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.
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royalcrown - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
yeah, but the $$$ of a 660 is dropping every week, i just dont really see the point of the 650 ti when you have the 650 and 660 and they all have overclocked versions as well. a few places have the 2 gig 660 for $199.00royalcrown - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
well, if the new 650 is 149, then I guess that'd be a great price preformance vs the 660. I suppose it depends on what they cost in real life.SAAB_340 - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Is it just me thinking the 1GB model might be a bad idea given that these cards with the 192bit memory bus have asymetrical memory placement. The card only has 768MB of the memory at full bandwidth while the last 256MB will only give a 3rd of the bandwidth. (it's the same with the 2GB card but there 1.5GB has full bandwidth.) 768MB is not much with todays standards. Looking forward to the test showing how much that will impact on performance.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
It's absurd, just like the AMD 1 GB card that was just announced. I've read that Skyrim with high resolution textures needs 2 GB at minimum and I doubt most people consider Skyrim a high-end game.Parhel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
The high resolution texture pack didn't really affect memory usage that much when I installed it. It was below 1GB both before and after. That's at 2560x1600, no AA. Maybe with mods it's a different story, but I think if you're trying to show where 1GB hits a wall, you'd be better off starting with a different game.mczak - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
Personally I'd think it would make more sense to just have a 1.5GB card (at say right between the 149$ of the 1GB model and the 169$ of the 2GB model). All the same performance characteristics as the 2GB model (as you say the those asymmetric configurations are a little dubious or at least suspect anyway) while being cheaper. But marketing doesn't like 1.5GB cards (and as intended competitor of 7850 2GB of course "looks" much better).drew_afx - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
How about Performance per dollar(retail) comparison for these very similarly spec'd cards?Make up some metric for 3d games(dx9/10/11), encoding/decoding, OpenCL, etc
Because a lot of games are CPU intensive, for potential buyers, FPS comparison on a specific benchmarking setup is not going to reflect equally in real life.
Also if a game can run 60+min. fps & maybe 75fps avg., then the card is as good as it can get for average people. This comparison proves X is better than Y when used with top of the line CPU Mobo RAM combo, but thats it. Many don't go for $2000+ gaming computer setup and put sub $170 GPU in it. What about overclocking potential? It's like comparing non-K cpu to unlocked one (just to put it in a perspective)
CiccioB - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
Still, the game list is quite obsolete.It is not time to replace Crysis: warhead with Crysis3 and Dirt: Showdown with Dirt3?
And adding Skyrim? Last Tomb Raider?
Gamers would like to know how today games run on these cards, not only if one GPU is faster than another playing ancient games with obsolete engines.
This thing has already been pointed out during Titan's review. There someone suggested that games choice has been made to review games that are better on AMD rather than nvidia GPUs.
However, no answer was made, either to give reasons on why so many old obsolete games or whether the list was going to be changed/enlarged.
Still, new games are not considered for no apparent reason.
After having spent so many efforts in upgrading the site's appearance, which I like very much, it would be nice also to spend a bit of time to make a new game benchmark suite. It's 2013 and many games have been published after Crysis: warhead and Dirt: showdown.
Thanks in advance
Ryan Smith - Friday, March 29, 2013 - link
We'll be adding two more games next month (or whenever I can find the time to validate them). Crysis: Warhead isn't going anywhere since it's our one legacy title for comparing DX10 cards to. And DiRT: Showdown is newer than DiRT 3, not older. It was Showdown that we replaced 3 with. Skyrim was also removed, since it's badly CPU limited on higher-end cards.medi01 - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
Any reason 7850 and not 7790 (direct competitor) is marked black?