Nvidia has been the best supplier of the Graphics cards in all markets from the ultra high-end research computers to the low-end gaming PCs. However, Nvidia is mostly known for its GeForce lineup. The 10-series pascal cards have been around for two years now, and the budget-friendly Pascal grads were announced a few months after that by the name of GTX 1050 lineup.
The better version of the 1050 lineup the GeForce GTX 1050Ti was considered to be the best card for budget gamers at the time who want to enjoy best games with suitable framerates and best graphics at 1080p resolution. The card was specially designed to be used a console killer, and Nvidia made sure that this card provides sufficient price to performance ratio so that people shift from consoles to PC gaming.
However, unfortunately, the pricing of this card was affected by shortages and mining too making the $150 card’s price close to $300 during Q1 of 2018. Quite a time has been passed since these cards are announced, and price of it is tamed nowadays; it’s a good time to revisit this card and gauge its performance over the years.
Specifications
Let’s get the specification bit out of the way first; the Pascal architecture based card is designed for 1080p gaming. With this card Nvidia debuted the power efficient GP107 GPU, that does not require additional power out of the socket, the 75 Watt TDP can be drawn out from the motherboard, and the smaller form factor allows it to fit in any cheaply build system even old PCs may also support this card.
The 132mm2 die is built with the better 14nm FinFet process and houses 768 CUDA cores, 12 stream processors, 48 texture mapping units accompanied by 32 render output units. Additionally, to make it suitable for the current gen titles, Nvidia put 4GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 7000Mhz with 128-bit memory interface making the total memory bandwidth 112Gb/s. The price of the card at the time of release was only $140, due to shortages and mining it got close to $300 and now it is retailing at $200 that is higher than the MSRP but a good deal nonetheless.
From now on we will look at the performance in games of this card over the years and see how this card has aged.
2016
Since this card was released at the end of 2016, it pretty much aced most of the games released at that time, less demanding titles were a piece of cake for this card even at ultra setting with 1080p resolution, while for the heavyweight AAA titles it is recommended to turn down the level of detail to minimum settings in order to hit the sweet 60FPS mark.
Tom Clancy’s The Division was one of the most demanding titles that was difficult to handle even for the mighty GTX 1080 at 4k, but it handled this game at 1080p to a handful extent, at ultra settings we were able to get 32FPS on average, that was not good for a first-person shooter that requires 60FPS cranking the details down would make the experience worthwhile.
On the other hand, it handled a less demanding game very well at ultra settings such as the 2016 game of the year Overwatch was a joyful experience on this graphics card, the game can be played at 1080p with Epic settings with locked 60FPS.
2017
2017 was the best year regarding quality games; we got the long-awaited sequels of the magnificent games, such as Halo wars 2, Call of duty World War 2, etc. Most of these games required beefy specifications to run at a higher resolution, but a mid-range graphics card such as GTX 1050Ti can play these games at medium settings.
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Call of duty WWll was a treat to play if you have a GTX 1050Ti on board, on ultra settings at 1080p with framerates touching the sweet spot of 60. While a more demanding game such as the Assassins Creed Origins can be played with framerates just above 30 at max settings that to is very good since it’s a third person RPG.
2018 & prospects
2018 has been rather quiet for PC games, we have some good console exclusives like the God of War, but PC platform has been more of a silent platform. However, we have multiplatform games like Far cry five that is an open world first-person shooter with RPG elements can be played rather well on GTX 1050Ti at ultra settings with framerates maxing at 40. For games that are yet to release it would be safe to say that GTX 1050Ti will still provide best 1080p performance but with an expense of details settings low or medium details would be a better choice.
Verdict
The best mid-range beast GTX 1050Ti from Nvidia is still having strong 1080p performance, but for future, one might want to crank down some settings to make the experience pleasurable.
