful anchor: at 4K the display demands roughly 8.3 million pixels per frame, and the card's 158.4 GPixel/s ceiling is the boundary the 98–166 FPS range at 4K sits well below but is shaped by. The Ultra-to-Low spread at 4K — 98 to 166 FPS — indicates that To The Core's highest preset adds substantial per-pixel cost, likely shading and effects work that leans on those 5888 shading units rather than on fill rate alone.

The GPU's benchmark pedigree supports the interpretation. A PassMark G3D score of 26927, a Geekbench Vulkan score of 174152, and a Geekbench OpenCL score of 154858 place it in the 81st percentile of all GPUs. The 12 GB VRAM buffer is never going to be stressed at any resolution in this title given the frame rates measured — a game that runs at 166 FPS on Low at 4K is not texture-bound — but the bandwidth and throughput clearly set how fast those frames arrive at Ultra, where the 192-bit bus and 504.2 GB/s figure become the ceiling the game pushes against. The card is marked End-of-life in production terms, sitting between the GeForce 30 generation it succeeded and the GeForce 50 generation that followed it, yet its measured output here remains strong.

FAQ

Q: Can this combo run To The Core at 4K with high frame rates?

A: Yes. The measured 4K averages are 122 FPS on High, 140 FPS on Medium, 166 FPS on Low, and 98 FPS on Ultra. Even the most demanding preset stays close to the triple-digit line.

Q: Which component limits performance in this game?

A: The data points to the GPU. Frame rates drop steeply as resolution rises — from 432 to 290 to 166 FPS on Low across the three resolutions — which is the signature of GPU-bound scaling rather than a CPU ceiling.

Q: How does this pairing rank among tested combinations for To The Core?

A: It ranks 860th out of 3725 tested combos, placing it inside the top quarter of results and roughly in line with its components' individual percentiles (77th for the CPU, 81st for the GPU).

Q: What is the frame rate range at 1080p Medium?

A: The measured range is 310 to 420 FPS, around an average of 365 FPS. Medium is the only preset tier with minimum and maximum values recorded.

Q: Does the CPU benchmark data suggest it could handle even higher frame rates?

A: Plausibly. The i5-13400F posts a single-thread PassMark score of 3634, a Geekbench single-core score of 1996, and a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 3191 — figures that sit at the 77th percentile of all CPUs and leave the measured frame-rate ceilings looking GPU-determined.

Q: Does turning settings down from Ultra to High help meaningfully at 4K?

A: Yes. The 4K average climbs from 98 FPS on Ultra to 122 FPS on High and to 140 FPS on Medium, so each step down buys a substantial frame-rate gain.

CPU Role

The Core i5-13400F is a Raptor Lake-S desktop part on Intel's 10 nm process, with 10 cores and 16 threads, a 2.50 GHz base clock and a 4.60 GHz boost clock, and a 65 W TDP. Its cache hierarchy comprises 80 KB of L1 per core, 1.25 MB of L2 per core, and 20 MB of shared L3, on a 215 mm² die. It supports both DDR4 and DDR5 over a dual-channel bus, offers PCIe Gen 5 with 16 CPU lanes, and launched at an MSRP of $196. Its multiplier is locked.

In an idle-genre game, the CPU's role is usually light, and the scaling data here suggests that holds for To The Core — the steep resolution-driven frame-rate declines indicate the i5-13400F is not the component being waited upon. That said, the chip's own benchmark sheet shows a balanced performer: a 3DMark single-thread score of 960 rising to 7314 at 16 threads, a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 22604 against a single-core 3191, a Geekbench multi-core score of 11068, and a PassMark multithread score of 25032. The max-threads 3DMark score of 7307 sits essentially level with the 16-thread score of 7314, which is a tidy illustration of the hybrid core arrangement fully saturating at sixteen concurrent threads.

The 77th percentile placement and the nearest-rival cluster — the Ryzen 9 6900HS at deltaPct 0, the Core 5 120 and Ryzen 5 5600X3D at -0.3, the Ryzen 7 6800H at 0.4 — confirm this is a mid-tier processor in aggregate terms, and its single-thread figures are strong enough that the 432 FPS ceiling at 1080p Low is very likely a rendering limit rather than a logic limit. A curious analyst might still wonder about the tail: at such extreme frame rates, per-frame engine overhead grows, and only the Medium rows carry min/max data, so the 310 FPS minimum at 1080p Medium is the one measured hint of where the floor sits under sustained load.

Settings Recommendations

The measured rows make the recommendation straightforward. At 1080p, every preset clears 255 FPS average, with Medium running at 365 FPS inside a 310–420 range — there is no reason to drop below High at this resolution, and Ultra's 255 FPS is still far beyond any practical need. At 1440p, Ultra averages 171 FPS with Medium at 245 inside a 209–282 range; Ultra remains entirely playable, but High at 213 FPS is the sweet spot if consistency matters, since it clears the 200 FPS line that Medium's minimum (209 FPS) barely touches.

At 4K the calculus tightens. Ultra averages 98 FPS — just under the 100 FPS mark — while High jumps to 122 FPS and Medium to 140 FPS within a 119–161 measured range. The 4K Medium minimum of 119 FPS is notable: it stays above the Ultra average. That makes Medium the measured-consistency pick at 4K, and High the quality-conscious pick for anyone who wants the higher preset while still clearing 120 FPS on average. Low is never necessary at any resolution in this title with this pairing; the RTX 4070's 81st-percentile rendering throughput makes the bottom preset redundant.

Measured FPS Breakdown

All figures below are measured average frame rates; the Medium rows additionally include the recorded minimum and maximum.

1920x1080:

• Low: 432 FPS
• Medium: 365 FPS (min 310, max 420)
• High: 316 FPS
• Ultra: 255 FPS

2560x1440:

• Low: 290 FPS
• Medium: 245 FPS (min 209, max 282)
• High: 213 FPS
• Ultra: 171 FPS

3840x2160:

• Low: 166 FPS
• Medium: 140 FPS (min 119, max 161)
• High: 122 FPS
• Ultra: 98 FPS

Read as a grid, the data shows a remarkably orderly progression: each preset tier and each resolution step produces a predictable, proportional frame-rate change, with no anomalous inversions or cliffs. The Ultra-to-Low spread is roughly consistent at every resolution — a touch over 40 percent of the Low figure retained at Ultra in each case — which again points to uniform GPU-side scaling rather than any setting tripping a hardware-specific bottleneck. For a rank-860-of-3725 pairing running a 2024 idle title, ultimately unambiguous: playable at every tested configuration, GPU-limited throughout, and with 4K Ultra the only row that dips below the 100 FPS line.