Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti...........
Not a Star Wars fan, Zak Storey warns you that this isn’t the budget graphics card you’re looking for.
Linus might to stick two fingers up at Nvidia, but there’s no denying the quality of their GPUs or is there? We test out the budget offering to see if it’s good enough to buy.
Nvidia’s transition across to the 16nm FinFET manufacturing process brought with it huge leaps for the vast majority of its GPUs. The power-hungry GTX 1080 showed us that gaming at 1440p with high refresh rates was possible off a single card; the GTX 1070 packed the power of a Titan into an affordable price point; and the GTX 1060 provided as much performance as last tier’s first flagship at a lower cost than a good meal out.
It was all going so well: clock speeds skyrocketed past 2GHz, CUDA core counts shot up… Alas, it seems the mighty green giant had to stumble somewhere, and that somewhere is with the Asus ROG Strix GTX 1050 Ti, to give it its full name.
Traditionally, the X50 series has been an awe-inspiring thing of beauty. Whether it’s the 750 Ti’s powerless design, or the GTX 950’s fantastic price to performance ratio, Nvidia really pushed those boundaries, proving time and time again that you could innovate in the mid-to-low range just as much as the high end. So what’s so bad about the GTX 1050 Ti that it warrants such a scalding paragraph? Let’s find out.
The GPU powering the heart of the GTX 1050 Ti comes packing a whopping 768 CUDA cores, 48 texture units and 32 ROPs. Compare that to the GTX 950, and you’ll see that it also had 768 CUDA cores, 48 texture units and 32 ROPs. But then, that’s fair, right? It’s a process shrink; it’s not something you’d expect to change. We would be inclined to agree with you if it weren’t for how Nvidia has specced the rest of its 16nm lineup. The GTX 1060, for instance, increased its CUDA core count from 1,024 to 1,280, forcing the transistor count to increase by 1.46 billion in the process.
Take the card out of the ecosystem entirely, however, and you’re greeted with a powerful GPU more than capable of tackling the latest games at 1080p Ultra settings comfortably. The problem arises when you look just slightly up the chain at the GTX 1060 3GB. The fact is, you can currently buy a compact GTX 1060 3GB for exactly the same price (£190/$240) as this card. And if you did, your frame rates would increase by 12–19 frames per second on average at 1080p. That’s a huge difference, and it’s something that really puts us off recommending this card.
We know what you’re thinking, though. The GTX 1050 Ti has 4GB of memory compared to the 1060’s 3GB. Surely that counts for something here? Well, to be honest, not that much. When testing our titles, we noticed frame rates across all three major resolutions varied by 1–3 frames per second when it came to our 3GB and 6GB variants of the 1060, and that’s something we can mostly dial down to the 3GB variant’s fewer CUDA cores.
The Asus ROG Strix GTX 1050 Ti’s aftermarket solution is a crisp reminder that you can innovate and design a graphics card that still looks classy at a respectable price point. The dual-fan cooler is subtle and quiet, with 0dB fan technology ensuring temperatures remain low and noise is minimal, and the included backplate and hint of RGB AURA tech that Asus is so well known for glams up an otherwise budget purchase, making this a truly solid aftermarket card.
If you’ve not upgraded for some time (we’re talking pre-GTX 600 series), the GTX 1050 Ti is a fantastic solution to alleviate all of your 1080p gaming woes. However, if you’ve got the cash, you should spring for the 3GB GTX 1060 variant instead. For the time being, 3GB is more than plenty for 1080p. Anything more than that and you’re going to need far more processing power anyway.