The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Review, Feat. Gigabyte, Zotac, & EVGA

Portal 2

Portal 2 continues the long and proud tradition of Valve’s in-house Source engine. While Source continues to be a DX9 engine, Valve has continued to upgrade it over the years to improve its quality, and combined with their choice of style you’d have a hard time telling it’s over 7 years old at this point. Consequently Portal 2’s performance does get rather high on high-end cards, but we have ways of fixing that…

With Portal 2 it’s not a matter of whether 1920x1200 is playable, but rather whether it’s playable with SSAA or just MSAA. In the case of the GTX 650 Ti, it’s just shy of being able to crack 60fps with SSAA, which is a good 15% better than what the 7850 can do. NVIDIA has always held an advantage in this benchmark with SSAA, and that advantage has cascaded into one of the only times the GTX 650 Ti can outright beat the 7850. Of course if we turn off SSAA we’ll see the 7850 lurch back ahead, but even then it’s only a 9% lead on behalf of the 7850.

Meanwhile the factory overclocked cards further add to the GTX 650 Ti’s lead. They also give us a good idea of what the bottleneck is for the GTX 650 Ti; rather than being memory bandwidth it would appear to be shading performance or ROP throughput.