Following in the footsteps of the GTX 1080, GTX 1070, and GTX 1060, Nvidia has unveiled the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti. Pitched as graphics cards for e-sports players, or those looking to upgrade an off-the-shelf PC from the likes of Dell or HP, the Pascal-based GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti are priced to move at just £115/?125/$109 and £139/?155/$139 respectively. Both cards are due to launch on October 25.
At those prices, the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti are in direct competition with AMD's RX 460, which costs £99/$99 for a 2GB version, and $129/£135 for a 4GB version. In theory, Nvidia's cards should be a wee bit faster, with the 1050 Ti in particular sporting some great specs for the money. Those include 768 CUDA cores, 4GB of GDDR5 memory with 112GB/s of bandwidth, and a boost clock of 1392MHz. The non-Ti GTX 1050 drops down to 640 CUDA cores and 2GB of GDDR5 memory, but maintains the same bandwidth, and ups its boost clock to 1455MHz.
Both cards have a TDP of just 75W, which means that they can be powered by the PCIe bus alone. This makes them ideal drop-in cards for cheapo, off-the-shelf systems with integrated graphics that might not have the spare PCIe power cables needed to run beefier graphics cards. That said, some versions of the GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti will feature an additional power connector to allow for more overclocking headroom. There's no Founders Edition this time either, so all cards will come from Nvidia partners like Asus and MSI.
As for performance, Nvidia is claiming that in a Core i5 Haswell-based system, games like The Division, Fallout 4, GTA V, Overwatch, and The Witcher 3 run at an average of 61.2FPS at 1080p with medium settings on a GTX 1050. GTX 1050 Ti performance should be even higher. Less demanding e-sports games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or League of Legends should push into hundreds-of-frames-per-second territory. That's a theoretical 3x boost over the older GTX 650.
The GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti are late to the mega-budget graphics card party, with AMD's RX 460 and RX 470 having launched in August to positive reviews. Ars hasn't reviewed these cards yet, but given there's now some healthy competition, it might be time for a head-to-head battle royale for the ultimate budget upgrade. Christmas is coming up, after all.
