Sub-$150 Pascal: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 & GTX 1050 Ti Review

Since the original The Witcher title came out in 2007, the series has become one of the best RPGs going. Each one of the titles in the series offers deep gameplay, amazing locales, and comprehensive lore. Wild Hunt, the series’ third game, also happens to be one of the best-looking games out there and requires a beefy PC to take great advantage of.

Testing: Our saved game starts us just outside Hierarch Square, where we begin a manual runthrough (literally – the run button is held down as much as possible) through and around the town, to wind up back at a bridge near a watermill (pictured below). The entire runthrough takes about 90 seconds. Please note that while ‘Ultra’ detail is used, NVIDIA’s HairWorks is not.

With as beautiful as The Witcher 3 is, it’s kind of surprising that we’re seeing these kinds of framerates from it. Sure, we’re not getting 60 FPS, but from hands-on testing, I can say that ~40 FPS is definitely playable. It’s not ideal, but we’re dealing with really affordable GPUs here. This performance still beats the pants off of current consoles.

Total War: ATTILA

For strategy fans, the Total War series needs no introduction. ATTILA is the latest in the series, which will remain true for only the next week, as Warhammer is due to launch. Thankfully, any recent Total War game is suitable for benchmarking, and our results are going to prove that.

Testing: ATTILA includes a built-in benchmark, so again, I’ve decided to use that. However, as I do with Metro, I stick to Fraps for framerate capturing as the game’s results page isn’t too convenient.

“But can it run ATTILA?” Seriously, this game is about as hardcore as it gets, as evidenced with the performance here. This kind of performance is actually playable given the nature of the game, but you don’t realistically need to deal with it: you can make a vast improvement by simply decreasing some of the settings. It seems very likely that you could achieve 60 FPS without making a severe impact to the quality.