GeForce GTX 650 Ti review - Introduction

It's time for one more product release from NVIDIA's Kepler series, a product that needs to fill the gap in-between the Radeon HD 7700 and 7800 series from AMD. See, NVIDIA recently released the somewhat entry level GTX 650, but it is performing at Radeon 7700 levels game performance wise. That means that there was a gap left open up to the Radeon 7800 series. To fill that gap NVIDIA is now releasing one more product, it's the all new GeForce GTX 650 Ti (with that Ti indicating a distinct difference).

See, the regular GTX 650 comes heavily castrated with just 384 shader cores wheras the Ti model is released with a much better 768 CUDA cores (shader processors) and a 925 MHz GPU clock. So that's nearly double the processing performance. The budget graphics card series for gamers therefore just got a little more interesting. Albeit we say that 145 USD/EUR should not exactly really carry the tag 'budget'.

But if you do not want to (or cannot) spend heaps of money on your HTPC card or simply game in resolutions lower than 1920x1080 then for 150 bucks the GeForce GTX 650 Ti positions itself smack down in-between AMD's Radeon HD 7770 and 7850, and that really is a comfortable spot to be in for many of you.

Being based on the Kepler GPU architecture obviously NVIDIA did not want to make yet another separate chip. So The GTX 650 Ti is the same one used on the regular GTX 660, yup the GTX 650 Ti uses the "GF106" silicon opposed to the GK107 being used on the regular 650 model (it's confusing as heck we know).

However, that GK106 silicon is armed with 768 active shader processor cores divided over four processor clusters running at 930 MHz on the reference products. That means the GeForce GTX 650 Ti packs decent enough punch whilst consuming a relatively small amount of power. Interesting to know is that the 650 series all have a fixed 3D clock, so there is no dynamic boost aka Turbo functionality or anything. Thanks to that it actually overclocks really well as you will find out in our AIB/AIC reviews.

The board partners will release two models in the 650 Ti series, one with 1 GB and the other one with 2GB of 5GHz GDDR5. The big bad limiter however will be the the memory bus width, it is 128-bit memory and that will seriously impact on the overall rendering and compute performance. 

Overall the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, as we'll demonstrate, has enough horsepower to step into the DX11 games arena at up-to 1600x1200 resolution, with the somewhat dated titles a resolution of 1920x1080/1200 will actually be playable as well. And if you can forfeit to medium quality settings in a game and don't do any crazy stuff antialiasing wise, it's definitely plausible to play games really nicely at such resolutions versus acceptable framerates.

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti graphics cards will be launched in the 150 USD/EUR price range. In this review we'll look at the model from NVIDIA itself, thus the reference product.

Have a peek at the GeForce GTX 650 Ti reference model, and then head on over next page please.