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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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.