by Rob Williams on December 17, 2012 in Graphics & Displays
NVIDIA does such a great job filling holes in its product line-ups, that sometimes it manages to fill a void we didn’t even know existed. The GTX 650 Ti is a perfect example of this. This GK106-based card sits close to the GTX 660, and with GIGABYTE’s overclocked GV-N65TOC-1GI, we’ll see if we can close the gap even further.
Many have called Sleeping Dogs the “Asian Grand Theft Auto“, but the game does a lot different that helps it stand out of the crowd. In lieu of supplying the player with a gazilion guns, Sleeping Dogs focuses heavily on hand-to-hand combat. There are also many collectibles that can be found to help upgrade your character and unlock special fighting abilities – and if you happen to enjoy an Asian atmosphere, this is one tree you’ll want to bark up.
Manual Run-through: Our run here takes place during the chapter “Amanda”, on a dark, dank night. Our saved game begins us at the first apartment in the game (in North Point), though that’s not where we begin capturing our framerate. Instead, we walk outside and request our motorcycle from the garage. Once set, we begin recording framerates and drive along a specific path all the way to Aberdeen, which takes about two minutes.
Sleeping Dogs hasn’t been praised too much for its graphical capabilities, but I believe it should be. It’s a great-looking and highly-detailed game that, as these graphs can prove, has the ability to punish any current graphics card. This is especially true with the 650 Ti, which again, is unable to generate very playable framerates at our default settings. Fortunately, improvement is a mere two options away. Disable SSAO and decrease AA to low, and you can expect to see average framerates of about 80, with nary a dip below 60 at the low-end.