NVIDIA announces the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti for gamers on a budget
NVIDIA announces the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti for gamers on a budget
NVIDIA has taken the wraps off the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti, two brand new cards aimed at the budget segment of the market. These cards round out an impressive Pascal-based line-up that comprises some of the best cards we’ve seen in recent years, including cards like the GeForce GTX 1080.
More importantly, the new Pascal cards are NVIDIA’s answer to the likes of AMD’s Radeon RX 400 series cards, and provide consumers looking for the best bang for their buck with even more choice.
Both cards are based on the new GP107 GPU that's sized down to serve the mainstream market and are built to deliver at least 60fps in popular e-sports titles like Overwatch and Dota 2 at 1080p and High settings. According to the company, the GeForce GTX 1050 is up to three times as powerful as the four-year-old GeForce GTX 650, and 50 per cent faster than the GeForce GTX 750 Ti.
That said, NVIDIA claims you’ll be able to run AAA games like Grand Theft Auto V and Gears of War 4 at around 60fps as well, provided you turn the settings down to Medium.
Here’s a table summarizing the key specifications of both cards:
Graphics Card |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti |
---|---|---|
GPU |
GP107 |
GP107 |
Process |
16nm FinFET |
16nm FinFET |
Transistors |
3.3 billion |
3.3 billion |
CUDA cores |
640 |
768 |
GPU base clock speeds |
1,354MHz |
1,290MHz |
GPU boost clock speeds |
1,455MHz |
1,392MHz |
Memory |
2GB GDDR5 |
4GB GDDR5 |
Memory clock speed |
7,000MHz |
7,000MHz |
Memory bus width |
128-bit |
128-bit |
Memory bandwidth |
112GB/s |
112GB/s |
TDP |
75W |
75W |
Price |
US$109 |
US$139 |
No Founders Edition models are available this time, and both cards will be available on 25 October directly from NVIDIA’s board partners.
Thanks to its 75 watt TDP, the card can be powered without any need for external PCIe power connectors, although custom cards may feature additional connectors to increase the overclocking headroom. Despite its target audience, NVIDIA says the card actually overclocks quite well, even hitting up to 1.9GHz during its own internal testing.
However, there is no support for SLI, much like the GeForce GTX 1060. And from the pictures of the custom cards we’ve seen, many are compact cards targeted at mini-ITX systems.
At US$109, the GeForce GTX 1050 goes head to head with the identically priced Radeon RX 460. On the other hand, the Radeon RX 470 is actually more expensive than the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti at US$179 (rumors say a price drop is incoming in response to NVIDIA's launch), but we’ll be running a comparisons feature in the near future to assess how these cards stack up against each other.