NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Review: Bringing Balance To The Force
by Ryan Smith on March 26, 2013 8:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Our final game, Civilization V, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
Civilization V is an interesting game due to the fact that it puts the 7790, GTX 650 Ti Boost, and 7850 so close together in performance. It stresses just about everything at some point – tessellation/geometry, ROP throughput, compute, and texturing – but it’s really shading/texturing that form the biggest bottleneck here. This works out well enough for NVIIDA, allowing them to get within 4% of the 7850, while still keeping the GTX 650 Ti Boost and GTX 660 well separated.
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Eugene86 - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Overclocking is not a guarantee, apart from the fact that it shortens the lifespan of the card itself, all it does is increase power consumption (which negates your power consumption argument) and it also wastes your time by having to have to tinker with drivers and overclocking speeds to make sure the card doesn't artifact and such. Considering the subpar quality of AMD drivers, this is something that no one wants to waste their time on except for fans of AMD.stickmansam - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Have you tried to OC the 7850 yourself? I hit 1ghz without any voltage or power tweaksIt is way under clocked at 860mhz.
Haven't run any power draw comparisons yet though myself
cyrusfox - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
So true, 7850 hits 1050 MHz easy breezy. It was a great card and it has held its value, I originally got it for $150 second hand when it first came out(forum shopping). I'm surprised to see it still being valued higher than that.From my personal experience, the 7850 is a guaranteed 1 GHz card. But a lot of people don't OC so they miss out on the potential. Nvidia does have its positives and the boost seems like a good card to fill the holes in the market.
anubis44 - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
I hear what you're saying -- in the past, people would say that you could overclock a model of card to some ridiculous speed that only 5% of the cards of that model could reach with stability, and then say that the entire model of card performed that way. A couple of times, I was tricked by this kind of nonsense, and regretted swallowing it from idiots on a chat forum.But in the case of the 7850, this is the real deal. I kid you not, there is probably not a single one that won't go up to 1050MHz with just the AMD video driver and a couple of fisher-price sliders and not even any additional voltage. I defy you to find somebody who has tried this, and been unable to clock it up to at least the 1050MHz max in the video driver, without any extra volts. It's the best kept secret in the video card market right now, almost like the Celeron 300a back in the day, that would clock from 300MHz to 450MHz with just a multiplier adjustment in the bios. It's like AMD just left 40% more performance on the table with the 7850. I had two of them myself for about a week, and it was ridiculous how much faster they would go if you just bothered to take 2 minutes to bump them up from 860MHz to 1100MHz-1150MHz. I can picture AMD getting slightly irritated at nVidia for trying to reach the 7850's default speed with this piddly GTX650 Ti Boost, and turning around and releasing a GHz edition bios for all 7850 owners to just flash their cards to 1050MHz, kinda of like they did for the 7950.
k2_8191 - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
IMO The new card is good deal if I consider only gaming performance per price.However, as a distributed computing junkie, I would still recommend the participants to choose some RADEON HD 7k cards for double-precision workunits (HCC in WCG in particular).
Bob Todd - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
One simple and obvious answer, Never Settle Reloaded. The 7850 is faster in most games, destroys it compute, and you get Tomb Raider and BioShock Infinite for free. Even if you have no interest in either game, you can easily get ~$50 (after fees) for the codes on eBay. Nice 2GB 7850s have been on sale regularly for $170. That means you can get a faster 7850 2GB for ~$120. So does $150 for a 1GB 650 Ti Boost sound better than $120 for a 2GB 7850? 1GB 7850s have hit $150. Bottom line is that it's great time to be a budget gamer. The 650 Ti Boost, 7790, and 7850 are all good cards in the pricing sweet spot for a lot of people. Never Settle Reloaded puts things squarely in AMDs hands from a "value" perspective though. Whether or not you want the games, they are quick sells, and even the 7790 would really be in the ~$120 range if you wanted to sell BioShock Infinite.Parhel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Thanks! Based on your post, I did a bit of shopping, and found an MSI 7870 @ Newegg. $220 list price minus a $25 rebate, ~$50 on reselling the bundle, and ~$30 on reselling my GTX 460, and I should be at about $115 for a 7870. Not too bad considering they were ~$350 at release.Bob Todd - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
You just reminded me that I need to decide if I'm selling my GTX 460. I looked on eBay a few weeks ago and the same 1GB model sold for ~$60. Part of me thinks it isn't really worth it and I should just keep it as a backup or a hand-me-down upgrade for a family member. But the smarter part of me knows it will probably just sit in its box in my closet for years.just4U - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
I think you can get a bit more for the 460.. $60 is a fair price for it.. imo. Also "HIS" seems to offer the best deals on the 7870 (when they come up for sale..) Not sure if you can really get $50 for the bundle tho.. hah can always try!Bob Todd - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
YMMV of course. However I've sold two for that much, with the listings lasting less than 12 hours. And most people are happy to just get the code via email so you might not even have to ship anything.