Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
1080p at 60fps for next to nix.
This $200 price point is about as low as you can go, but you can still pick up what’s considered a ‘real’ gaming GPU. For budget gamers, what you’re aiming for is a card that can average around 60fps at 1080p in modern games — and you can generally get that, provided you turn the detail settings down to Medium/Normal.
That said, this category actually turned out to be the hardest for us to make a clear recommendation for this month, primarily due to two factors. The first is that Nvidia only just announced its budget Pascal cards (the GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti) right as we were going to print, so we’ve not had a chance to benchmark them yet.
The second is that AMD’s competing RX 460 isn’t a great card. While it doesn’t require much power and does manage to squeak in by delivering 60.3fps at Medium in our 16-game average, it has only half the stream processors and performance of the RX 470, but still ultimately costs two-thirds the price. In many games, it’s only marginally ahead of the last-gen GeForce GTX 950. That makes it quite poor value on an FPS-per-dollar scale — and one we’d avoid.
Moreover, based on the official specs and some early leaked benchmark results, the GTX 1050 and higherend 1050 Ti both look to outperform the RX 460 — the Ti by significant margins. The latter looks like it’ll come in at around $210 locally, so it’ll be a much better budget buy.
We’ll have a full review next month, but consider this a tentative recommendation for the 1050 Ti.