The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Review, Feat. Gigabyte, Zotac, & EVGA
by Ryan Smith on October 9, 2012 9:00 AM ESTPortal 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.
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chizow - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
I guess in years past this may and probably should've been branded GTS 650Ti along with the GTS 650 (they've used GTS 250, GTS 450 etc in the past), but I know for a fact Nvidia is trying to establish GTX as its own brand for gamers.They really emphasize it with all this "Green Light" business with regard to overclocking, overvolting etc.
Blazorthon - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
Nvidia has been cracking down on overvolting support, so IDK if I'd give them that much credit.Pneumothorax - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
That will make the price/performance gap even worse as the 7850 is an oc beast.goinginstyle - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
So why no reviews of the Asus or MSI offerings in these roundups?silverblue - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
You need to be sent a card in order to review it. ;)Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
The 7850 1GB is $150. It IS is the direct competitor to the 650 ti. You can speculate all you want about the 1GB being some sort of ephemeral limiting factor, but I dont see it. All I see is that in one game, at BEYOND 1080p resolution, memory becomes a factor. But if you look at it, you can see that it is still so very close on the bell curve. I bet that if you actually tested Skyrim at 1920x1080 (not 1920x1200), there would be much less difference between 2GB and 1GB.Even 2 years from now the 7850 1GB is going to be a better performer than the 650ti. Even with the "latest and greatest" games.
Shark321 - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
Where is the 7850 1GB $150?KineticHummus - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
yeah wish i could fine one of those haha. pretty sure there isnt a single card for 150Marlin1975 - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
How about $159 AR shipped?http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
LordanSS - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
I'm a bit curious about this card's performance with PhysX enabled games.Personally, I am a 6970 owner and thus have no access to PhysX effects on games, but there are many workarounds out there where you can add a nVidia card to your machine to compute the physics.
Borderlands 2 is an example, I know of people buying (cheap) nVidia cards so they can run physics on them. Problem is that, most of the time, these guys are buying really old or cheap hardware (like GT210 or 430 cards), causing a big drop in game performance. Others using more powerful (and expensive) cards, on the other hand, experience good results.
So I'm thinking what's the cutting point for performance here. I know it's an extremely niche endeavor, but if anyone has experience or thoughts, I'd be glad to hear them.