GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Review

Battlefield 3 is a rare treat when it comes to PC gaming. Rather than develop the game for the consoles first and then port over to the PC, DICE built the game with the PC in mind from the getgo. It’s graphically one of the most impressive games ever created, so it’s of little surprise that it finds itself in our testing.

Manual Run-through: Operation Guillotine (chapter 5) is the basis for our benchmarking here, as it features a lot of smoke, water, debris and is reliable to benchmark repeatedly. Our run starts us at the top of a hill, where we immediately rise up and run down it. We make our way down to the riverbed below, and end our run once we hit the first set of stairs.

It should come as a surprise to no one, but NVIDIA’s GTX 650 Ti isn’t able to handle many games at resolutions above 1080p. Even there things can become sketchy, especially in blockbuster games such as Battlefield 3. Maxed-out, we eked about 31 FPS on average from the card at that resolution – aka: it wasn’t very playable.

Things change once you disable anti-aliasing, SSAO and shadow blur. Do that, and you can expect average framerates in the 60 FPS area (min: 37, avg: 59 to be exact).