To The Core

To The Core is the game that makes our benchmark database look broken, right up until you remember what it is. SomethingExtra's incremental drilling game, released on Steam in 2023 and still pulling in positive reviews by the thousand, asks exactly one thing of you: dig through planets, sell what you extract, and buy upgrades that let you dig faster. Across 3,725 measured CPU and GPU combinations in our testing, the average system records 201 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 136 FPS at 1440p Ultra, and 78 FPS at 4K Ultra. The fastest combinations reach 667 FPS at 1080p Low, while the slowest combo in the entire grid still manages 52 FPS at 1080p Ultra. Those numbers look like a game with nothing to say about hardware. They are not. A 52 FPS floor and a 667 FPS ceiling inside a 2D pixel-art idler tells a useful story about where lightweight games actually spend their budget, and about which upgrades matter once you stop assuming every title wants a bigger graphics card.

A 2D engine with a late-game appetite

To The Core is a 2D incremental game, and its load profile follows the genre's usual arc: trivial at the start, surprisingly busy at the end. Early on you are cracking a few blocks per second and the frame counter barely notices. Several hours into a run you have automated drills, chained explosions, hundreds of destructible blocks spawning debris and particle effects, and resource counters ticking in the background. That is when the engine starts earning its keep, and it is also why a single average FPS figure undersells what this game does to a machine.

The work splits in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has profiled sprite-based games. The CPU handles the simulation: block destruction, physics debris, particle spawning, automation logic, and the incremental math the genre runs on. It does this on a small number of threads, so per-core speed matters more than core count, but the total load is modest by modern standards and any recent six-core processor shrugs it off. The GPU's job is mostly fill rate, drawing sprites and, critically, overdrawing particles when several effects stack on the same pixels. That fill-rate behavior explains the resolution scaling in our data: 201 FPS at 1080p falling to 136 at 1440p and 78 at 4K is a steeper drop than you would expect from a game that looks like a shareware title from 1995.

Memory is a footnote for systems with a discrete card. The game's footprint is small, 8 GB of RAM is plenty, and RAM speed barely registers. The exception is integrated graphics, where the GPU shares system memory and lives or dies on bandwidth. On those machines, dual-channel DDR5 or DDR4 is not a nicety, it is the difference between smooth and stuttery when the particle count spikes late in a run. Storage barely matters once the game is loaded, though at this install size an NVMe SSD gets you from desktop to digging in a couple of seconds.

1080p: everything plays, almost everything flies

At 1920x1080 the 201 FPS Ultra average means exactly what it says. Pick a discrete graphics card from the last several generations, pair it with any modern CPU, and you are comfortably past what a 144Hz monitor can display. This is one of the rare games where a 240Hz monitor is a sensible purchase rather than an aspiration, because a mid-range gaming PC build genuinely feeds it here. If you have wanted something to justify high refresh rates without a flagship budget, the incremental genre is quietly it.

The more interesting number at this resolution is the floor. The weakest combination in our data still holds 52 FPS at 1080p Ultra, and that is the honest answer to the question most visitors to this page actually have: yes, it will run on your old machine. The caveat is that the very weakest hardware, think ancient dual-cores and first-generation integrated graphics, can dip below 60 exactly when the game gets busy late in a run, which is the worst possible time in a genre about watching numbers go up. The fix costs nothing. Particle and effects density are the first settings to cut, and trimming them recovers most of the gap, because that floor is a simulation and overdraw problem rather than a raw GPU power problem.

1440p and 4K: fill rate sends the bill

At 2560x1440 the average falls to 136 FPS at Ultra, which keeps the game comfortably in high-refresh territory for most systems. Mid-range cards paired with any modern CPU stay well past 100 FPS here, and even entry-level discrete GPUs from a few years back hold up. The 32 percent drop from 1080p is the first clear evidence that this 2D game scales with pixel count the way a 3D game does, because the renderer's cost is dominated by how many pixels the sprites and particle overdraw cover, not by geometry or shader complexity.

At 4K Ultra the average lands at 78 FPS, and the picture splits by hardware class. Strong cards still post triple digits and the game remains trivial. But that average is pulled down by entry-level cards and integrated GPUs that slide under 60 when particle effects stack up, which means 4K on modest hardware stops being free, a sentence you do not expect to write about an idle game. There is no DLSS or FSR upscaling to rescue you here, and honestly none is needed: the correct move on weak 4K hardware is to drop the preset one notch or run at 1440p, because the visual difference in a pixel-art game is minimal. What the 78 FPS average really demonstrates is that resolution is the one hardware demand this game genuinely makes, and it makes it to your graphics card.

Recommended settings: our tested configuration

The settings menu is small, which makes the order of operations simple. Particle and effects density come first: they drive both the CPU-side simulation load and the GPU-side overdraw, so reducing them attacks the game's only two real costs at once. Screen shake and flash effects are personal preference and cost little. Keep resolution native; pixel art rendered below native resolution and stretched looks immediately wrong, so if you must scale, use integer scaling and keep the pixels crisp.

The most valuable setting for this particular game is a frame limiter, and the reason is the genre. To The Core is designed to run unattended for hours, and an uncapped idler on strong hardware will happily render at several hundred FPS all night, converting electricity into heat for zero benefit. Cap it at your monitor's refresh rate while you are actively playing, and at 60 or even 30 when the game is idling on a second screen or overnight. Your power bill and your room temperature will both notice, and the game will not.

What hardware do you need?

Entry level (integrated graphics, older dual or quad-core, 8 GB RAM): playable, with one adjustment. Expect to sit near the bottom of our measured range at Ultra, around that 52 FPS floor in the worst late-game moments, so run Low or trim particle density and the experience stays smooth. The single best hardware fix at this tier is a second memory stick for dual-channel operation, because integrated GPUs are bandwidth-starved by design.

Mid-range (modern six-core CPU, 16 GB RAM, mainstream discrete GPU): the sweet spot. You land at or above the 201 FPS average at 1080p Ultra and around the 136 FPS average at 1440p, which puts high-refresh monitors fully on the table. The best graphics card for To The Core, realistically, is whatever mid-range card you already own.

High-end (fast modern CPU, 16 to 32 GB RAM, upper-tier GPU): frame rates deep into the several hundreds at 1080p, 1440p beyond what any sensible monitor displays, and 4K comfortably into triple digits. This tier is overkill for this game and correctly sized for everything else in your library, which is exactly how it should be.

Flagship: this is where the 667 FPS ceiling at 1080p Low comes from. If you own this class of hardware, To The Core is a rounding error. Run it at 4K on a second monitor while your main display does real work.

Laptop playability

This is close to the ideal laptop game. Any laptop from the last several years, including thin-and-light models with integrated graphics, plays it well at 1080p, and the modest CPU load means fans stay quiet. Two laptop-specific notes apply. First, check your memory configuration: many thin laptops ship with a single stick, and on an integrated GPU the jump to dual-channel is worth real frame rate when the screen fills with particles. Second, cap the frame rate on battery. An uncapped idle game will drain a battery rendering frames nobody is watching, and at 60 FPS capped this becomes one of the most battery-friendly games you can run. The laptop experience here genuinely equals the desktop experience, which almost no game can claim.

Streaming and content creation

Incremental games have a real niche in the streaming world as background and second-monitor content, and To The Core is one of the easiest games in our library to broadcast. The CPU load is light enough that even x264 software encoding is viable, which is unusual in 2026: a modern six-core can run the game and a medium-preset encode without either side noticing. That said, a hardware encoder remains the right default for any streaming setup. NVENC on Nvidia cards or AMF on AMD produces a clean 1080p60 stream at negligible cost and keeps the CPU free for the browser tabs, chat, and Discord that a real broadcast actually involves. One practical warning: pixel art with dense particle fields compresses worse than it looks, and low bitrates turn chained explosions into blocky mush, so give the stream a reasonable bitrate rather than assuming 2D means cheap to encode. On the video editing side, recorded footage is small, scrubs easily, and cuts on any machine; this is not the title that justifies a workstation.

Common problems and fixes

FPS drops late in a run, after the upgrades pile up: particle and debris counts. Lower effects and particle density first, because that is where both the CPU and GPU load lives.

Weak frame rates on an integrated-GPU laptop or mini PC: almost always single-channel memory. Adding a second stick for dual-channel is the cheapest real fix in PC gaming, and this game benefits from it directly.

Coil whine, a hot room, or a surprising power bill: the game runs uncapped by default and renders as fast as your hardware allows, which on a strong PC means hundreds of frames per second for hours on end. Set a frame limit.

Soft, smeared visuals after lowering resolution to gain FPS: you scaled below native on pixel art. Restore native resolution and lower effects instead, or use integer scaling if you must scale at all.

Dips below 60 at 4K on entry hardware: expected behavior, and the reason the 4K Ultra average sits at 78 rather than higher. Drop one preset notch or run at 1440p in a borderless window.

Upgrade priorities

Here is the honest section nobody else will write: you should not upgrade your PC for To The Core. The floor data says even the weakest combination we measured holds 52 FPS at 1080p Ultra, and anything built in the last several years clears it without trying. If you are somehow below that floor, the fixes are cheap and specific: a second memory stick for dual-channel on integrated graphics systems, or an inexpensive used discrete card if your iGPU is truly ancient. If you are planning a gaming PC build anyway and this game is on your list, build for the heaviest game you play, not this one. A sensible CPU upgrade aimed at simulation-heavy titles plus a mid-range GPU will crush To The Core as a side effect, and an NVMe SSD remains the best general quality-of-life spend in any build. Spend your budget where your library actually hurts.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Is To The Core CPU or GPU intensive?

A: Neither, by AAA standards. The CPU handles simulation and particle logic on a few threads, the GPU handles sprite fill rate. Across 3,725 measured combos the averages are 201 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 136 at 1440p, and 78 at 4K.

Q: Can I run To The Core on integrated graphics or a cheap laptop?

A: Yes. The weakest combination in our database still holds 52 FPS at 1080p Ultra. Trim particle density if you dip below that, and make sure the machine has dual-channel memory.

Q: Does To The Core support DLSS or FSR upscaling?

A: No, and it does not need them. Mid-range hardware already exceeds monitor refresh rates at 1080p and 1440p, and at 4K on weak hardware a preset drop does the same job for free.

Q: Why did my FPS tank late in a run when it was fine at the start?

A: Particle counts, debris, and automation. That is the engine's real workload and it grows with your upgrades. Cut effects density and the frame rate comes back.

Q: Is To The Core a good reason to buy a 240Hz monitor?

A: It is one of the few games where 240Hz is realistic without flagship hardware. The average system already records 201 FPS at 1080p Ultra, and Low settings push far past that.

Q: Should I upgrade anything specifically to play it?

A: No. If you are on integrated graphics, dual-channel memory is the only spend that makes sense. Otherwise save the money for the heaviest game in your library.

To summarize: To The Core in 2026

To The Core occupies its niche confidently in 2026: a polished incremental game with an active community, a steady stream of positive Steam reviews, and the peculiar honor of being one of the least demanding titles in our entire benchmark library. Its real value on a hardware site is different from the usual one. This is the game you use as a sanity check, because if To The Core runs badly on your machine, something else is wrong with the machine. The data says the average system gets 201 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 136 at 1440p, and 78 at 4K, with a floor of 52 FPS on the weakest hardware we tested and a ceiling of 667 FPS at 1080p Low on the strongest. If your numbers sit far below that band, the problem is configuration, almost always single-channel memory on an integrated GPU or a missing frame cap masking something else, and not the game.

For everyone else, the takeaway is simple and faintly liberating. In a hobby where every new release seems to demand another component, here is a game that asks for nothing and runs on everything, including the laptop you already own and the budget build you were worried about. Dig, upgrade, idle, repeat. Your hardware will not notice, and that is precisely the point.