The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Review, Feat. Gigabyte, Zotac, & EVGA
by Ryan Smith on October 9, 2012 9:00 AM ESTMetro: 2033
Paired with Crysis as our second behemoth FPS is Metro: 2033. Metro gives up Crysis’ lush tropics and frozen wastelands for an underground experience, but even underground it can be quite brutal on GPUs, which is why it’s also our new benchmark of choice for looking at power/temperature/noise during a game. If its sequel due this year is anywhere near as GPU intensive then a single GPU may not be enough to run the game with every quality feature turned up.
The good news for the GTX 650 Ti is that Metro is not the performance bloodbath that Crysis was. The bad news is that this is just about all the GTX 650 Ti has going for it. The Radeon HD 7850 1GB is priced above the GTX 650 Ti and for good reason: it’s faster. At $20 more expensive the cutoff is basically 13%; if the 7850 can lead by more than 13%, it’s outpacing the GTX 650 Ti even after accounting for the price difference. In this case the 7850 leads by 26%, double the magic number. At best you can say the GTX 650 Ti isn’t doing too poorly here on an absolute basis, since it’s within striking distance of 60fps.
As for our factory overclocked cards, once again we see Zotac pull ahead of EVGA and Gigabyte in that order. Despite the fact that each card has a different factory overclock, the difference between the overclocks is small enough that there’s not any kind of significant gap between the cards. Unfortunately even the Zotac card with its duo of memory and core overclocking still falls just short of 60fps here.
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CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
Oh there's the amd fanboy bloviating spew I predicted above you responded to ! LOL I cannot frikkin believe it, I got it exactly correct without looking ! Here I will FTFamd fanboy" Don't forget, the 650Ti comes with a game and so does the 560Ti. Coming with a game is necessary just to compete right now. The 460 also has some highly factory overclocked models that can smash out the 7770 while still being cheaper. The 7850 would do better at $10 or $20 lower and a MIR is a great way to accomplish that since a lot of people forget to do them anyway, but buy the card because of the after MIR price. ( I love ripoff MIR because I am an idiot shining on for corpo pig profits I hate so much).
ionis - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
2 of the 17 2GB 7850s on newegg comes with a game. I didn't bother checking the 1GB, b/c who cares about the 1GB? To say they comes with a game is a bit disingenuous.CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
It's okay all the amd fanboys can get the lowest low down 1GB now at the cited lowdown more expensive price, that doesn't matter when they are making their arguments for amd fanboyism.Two seconds later they will be screaming the 7850 is future proof with 2g ram so F orget the 650Ti, it is also the best deal againbecause amd roxxors.
So 1gb price, and magically in the deranged gourd of the amd fanboy 2G card is futureproof.
That is the amd fanboy brain after it exited the blender 20 years ago.
Galidou - Saturday, October 13, 2012 - link
The 7850 is a better choice for one freaking big reason you Cerise wouldn't be able to see because you're blinded with green glasses. When you buy a 7850 you always have the choice to go crossfire in the future which is something that happens often in the enthusiast world.Usually GTX is branded for the enthusiast market and reffered as the better cards from Nvidia but hey, where is my SLI connector? Oh... there's none... they had to cut it for cost purposes, that's what Nvidia claims..... First time in history a GTX card comes without one... you're so stubborn you can't even see any downside when they're OBVIOUS..... HELL even half of the radeon 7770 comes with Crossfire support and some of them costs 120$...
nathanddrews - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
I see what you did there...Denithor - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
I caught that too. Thought it was cute but kinda silly.Wonder how much of the target audience got it?
Exodite - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
I'd wager most of the AT readers passed middle school chemistry. :PPaulman - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Exodite is right. Also, nerds love memorizing trivia (and the periodic table definitely counts).CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
I'll wager if that's minimally true we've got a dumber group than the general populace.Since the idiots group think yours was a great line, the above may in fact be the case.
chizow - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
As indicated in the review, the 650Ti fills the huge gap in performance between the 7850/GTX 660 and 7770/GTX 650, its price just needs to be adjusted in light of AMD's pre-emptive cuts on the 7850. Once we start seeing ~$20 rebates similar to those we see for the 7850, the 650Ti should be a more appealing option in the sub-$150 range.I also think Nvidia missed an opportunity here by turning off Boost for sub-660 parts. It's just inconsistent with the rest of the Kepler line and while it allows partners to benefit on OC parts, they are clearly charging an additional premium instead of offering it at MSRP like past parts such as EVGA FPB.
Most interesting to me seeing how these bandwidth neutered parts perform is how shading/backend performance has caught up and is generally no longer the biggest bottleneck; bandwidth tends to hold these cards back more often than not compared to their bigger siblings even at modest resolutions like 1080p.