NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Review: Bringing Balance To The Force
by Ryan Smith on March 26, 2013 8:00 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Up next is our legacy title for 2013, Crysis: Warhead. The stand-alone expansion to 2007’s Crysis, at over 4 years old Crysis: Warhead can still beat most systems down. Crysis was intended to be future-looking as far as performance and visual quality goes, and it has clearly achieved that. We’ve only finally reached the point where single-GPU cards have come out that can hit 60fps at 1920 with 4xAA.
Crysis has shown to favor raw ROP performance and memory bandwidth above shader performance, so it’s been a rough game for NVIDIA’s Kepler cards, which typically have less memory bandwidth than their AMD competition. In this case at Gamer quality the GTX 650 Ti Boost still can’t crack 60fps, and it’s trailing the 7850 by 12%. On the other hand it has 50% more memory bandwidth than the 7790, so the 1GB variant may be interesting to see here if it can achieve similar results as the 2GB variant.
It’s interesting to note though that because this game depends so much on ROP performance and memory bandwidth that this is as close as we’ll see the GTX 650 Ti Boost get to the GTX 660. There’s less than 5% separating them at Gamer quality; these cards have plenty of shading/texturing performance, but not enough ROP performance to satisfy Crysis.
Jumping to our minimum framerates, we do see things open up a bit as shader bottlenecking does occur in a few places. The result is that the GTX 650 Ti Boost falls well behind the 7850 in minimums, and the full GK106 GTX 660 pulls ahead. Still, the difference between the GTX 650 Ti and its boost variant is nothing short of staggering; the boost card leads by 45% here, relying heavily on those ROP and memory bandwidth advantages.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
78 Comments
View All Comments
piroroadkill - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
1GiB 7790s are about the same price here as 1GiB 7850s - no joke, for example:http://www.ebuyer.com/492110-asus-hd-radeon-hd-779...
http://www.ebuyer.com/393396-asus-hd-7850-1gb-gddr...
So what's the point? Save a bit more money, get a 7850 2GB and overclock the balls off it...
HighTech4US - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
7850's 1GB are going EOL so if you want one better grab it quick.http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/30865-radeon-hd-...
piroroadkill - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
That makes sense, it replaces that part. In that case, you're getting screwed at that price point, and you should pick up a 7850 instead as soon as possible.Myself, I don't need an upgrade yet, my 6950 2GiB with unlocked shaders is fine..
chizow - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
This is probably the first Kepler part Nvidia has launched so far that actually comes off looking like a good value. It's probably where price:performance should've been a year ago, but it has taken nearly a full year for 28nm prices to trickle down to this point. Still, it's pretty amazing how much Nvidia has milked Kepler. They now have 7-8 SKUs (not counting OC variants) in this sub-$300 market based off of 3 ASICs (GK104, GK106, GK107). Reminds me of that Mickey Mouse cartoon where they keep slicing off razor thin pieces of bean. At least this part makes sense however and fills a pretty cavernous void in that $150-$200 range between the 660 and old 650Ti.Valid point to be made however about the huge disparity in gaming bundles. AMD really is kicking Nvidia's teeth in with their gaming bundles of late. Nvidia's F2P bundle stinks compared to AMD's recent offerings of Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinity, Tomb Raider etc. In a $150-200 market where one can easily account for 1/3 to 1/4th of the sticker price as a hot AAA game, the perceived bundle value does matter. I'm sure it helped the 650Ti with AC3, but that card was a bit underperforming relative to even last-gen cards. The cards in the $150+ range are much better performers, actually providing tangible upgrades from most last-gen parts in this range (GTX 560, 6850 etc).
Bob Todd - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Spot on about the huge disparity in the game bundles. In the last two months I've picked up a 2GB 7850 and two 7870s. Without Never Settle Reloaded I honestly probably wouldn't have bought any of them. Sold two of the bundles and kept one.HighTech4US - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
A number of problems with this review.#1 The latest Nvidia VHQL driver is 3.14.22 and was released yesterday. It shows improvements in Sleeping Dogs. So why is this review using an older 314.21 driver set?
http://techreport.com/news/24560/new-geforce-drive...
#2 Also the HD 7850 1GB is going EOL so why even do comparisons with a card that won't exist very soon.
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/30865-radeon-hd-...
tfranzese - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Concerning #1, are all fanboys this stupid? You do realize that a lot of work goes into these reviews and they're not done in a < 24 hour turnaround.DanNeely - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Re #2; even after being EOLed by the manufacturer the old models tend to linger in the channel for a while.whyso - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Good card compared to the 7790 but the 7850 2 gb is still a better buy. The two games you get with it and the fact that if you overclock the 7850 is going to eat the 650 ti boost (the 650 ti boost does not have much overclocking room at over 1050 mhz vs the 860 of the 7850). Competes much better in the low end (1 gb) than with the higher end.Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Ok, instead of just assuming Nvidia is evil.WHY didn't they just drop the price of the GTX660 to like 170 MSRP? I mean, if they're just fusing off part of the card, their cost is the same, if not higher due to whatever labor is involved in fusing off that SMX. This, IMO is a card that shouldn't even exist. The GTX660 is priced far too high for the performance offered. Random FPS hickups or no, all my recommendations are AMD until Nvidia stops pricing themselves out of competition. This, coming from someone who was, for a long time, Nvidia only ever since I had 3 horrid experiences with ATI in a row, back in the day.