Nvidia quietly launched the new graphics card in their low-end spectrum the Nvidia GeForce 1050 (3 GB) a few days back, to date of announcement may seem odd since the newer 11th gen graphics cards are just around the corner, but people who especially follow Nvidia’s releases will agree on this, because the high-end graphics cards are going to launch soon but their low-end variants will arrive a bit later, so it is considered to be a smart move from Nvidia.
Originally this card was supposed to release only for the Chinese market, where it was supposed to be found at the local gaming booths or in the hands of the OEM developers, but due to its “anti-cryptocurrency” configuration they thought it would be beneficial to release it for the gaming community generally, it is not revealed how are they going to market the card, but the users who are planning to buy an entry level graphics card it will give another option in their entry level lineup by increasing the GeForce 1050 SKUs from just two to three. Hence, the consumers who are looking for this kind of graphics card should look forward to its release date that has not been announced yet.
Coming to its “anti-cryptocurrency” configuration, the specification of this card are somewhat between the other two siblings, based on the same Pascal architecture, 3.3 billion transistors and 5 texture units boosting the GP-107 GPU used in the card, with the 1050Ti at the top and the simpler version at last, according to Nvidia this card offers 10% more performance than the 2GB variant.
The specifications of this card will be the focus of this article from now on, it cannot be reviewed yet,but the specifications will tell us to some extent whether the Nvidia’s claims are accurate or not. It comes with the same number of CUDA cores as the 1050Ti that is 768 greater than the 2GB variant that has only 640 cores, the interesting thing is that, the clock speeds of the card is higher than both its counterparts at the base and boost clock being 1392Mhz and 1518Mhz respectively making it slightly faster than the 1050Ti and the 1050 2GB variant.
The memory speed is consistent throughout at 7Gbps while the memory interface width has been shrunk to 96-Bit from 128-Bit in the other cards, making the memory bandwidth 84GB/sec that is 25% less than the other cards. Shrinking the memory interface is the Nvidia’s answer to crypto-mining since it requires a wider interface to work, as the 3GB VRAM is just enough to mine the Ethereum, giving gamers the first crack at the miners.
Because the memory interface sacrifice this card will trail even the 1050 2GB, since fie filtering is not the only thing that determines the performance of the card in gaming, just like the case with the 1080Ti and Titan XP despite the titan having better configuration than the 1080Ti, it remains at the heels of the mighty 1080Ti in terms of performance.
Nevertheless, you should expect this card to excel at the esports games like FIFA, Overwatch and much praised DOTA 2, giving slightly better visuals than 1050, but the performance of both is expected to remain neck-to-neck, while due to the increased memory it will be able to run the AAA titles at a slightly lower graphical settings.
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NVidia’s claims about this graphics are somewhat delusional, but it cannot be said with authority before its release and testing. The release date and the pricing is still under the veil, but the MSRP should be in between $109 the release price of 1050 and $140 the release price of 1050Ti, but it will be available in between the $140 and $190 that are the current minimum prices of 1050 and 1050Ti respectively, unfortunately, due to the market structure.