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Nvidia has released the latest entries into the GTX 10-Series of graphics cards: the 1050 and 1050 Ti. These cards are firmly aimed at a budget market with prices of £115 and £139 respectively, even cheaper than the previous-gen GTX 950.
The 1050’s specs were leaked last month, so Nvidia’s announcement doesn’t come as a huge surprise. The GTX 1050 is based on the GP107-400 chip with 640 CUDA cores, has a base clock speed of 1,354MHz and a boost clock speed of 1,455MHz. Typical configurations will have 2GB of GDDR5 memory.
The GTX 1050Ti, meanwhile, has 768 CUDA cores (the same as the current GTX 950) with a base clock speed of 1,290MHz and a boost clock speed of 1,392MHz. The Ti will typically come with 4GB of GDDR5 memory.
Both GPUs use a 128-bit memory bus with improved bandwidth, up from 6.6Gbps to 7Gbps. Various other enhancements in memory compression ought to add to the performance. GTX 1050 graphics cards should be more power efficient, having a 75W rated thermal design, 15W lower than the GTX 950.
In practical terms, this means that the cards will allow PC gamers to comfortably play the latest 1080p games at 60 frames per second while the GPU sips just 75W.
Nvidia claims that the 1050 Ti is, on average, 40 per cent faster and more than 128 per cent more power efficient than the "closest competitive product" at stock speeds. This was based on tests run against AMD’s RX460.
While Nvidia is dominating the graphics card space, AMD is expected to release more GPUs based on its Polaris architecture in 2017.
The low prices of these new cards along with the introductions of the GTX 1060, 1070, 1080, 1080 and Titan X are certain to leave retailers with unwanted stocks of existing GTX 950, 960 and 970s.
As one example, Maplin has already cut the price of the GTX 950 from £144.99 to £114.99 to bring it on par with the new card, but customers will almost certainly be better off buying the GTX 1050 at the same price.
The GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti will be available from next Tuesday.
