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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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.