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

Synthetics

As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance to see if NVIDIA’s core configuration has had any impact on basic performance metrics. Paper specifications tell us that texture fillrate should take a decent hit with pixel fillrate takes an even larger hit; and meanwhile tessellation should hold up fairly well. We’ll start with 3DMark Vantage’s Pixel Fill test.

As expected, the GTX 650 Ti drops off a cliff compared to the GTX 660. Despite this, it does rather well compared to the GTX 650 despite the similar ROP throughput and memory bandwidth of the two cards. It can even edge out the GTX 560 in the process.

Meanwhile 3DMark Vantage’s Texture Fill test backs up our earlier texture performance expectations. The drop compared to the GTX 660 is still large, but not by nearly as much as the pixel fillrate. Having twice as many SMXes as the GTX 650 also means that it comes close to doubling the GK107 card’s performance here.

Our third theoretical test is the set of settings we use with Microsoft’s Detail Tessellation sample program out of the DX11 SDK

So much for tessellation performance holding up. This is admittedly a high pixel throughput test (we’re measuring at 1000fps+), but it’s also a very simple test that doesn’t have a great deal of overdraw. Despite the fact that the GTX 650 Ti holds on to most of GK106’s Polymorph Engines, performance drops by 40% relative to the GTX 660, which is far more in-line with the loss of ROP throughput and memory bandwidth.

Our final theoretical test is Unigine Heaven 2.5, a benchmark that straddles the line between a synthetic benchmark and a real-world benchmark as the engine is licensed but no notable DX11 games have been produced using it yet.

Despite everything else we’ve seen, Unigine results are almost exactly in the middle of the expected performance loss between shading/texturing and ROP/memory on the GTX 650 Ti. This makes it just good enough to tie the GTX 560, or surpass the GTX 550 Ti by nearly 50%.