Core i7 12700K and Core i5 12400F: performance analysis

We've run our benchmarks at the standard three resolutions: 1080p, 1440p and 4K, but we're focusing the bulk of our attention on those 1080p results, as this is where differences between different CPUs are most visible. (There's an argument for testing at 720p to make these deltas even more visible, but even mainstream PC gaming has long since moved onto 1080p.) We're using an RTX 3090 for these results.

This page is all about FPS fps - the frames per second you'll see in some of the best first person shooters on the market. We start with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a competitive 5v5 shooter that I've spent a silly amount of time playing, before moving onto two more recent titles: Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War. Both of these newcomers are RT-enabled benchmarks, as we examine performance in the games' campaigns.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Counter-Strike. This is one of a few actively-played DirectX 9 titles on the market, and therefore despite receiving regular updates since 2012 it's an outlier in our CPU tests. We expect modern processors to deliver extremely high performance, in the hundreds of FPS, which syncs up nicely with the high refresh rate monitors preferred by CS:GO enthusiasts and professional players. We test CS:GO with a replay of a pivotal round in the Boston Eleague Major, which includes a realistic amount of smokes, Molotovs and other particle effects that can tank frame-rates plus some downtime, giving us a good chance to see how different CPUs fare under these different scenarios.

AMD's Ryzen 5000 CPUs have been the CS:GO champions since their debut last November, with their large cache boosting performance precipitously over earlier Ryzen designs, and only the Core i9 12900K is able to outperform the likes of even the entry-level Ryzen 5 5600X. The 12900K is 11 percent faster than the 12700K here, but the 325fps average and 214fps 'worst five percent' score is still reasonable for anything up to a 240Hz monitor. The 12400F exhibits a more severe drop-off in performance thanks to its lower core clocks and smaller cache size, with a 255fps average and 150fps worst five percent score. That's still nearly on par with the outgoing 11900K, at 268fps average, so it's still a strong showing from 11th-gen.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

We return to the opening scenes of the Volga level from the campaign of Metro Exodus, but this time in the Enhanced Edition of the game. Even with RTX effects mandatory, the game remains CPU-limited at 1080p and 1440p. As we've seen in the original Metro Exodus release, mid-range CPUs sometimes outperform their higher-end counterparts, with the Core i7 12700K hitting 213fps while all other 12th-gen CPUs we tested managing around 205fps - an effect that persisted across multiple re-tests. The Ryzen 5 5600X ties the 12700K, while the 5950X forges ahead to 234fps average. 1440p

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War

Our final FPS on this page is the Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War. Here, the focus is less on competitive performance and more on the single-player side of things, as we enable ray tracing and hop into one of the first campaign missions, Fracture Jaw. Interestingly, this mission has RT disabled on consoles, even when the option is enabled elsewhere in the game, suggesting that the BVH building process here is particularly tough. The opening scene, as Bell joins Adler on the fields of Vietnam, is heavy on the CPU at the relatively low graphical settings we've chosen.

The 12700K is clearly better value than the 12900K in this test, with results only two percent behind on average at 1080p, but the 12600K is even better at just a five percent deficit to the flagship part. The 12400F is a little further off the pace, turning in 82 percent of the 12900K's score, but still producing a more than playable result with DLSS enabled. The 12400F is also competitive against the 11600K and 11900K, beating the former by five percent and losing to the latter by around the same amount. In AMD-land, the 5950X offers equivalent performance to the 12700K, while the 5600X is akin to the 11900K - and just a bit ahead of the 12400F.

We conclude our new standard gaming tests on the next page, where we take on Cyberpunk 2077 and two new editions of Digital Foundry favourites: Far Cry 6 and Crysis 3 Remastered.

Intel Core i7 12700K and Core i5 12400F analysis

• Introduction, test rig and content creation benchmarks
• Gaming benchmarks: Flight Simulator 2020, Hitman 3
• Gaming benchmarks: CS:GO, Metro Exodus EE, Black Ops Cold War [This Page]
• Gaming benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6, Crysis 3 Remastered
• Gaming benchmarks: Memory bandwidth analysis
• Intel Core i7 12700K and Core i5 12400F: the Digital Foundry verdict