NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Review: Bringing Balance To The Force
by Ryan Smith on March 26, 2013 8:00 AM ESTTotal War: Shogun 2
Our next benchmark is Shogun 2, which is a continuing favorite to our benchmark suite. Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. Even 2 years after its release it’s still a very punishing game at its highest settings due to the amount of shading and memory those units require.
Shogun at Ultra quality has been favoring our NVIDIA cards as of late. As a result the GTX 650 Ti Boost becomes the cheapest card to cross the 30fps threshold at these Ultra settings. Though at the more meaningful very high quality settings, we get something that’s more an archetypical outcome for these cards, with the GTX 650 Ti Boost in close pursuit of the 7850 and clearly ahead of the 7790. This is a shader bound game, so compared to the vanilla GTX 650 Ti, the boost variant picks up some performance, but it’s still not enough to even halve the gap to the GTX 660.
78 Comments
View All Comments
trajan2448 - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
Seems a little disingenuous to avoid comparisons to its direct competitor, the7790, which it handily beats and has better frame delivery times. It wasn't designed to go against the 7850, and you guys know that.FearfulSPARTAN - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
Nvidia seems to thinks so, cant remember the article but Nvidia said the gtx 650 ti boost beat the 7850 in several games, all of them just so happen to be nvidia optimized games though.Ryan Smith - Friday, March 29, 2013 - link
At $169 for the model we reviewed it sure is. It's the $149 1GB card that we need to look at if we want to make meaningful 7790 comparisons.marees - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
"the best card is going to be the card you can afford."The above conclusion should be revised as "the best card is going to be the card+power_supply+cooling_solution you can afford."
I would like a gddr5 card <=$200 which can play latest games at 1080p at the max settings allowed by budget. But I dont want to screw-up my entire pc due to wrong choice of Power Supply or Cooling system/case.
I am sure this has been discussed somewhere before, if not can Anand and his team create a bench / post article to analyse the playable settings of different gddr5 cards along with the additional investment required in terms of case & power supply, esp from a budget gamer point of view - a person for whom it is nice to be able to game, but actually uses the pc mostly for browsing facebook and doing office work.
rbfowler9lfc - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
Why "Ti Boost"? GTX 660, 660Ti, 650, 650Ti and now 650TiB. So many suffixes, that's confusing for the average joe! Why not just plain GTX 655?!?MrSpadge - Tuesday, April 2, 2013 - link
Agreed - this is totally ridiculous!They've already got up to 3 letters for prefixes (but always use the same GTX on any card half-interesting for actual 3D work), 100 different numbers in each generation, now an additional suffix "Ti". Yet that's still not enough, we need another suffix...
Based on performance these should be:
GT640 - GT640
GTX650 - GTX640
GTX650Ti - GTX650
GTX650Ti Boost - GTX655
Darbyothrill - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
This may very understandably not be a big consideration for many people, but this card appeals to me a great deal as I am interested in running a Steam Linux Box, and the AMD drivers are currently in an atrocious state for linux. I overall think the AMD cards are more compelling for the price right now, but this is a decently priced nVidia solution.vaibhav81 - Friday, April 12, 2013 - link
guys,I am going to build custom gaming pc. And I Have selected this card for my pc.Can you suggest me other compatible hardware requirement for this,e.g.MotherBoard,PSU,Processor,Case,monitor??lower price will be good.