GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Review

Throughout our testing, NVIDIA’s GTX 650 Ti proved itself to be quite capable in most games at 1080p, with some tweaking needed on occasion to enable truly playable framerates. A common hindrance on performance across some of our tested games was screen-space ambient occlusion – SSAO for short. This advanced shadow / lighting technique is extremely hardware-intensive, so if you’re experiencing poor performance in any game, make sure that option isn’t enabled. Past that, disabling anti-aliasing usually remedies things fast. Overall, the loss of SSAO and AA are not really a big deal – especially not when you’d need a GPU twice as expensive to make up for it.

This of course begs the question – is the GTX 650 Ti worth picking up? How about GIGABYTE’s overclocked variant which costs $20 or so more? Generally speaking, at $140, a stock-clocked GTX 650 Ti is very worth it. Our overclocked model, at best, will add 5 FPS to our average framerates – without those extra 5 FPS, our end recommended settings for each game would still remain the same.

The GTX 650 Ti is quite a bit faster than the HD 7770, but what about the HD 7850, a card we didn’t test? This is a tough comparison, because that card generally starts out at a price-point $40 higher than the stock-clocked 650 Ti, and $20 higher than the GIGABYTE model we took a look at. It’s only about 10% faster than the GTX 650 Ti in our quick testing, however, so both the reference GTX 650 Ti and GIGABYTE’s variant seem to be the better buy.

After pouring over the results, I couldn’t imagine anyone going wrong with the GTX 650 Ti that look to power today’s hottest games at modest settings at no higher than 1080p. The card’s 1GB framebuffer could be a concern for certain games and your goals, however, so bear that in mind (don’t expect AA on every game).

All said, both the stock-clocked GTX 650 Ti and GIGABYTE’s overclocked model here are fantastic offerings for their price-points. In general, you can expect it to be about 30% faster than AMD’s HD 7770 and 10~15% slower than the HD 7850.

GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB

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