Earlier this year NVIDIA got us all in a tizzy with the announcement of its latest 10-series GeForce GPUs. There is no denying the cards we’ve seen in the range thus far are great but the price points of these cards puts them out of reach of budget PC gamers.
There’s good news on the horizon for budget PC gamers however with the arrival of two new 10-series GPUs from NVIDIA, the GeForce GTX 1050 and the GTX 1050 Ti.
The cards are cheap, starting at $109 (~R1 500) for the GTX 1050 and $139 (~R1 900) for the Ti version, a clear shot at AMD which launched its cheaper Radeon RX 400 series earlier this year.
AMD’s budget friendly card, the RX 460, starts at around R2099 locally and offers both 2GB GDDR5 and 4GB GDDR5 variants. AMD’s RX 460 is squarely aimed at gamers who play esports titles such as Overwatch and Dota 2 at 1080p and settings on high and the GTX 1050 looks to have similar aspirations.
The GTX 1050 cards then are the “equivalent” of the RX 460 but instead of offering a 2GB GDDR5 and 4GB GDDR5 iteration of each card, the GTX 1050 has 2GB GDDR5 and the GTX 1050 Ti offers 4GB GDDR5.
GTX 1050 | GTX 1050 Ti | RX 460 | |
Base Clock | 1354MHz | 1290MHz | 1090MHz |
Boost Clock | 1455MHz | 1392MHz | 1200MHz |
Memory Speed | 112GB/s | 112GB/s | 112GB/s |
Memory | 2GB | 4GB | 2GB / 4GB |
Memory Interface Width | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit |
Memory type | GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR5 |
TDP | 75W | 75W | <75W |
Before declaring the winner to be NVIDIA we must point out that the figures from the RX 460 are for the reference card. This means that with a bit of overclocking, original equipment manufacturers such as Gigabyte or MSI can squeeze more power from the card if they wish.
With that having been said, the base line numbers of the GTX 1050 series are pretty good. There’s also the fact that the NVIDIA cards support G-Sync, and NVIDIA’s incredible Ansel technology.
Sadly, Team Green has said these new cards are not ready for VR nor will they support SLI. They do however support Vulkan which is great in the few games that support the API.
As to availability NVIDIA has said it will release the GTX 1050 Ti on 25th October with the 1050 releasing “on or before” November 8th according to a report by The Verge.
As a bit of a disclaimer, don’t go by the US pricing. Aside from import duties, our currency playing jump rope and mark-ups from retailers, even the US finds it hard to find GPUs that cost what the firms like AMD and NVIDIA say they will cost. If you have a spare few minutes check out the video below from Linus Tech Tips which sums up the problem quite nicely.
[Source – NVIDIA]