Average fps looks good on a box. 1% low is what you feel: the stutters in a teamfight. Estimates below are fitted to thousands of measured 1% lows from reviews, YouTube benchmarks and real player sessions.
What will I get?
What do I need?
Pick a CPU and a graphics card.
How this works
For every game and setting the model has two ceilings: what the graphics card can deliver and what the CPU can deliver. Your 1% low is roughly the lower of the two (a soft minimum — when they are close, both pull it down). Each GPU and CPU gets one strength number, fitted from every measurement it appears in; hardware without its own measurements gets one from its PassMark score.
Sources for the measured 1% lows: ComputerBase, PC Games Hardware, YouTube benchmark channels (read from the RivaTuner overlay), HowManyFPS player sessions and the CS2 benchmark map on cstb . Esports titles like League of Legends and Valorant are rarely tested by reviewers, so their numbers rest on fewer, noisier measurements — the ranges are wider there, and you should trust them less.
The range shown is about ±1 standard deviation. Scenes differ between reviewers and patches change games, so treat single numbers as “in this neighbourhood”. Frame generation and ray tracing are never counted. Used prices are the typical asking price on DBA (Denmark) for GPUs, where we have one.
Ray tracing is left out for now: how well a card handles it differs so much between NVIDIA, AMD and Intel that one strength number per card can't carry it.