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.
Although we generally shun automated gaming benchmarks, we do like to run at least one to see how our GPUs scale when used in a ‘timedemo’-type scenario. Futuremark’s 3DMark 11 is without question the best such test on the market, and it’s a joy to use, and watch. The folks at Futuremark are experts in what they do, and they really know how to push that hardware of yours to its limit.
Similar to a real game, 3DMark 11 offers many configuration options, although many (including us) prefer to stick to the profiles which include Performance, and Extreme. Depending on which one you choose, the graphic options are tweaked accordingly, as well as the resolution. As you’d expect, the better the profile, the more intensive the test. The benchmark doesn’t natively support 2560×1600, so to benchmark with that, we choose the Extreme profile and simply change the resolution.
According to 3DMark, GIGABYTE’s overclocked GTX 650 Ti performs close to 40% faster than AMD’s Radeon HD 7770 1GHz edition. This seems reasonable based on our earlier test results, but it’s important to bear in mind that AMD’s card can easily be found substantially cheaper than this GTX 650 Ti. Tis the joys of GPU buying.