Good news, PC gamers! Nvidia has launched two new low-power graphics cards that won’t cost you the earth.
The latest additions to Nvidia’s new 10-series GPUs are the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti, both of which were extensively leaked before today’s announcement. As expected, they’re nowhere near as powerful as the flagship Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 model that launched earlier this year, but they’ll price at just £115 and £139 respectively.
That puts these new graphics cards in direct competition with AMD’s latest low-power offerings, specifically the AMD Radeon RX 460 (~£110) and the AMD Radeon RX 470 (~£199). But the Nvidia options are based on the GPU giant’s new Pascal architecture, which will make them an attractive pick for PC gamers on a budget.
Both cards make use of Nvidia's new GP107 GPU, although the 1050 Ti version gets a higher-spec version with more CUDA cores – 768, to be precise. And although the old Nvidia GTX 950 had the same number of cores, you’re getting a higher base- and boosted-clockrate, plus an additonal 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM.
The GTX 1050 features a lower 640 core-count, but is also clocked faster than the old GTX 950, and features the same 2GB GDDR5 VRAM. And with the new Pascal architecture, you’d expect better performance and lower power-drain.
As far as performance goes, Nvidia tested the GTX 1050 Ti against the AMD Radeon RX 460 on a bunch of different games, and claims 40% performance improvements and 128% greater power efficiency than its rival. As a result, Nvidia reckons you’ll be able to play “today’s most popular games” at 60fps on a 1080p display, while drawing just 75W of power. These games include:
BioShock InfiniteCrysis 3Grand Theft Auto VRise of the Tomb RaiderStar Wars BattlefrontWitcher 3Ashes of the SingularityThe Division
Of course, we’ll have to wait for review samples to run our own performance benchmarks before we can come to any real conclusion.
The GTX 1050 Ti goes on sale first, starting from October 25, while the GTX 1050 will arrive later, on November 8. Card partners include Asus, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, iGame, Innovation 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, and Zotac.
