Valorant

Valorant is an esports-focused FPS built to run on a wide range of hardware, but the data for the Intel Core i5-12400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti combination shows a system that is overwhelmingly GPU-limited at higher resolutions, while remaining exceptionally fast at 1080p. The measured frame rates across all settings and resolutions are extremely high, with the lowest average being 343.3 FPS at 4K Ultra and the highest reaching 529 FPS at 1080p Low. This places the combo at rank 530 out of 1650 tested combinations, indicating a top-tier performance tier for this specific title.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate drop from 1080p to 4K is significant but not catastrophic, revealing a clear shift in the bottleneck. At 1080p Low, the system produces 529 FPS, which drops to 501.7 FPS at 1440p Low and then to 465.2 FPS at 4K Low. This progression shows a reduction of 27.3 FPS when moving from 1080p to 1440p, and a further 36.5 FPS when moving from 1440p to 4K. The percentage drop from 1080p to 4K at Low settings is approximately 12.1%, which is relatively modest and suggests the CPU is still capable of feeding the GPU even at 4K.

However, the scaling pattern changes dramatically when looking at higher settings. At Ultra settings, the frame rate goes from 438.5 FPS at 1080p to 411.6 FPS at 1440p, and then down to 343.3 FPS at 4K. The drop from 1440p to 4K at Ultra is 68.3 FPS, which is a 16.6% reduction. This is more than double the percentage drop seen at Low settings for the same resolution change. The data indicates that as the settings increase, the GPU becomes the limiting factor sooner, with the 4K Ultra result showing the largest relative performance penalty.

The implication is that the i5-12400F’s six cores and twelve threads, with a boost clock of 4.40 GHz, provide enough headroom to keep frame rates high even at 1080p. The RTX 3070 Ti, with its 8 GB of GDDR6X memory and 608.3 GB/s bandwidth, handles the graphical load well, but the rendering load at 4K with higher presets begins to saturate the GPU. The frame rate differences between 1080p and 1440p at High settings (444.4 vs 420.2 FPS) are a 5.4% drop, which is smaller than the 7.1% drop between 1440p and 4K at the same settings, reinforcing that the GPU workload scales super-linearly at higher resolutions.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the database of 1650 tested combos for Valorant, this specific pairing of the Intel Core i5-12400F and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti achieves a rank of 530. This position places it in the upper third of all tested systems, which is a strong result for a game that is often considered CPU-bound. The percentileVsAllCpus for the i5-12400F is 77, indicating it outperforms 77% of all CPUs in general benchmarks, while the RTX 3070 Ti has a percentileVsAllGpus of 74.

The combo’s rank relative to other tested systems suggests that the hardware is well-matched for this title, but not at the absolute top. The CPU’s nearest rivals, such as the Intel Core i7-8700K with a deltaPct of 0.1% and the AMD Ryzen 5 7533HS with a deltaPct of -0.7%, show that the i5-12400F is statistically tied with these processors in average benchmark scores. This indicates that the CPU is not a differentiator in this pairing; the GPU’s performance is the primary driver of the frame rates.

The GPU’s nearest rivals include the AMD Radeon RX 6700 with a deltaPct of -0.8% and the NVIDIA Quadro M5000 with a deltaPct of -0.9%, showing that the RTX 3070 Ti is essentially on par with these cards in general compute benchmarks. However, the measured FPS in Valorant suggests the RTX 3070 Ti’s specific architecture, with its 6144 shading units and 192 texture mapping units, is well-suited for the game’s relatively simple geometry and effects. The rank of 530 out of 1650 means there are 1120 combos that are slower, but the top 529 are faster, which likely consist of higher-end CPUs paired with faster GPUs.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data provides a clear hierarchy for settings, with Low settings offering the highest frame rates and Ultra offering the lowest. At 1080p, the difference between Low and Ultra is 90.5 FPS (529 vs 438.5), which is a 17.1% performance gain for turning down the settings. This is a substantial margin that competitive players will want to exploit, but the absolute frame rates are so high that even Ultra settings remain far above the refresh rate of most monitors.

For players with a 1440p monitor, the data shows that High settings at 420.2 FPS are a better choice than Ultra at 411.6 FPS, as the difference of 8.6 FPS is negligible in practice. The Medium preset at 429.6 FPS offers a 4.4% improvement over Ultra, suggesting that Medium is the sweet spot for maintaining visual quality while gaining performance. At 4K, the High preset at 357.3 FPS is notably faster than Ultra at 343.3 FPS, and the Low preset at 465.2 FPS is significantly faster.

The best experience per the measured rows depends on the display’s refresh rate. For a 240 Hz monitor, 1080p High at 444.4 FPS or 1440p Low at 501.7 FPS are both viable. For a 360 Hz monitor, only 1080p Low at 529 FPS will fully saturate the display. The data shows that the High preset provides a good balance, with frame rates within 2.5% of Medium settings at all resolutions, while offering better visual fidelity. The Ultra preset provides diminishing returns, with a performance penalty of 17.1% at 1080p compared to Low, which is not justified for a competitive title.

Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete measured FPS data is as follows: at 1920x1080, Low settings produce 529 FPS, Medium produces 450 FPS, High produces 444.4 FPS, and Ultra produces 438.5 FPS. The spread from Low to Ultra is 90.5 FPS, with the largest single jump being 79 FPS from Low to Medium. At 2560x1440, Low produces 501.7 FPS, Medium produces 429.6 FPS, High produces 420.2 FPS, and Ultra produces 411.6 FPS. The spread here is 90.1 FPS, showing a similar delta to 1080p, but the absolute values are lower.

At 3840x2160, Low produces 465.2 FPS, Medium produces 378.7 FPS, High produces 357.3 FPS, and Ultra produces 343.3 FPS. The spread is 121.9 FPS, which is the largest absolute difference across all resolutions. The data shows a consistent pattern: the performance gap between Low and Medium is always the largest, while the gap between High and Ultra is the smallest. For example, at 4K, the difference between High and Ultra is only 14 FPS, while the difference between Low and Medium is 86.5 FPS.

The 1080p results show that the CPU is able to maintain very high frame rates, with the lowest result at Ultra being 438.5 FPS. The 1440p results show a similar trend, with the lowest being 411.6 FPS at Ultra. The 4K results show a more pronounced GPU limitation, with the frame rates dropping below 400 FPS for Medium, High, and Ultra presets. The data indicates that this combo can comfortably handle 4K at Low settings with 465.2 FPS, but the visual quality trade-off may not be worth it for most users.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti’s role in these results is defined by its memory and clock specifications, which directly influence the frame rates at higher settings. The GPU has 8 GB of GDDR6X memory, which is sufficient for Valorant’s textures, and a memory clock of 19 Gbps effective, providing a bandwidth of 608.3 GB/s. The core clocks are 1575 MHz base and 1770 MHz boost, which are relatively high and contribute to the strong performance at lower resolutions.

The data shows that the GPU’s workload increases with resolution, as seen in the FPS drop from 1080p to 4K. At 1080p Low, the GPU is not the bottleneck, as the frame rate of 529 FPS is likely limited by the CPU’s single-thread performance. However, at 4K Ultra, the frame rate drops to 343.3 FPS, indicating that the GPU’s rendering capabilities are being fully utilized. The GPU’s pixel rate of 169.9 GPixel/s and texture rate of 339.8 GTexel/s are the specifications that determine how quickly it can fill pixels and sample textures, which become critical at 4K.

The RTX 3070 Ti’s 8 GB memory size is not a limiting factor in this game, as Valorant’s asset sizes are modest. The GPU’s FP32 performance of 21.75 TFLOPS is more than adequate for the game’s shader complexity. The measured FPS at 4K High (357.3 FPS) is only 4.1% lower than at 4K Medium (378.7 FPS), suggesting that the GPU’s memory bandwidth is not saturated, but rather the compute units are the limiting factor. The performance difference between 1080p High and 4K High is 87.1 FPS, a 19.6% reduction, showing a clear scaling trend that aligns with the GPU’s increasing workload.