PASCAL is perhaps the best technology to come out of Nvidia in a long time. It powers their 10 series and as our glowing review of the 1060 states, it offers excellent infrastructure to play games on ULTRA settings. So it would have made sense if Nvidia would have kept their PASCAL series and incidentally their 10 series for the higher price bracket. Offering it only to the elite of the PC gaming world.
But with the advent of Nvidia 1050 and 1050 Ti, Nvidia brings PASCAL to the highly contested and highly competitive budget market. With the Nvidia 1050 priced at somewhere around INR 10-11K, it is placed in direct competition with AMD RX 460, the AMD 470, along with all the older generation graphic cards.
Introduction
With the launch of the GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050, Nvidia fleshes out their 10-series GPU lineup with six models (not counting the 1080 Ti, which will likely come in January). Both cards use the same GP107 GPU, built on Samsung’s 14nm FinFET node, but the GTX 1050 disables one of the six SM clusters, giving it slightly less performance than the 1050 Ti. Perhaps more importantly (depending on the games and settings you select), the 1050 also ships with 2GB GDDR5—no more, no less.
Limiting the 1050 to 2GB might seem like a regressive step, but an observation of how AMD slashed the prices of their RX 460 and RX 470 would indicate that AMD what was coming, and whatever was coming is GOOD.
SETUP
Setting up the 1050 was a breeze. After the efforts that I had to put in the last time when I had to insert the 1060 into my system, I had learnt a lesson or two. The 1050 is obviously smaller than the 1060 and is more easier to handle. Plus it does not require and extra power connection. So the setup became a simple plug and play in my case.
Below are my system specifications.
Note how my entry level AMD chip can bottleneck some games. This bottleneck is more apparent in games when using the 1050 as compared to when I was using the 1060.
Benchmarks:
Especially when I played Gears Of War 4 and Ashes of Singularity. The FPS drops were more prominent, and I had to turn the settings down a notch before I can get some stability in that section. This plateau was around the medium setting mark, at which both games offered stable framerates. The card performed better when I was playing Witcher 3, and I was able to keep the settings at high for most of my time.
Many will notice that the 1050 is dishing out numbers very similar to the 950. A last generation card which can be found for the same price range as the 1050 these days, and maybe even cheaper if one waits. But that’s just it, it’ last generation, so while the 950 maybe churning out similar numbers for current and maybe near future games, the 1050 is expected to compete and be sufficient for games coming out atleast for the next 3 years.
The Games:
However Nvidia didn’t push this card as a high end offering, but as an alternative to multiplayer online gamers and in that section the 1050 proves to be satisfactory. I tried out LOL, DOTA 2, CS GO, Hearthstone, Elder Scroll Legends and the GWENT beta. All running butter smooth on the card with no problems whatsoever.
This is the sector that Nvidia is targeting with the 1050 and the 1050Ti. And this is the budget that most gamers settle on when they go out looking for a graphic card. Having said that while the 1050 Ti does come in direct competition with AMD RX 460, the 1050 is practically uncontested at its INR 10-11K price. This would be great news, though if it wasn’t this damned difficult to find a Nvidia GTX 1050 online. Almost all sites are selling the 1050 Ti variation of the 10 series but its very tough to find the 1050 version anywhere. Even Nvidia homepage links to buy the 1050 leads to the page of GTX 1050 Ti on their partners vendors. This might put off buyers who trust online retailers, but for people who employ local vendors, procuring the GTX 1050 should not be a problem.
VERDICT