NVIDIA Releases A Bit Of An Odd GPU: 3GB GeForce GTX 1050

A 3GB version of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1050 has been rumored about for some time, and today, we finally see the card rise to the surface – at least by way of appearing in plain text form on NVIDIA’s website. It’s a bit of an odd beast, though… almost too odd, making us question its reason for existence.

The 1050 Ti is a vastly superior card to the 1050, despite the fact that the only difference in name is that simple “Ti”. Moving from one to another doubles the VRAM, and increases the core count by 20%. At that level, a 20% increase in cores is massive (OK, it’d be massive on any scale).

ASUS’ GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

Based on these specs alone, the 1050 at 3GB sounds pretty good, since the Ti only adds a single extra GB, and at this performance level, that’s highly unlikely to make a difference over 3GB. Meanwhile, 3GB is a lot better than 2GB, so we can see the allure of a card like this if you need to go the low-end route.

But wait, there’s more: the 3GB version of the 1050 cripples the memory design, dropping the expected 112GB/s of bandwidth down to 84GB/s. What the real-world detriment will be from that, I’m not sure, but it’s a bit strange to me to give people a higher-density version that ends up offering less bandwidth in the end. It’s effectively trading one caveat for another.

That said, the 3GB 1050 is interesting in that it still matches the Ti’s core count, and it happens to have a much faster base clock – 102MHz higher on 3GB than 4GB Ti. Given that, the memory issue could be negated somewhat, and this card could technically deliver more performance than the Ti in some games.

Ultimately, we come to a question of why this new GPU offering even exists at all. Maybe it’s just to get people like me to write about it. If so, the plan worked incredibly well. Or, maybe it’s because this is the last release needed before the next major series is launched. The rumor mill tells us that next-gen GeForce could launch next month, the month after that, the month after that one, and the month after that. In other words, sometime this year, but probably sooner than later.