NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 - The Affordable Kepler
3DMark 11 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 Results
3DMark 11 Results
We begin our analysis of the new GeForce GTX 650 and the MSI GTX 650 Power Edition with the very popular 3DMark 11 benchmark. The latest iteration of FutureMark’s benchmarking utility makes extensive use of all DirectX 11 features such as tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading, making it a good gauge of a card’s performance.
On 3DMark 11, the GeForce GTX 650 performed better than the Radeon HD 7750. Its scores were on average about 14% better. On the other hand, the slightly boosted MSI GTX 650 Power Edition scored about 5% better than a reference GeForce GTX 650. That said, the GeForce GTX 650 is very much far down the performance ladder when compared to the next card in the Kepler line-up, the GeForce GTX 660. In comparison, the GeForce GTX 650 could only score half the 3DMark result of the more powerful GeForce GTX 660. This goes to show just how significant the cuts made to the GK107 core are. This also means you can expect a GTX 650 Ti to plug this gap shortly.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Results
Next, we move on to Battlefield Bad Company 2, one of the earliest DirectX 11 first-person shooters. Here we saw that the GeForce GTX 650 was noticeably quicker than the competing Radeon HD 7750 by more than 20%. In fact, a reference-clocked GeForce GTX 650 was marginally quicker still than the more costly Radeon HD 7770. The MSI GTX 650 Power Edition, with its higher clock speeds, was about 5% faster than a stock GeForce GTX 650.