Feature Articles

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti - The Budget Kepler With A Bite

By James Lu - 9 Oct 2012

3DMark 11 & Unigine 2.1 "Heaven" Results

3DMark 11 Results

As usual, we start our tests with a few synthetic benchmarks before launching into actual games. First up, 3DMark 11, which tests a variety of DirectX 11 functions including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading, making it a good indication of a card's overall performance.

Starting off strong, the GTX 650 Ti showed a whopping 50% increase on the GTX 650, and was also able to fend off its direct competition from AMD, the Radeon HD 7770 with a resounding 32% victory on the Performance preset which extended to 35% at Extreme. On the other hand, there was just too much ground to make up against the GTX 660, which outperformed the GTX 650 Ti by about 40% on Performance and 50% on Extreme.

ASUS' custom GTX 650 Ti performed about 8% better than the reference design.

 

Unigine 2.1 "Heaven" Results

Unigine’s “Heaven” benchmark is an extremely tessellation-intensive benchmark which, when combined with a high resolution and 8x AA was just too much for the GTX 650 Ti. Do note that AMD's Radeon HD 7770 was also unable to run the benchmark at these settings. In short, most of these severely underperforming cards are deprived of adequate video memory.

Looking instead at results in the middle resolution bracket of 1920 x 1200 pixels, the GTX 650 Ti was about 8% better than the GTX 650 with AA turned off and about 3% better with AA set to 8x. As for the competition, AMD's HD 7770 was the clear winner in this test, pulling ahead of the GTX 650 Ti by 11% with AA turned off and by about 8% with AA set to 8x. Looking at the lower 1680 x 1050 resolution, you can see that these results are repeated there too.

These results were not all that surprising, as we have seen from our past reviews of the GTX 660 and GTX 650 that heavy tessellation is not the strong point of NVIDIA's more affordable Kepler cards, and AMD's somewhat superior hardware was able to provide it with enough extra firepower to claim the victory in this case. We will see if these results are repeated later in the more tessellation heavy games.

ASUS was again about 5-8% better than the reference card throughout.

      

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.