Starcraft II

Our next game is Starcraft II, Blizzard’s 2010 RTS megahit. Much like Portal 2 it’s a DX9 game designed to run on a wide range of hardware so performance is quite peppy with most high-end cards, but it can still challenge a GPU when it needs to.

As opposed to Battlefield 3, Starcraft II is light enough that the GTX 650 Ti can generally get away with 1920x1200, even with MSAA. It isn’t 60fps, but for a RTS it’s good enough. The bad news from this view is that while the GTX 650 Ti falls short of 60fps the 7850 can blow past it. Otherwise at 1680x1050 without MSAA we see something similar to Batman, where the GTX 650 Ti hangs with the 7850 as these lower settings do not penalize the GTX 650 Ti’s lack of ROP throughput and memory bandwidth nearly as hard.

Meanwhile the factory overclocked cards see the typical performance gains. Without memory bandwidth being hit so hard, it’s the EVGA card and its top core overclock that edges out the others. Notably, all 3 can just hit 60fps at 1920.

Battlefield 3 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
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  • Galidou - Saturday, October 13, 2012 - link

    I won't be back on that thread anymore but just wait for some more stupidly stubborn reply of Cerise, that guy is just a show by himself. His level of global consiousness is below anything I have yet to see in the whole world.

    Sure he has some knowledge, can't deny it, it's just used in a way that seems like all that potential is totally WASTED, thrown to the garbage, buried in vomit and so on.....

    Funniest shit ever.... LOL funniest comments ever..... Can't beleive it.....
  • Speelteveel - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link

    Please provide these benchmarks where the oc'd 650ti "flies" past the 7850.
    Its not a 50 buck price diff, its 20.
    Also, in these benches above, the 7850 is not overclocked.
    So basically, you advocate to pay $20 less for a card that you have to overclock to get similiar performance, when the $20 more expensive card when oc'd goes into another spectrum of perfomrnace that the 650ti can't even fathom. Oc'd 7850s break even with 7870 benchmarks at 1080p.
    I'm not going to link you the benchmarks you can peruse google y yourself.
    the 650ti can't compare to the 7850 at all. I'm no fanboy, I just found your post dissing fanboys while blatantly being blindly biased very amusing.
  • vbmluis - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link

    Yeah, I remember one, ATi HD 2900, heavy, big, noisy, power hungry, pricey and low performance.
  • Jamahl - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link

    It's not bad. It's just slow, expensive and late.
  • Samus - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link

    lol, that defines bad, man!

    But I'd argue...the only thing really wrong with this card is there isn't any good reason or it to be dual slot. with that power envelope, nVidia really could have rocked the house if this thing were a single slot, maybe even half height card (especially the 650 non-TI) because it's make a very powerful USFF/ITX PC GPU.

    Aside form my dream of this card being single slot, it isn't a terrible card. The 650 Ti is mostly on par with the old 560 (which still costs more) while using less power and being half the length. Pretty much a no-brainer which one to buy there. But neither card is really worth $150-$180 when you consider you get substantially more (25-40%) performance from the 660 for just 20% more monies.
  • Blazorthon - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link

    Don't forget, the 7850 comes with games and so does the 7770. Coming with a game is necessary just to compete right now. The 7770 also has some highly factory overclocked models that can inch out the 650 Ti while still being cheaper. The 650 Ti would do better at $10 or $20 lower and a MIR is a great way to accomplish that since a lot of people forget to do them anyway, but buy the card because of the after MIR price.
  • TheJian - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link

    Love defending AMD everywhere you go don't you :)

    Until you OC the 650 (or buy one already done, you act like they don't sell them on both sides OC'd) making your point moot. No phsyx either.
    http://www.geforce.com/games-applications/physx
    Even batman AA supports it. I don't think the 7770 comes with a current AAA title such as Assassins Creed 3 (doesn't get any more current than a game NOT even out yet). That will make a nice xmas gift to themselves for anyone buying one. Metacritic has a date of Nov20th, which is plenty of time for them to even be late a few weeks an still play over the holidays.

    I'd be more than happy to have another round like we did at Toms if you'd like :) You start claiming MSAA crap again and we'll have a go...LOL

    Please refrain from saying AMD is financially competitive with Intel here like over at Tom's, I don't want to waste my time burying that one again...ROFL.
  • abianand - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link

    I have a slight preference from AMD cards (I don't why and I don't like having a slight preference between two equally and fairly-competing brands).

    Having said that....

    7850 is definitely faster, but look at the power consumption of the 650Ti. Even an overclocked 650Ti draws power that just equals a normal non-overclocked 7850. So, I wouldn't call the 650Ti a bad product at all, especially when it manages to touch 30fps in almost all settings in almost all games.
  • Samus - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link

    I have a preference for nVidia drivers, but these days both companies make solid chips. The real problem for AMD is all the games I play (mostly EA games) are optimized for nVidia architecture...like how Source was optimized for ATI architecture.

    Just how it goes.
  • Death666Angel - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link

    "Until you OC the 650 (or buy one already done, you act like they don't sell them on both sides OC'd) making your point moot."
    Wait, so you can't OC AMD cards? Oh that's right, you can. So that is meaningless, as any OC gains from Nvidia cards will be (likely) negated by OCing the respective AMD cards.

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