In-Game Benchmarks

For my next set of tests, I jumped right into the important numbers, overall in game performance. I also added the new Deus Ex as a benchmark. Now keep in mind both of these cards are designed to handle less demanding games at 60+ FPS but most of our tests are testing today and yesterday's demanding games with their settings completely cranked up. With all of our tests being run at multiple resolutions and in some cases tested at multiple settings we end up with a total of 33 results for each card. Given all of the cards tested it gets very hard to sort through it all, so first I like to break things down into three categories to let everyone see just an overall look at performance at both 1080p and 1440p. In this case, we are looking at two different cards, so I have broken it down twice.

First, we have the GTX 1050 results. At first glance, there is a lot of red in both charts, especially at 1440p. We have to remember that the GTX 1050 only have 2 gigs of vRAM and is not designed at all for 1440p gaming. So even having 8 games being playable is huge in my opinion, especially given the settings we test at. At 1080p the GTX 1050 does much better than the RX 460 that it is directly competing with. The 460 had 1 green, 6 yellow, and 7 red. We have added more tests but are getting fewer in below 30 FPS and more in the playable and idea ranges.

Like the GTX 1050, the GTX 1050 Ti is also not designed for 1440p gaming at all, even with its slightly higher vRAM and CUDA cores. It does, however, help push two more games into the playable range at that resolution over the 1050. At 1080p it actually performs REALLY well with 6 games in the 60+ range without adjusting the settings at all, and only three that aren’t playable with Ashes of the Singularity always being one of those for the mid to low-end cards.

Of course, I don’t hide all of our actual results, they are all here below for anyone to check out. There were a few things that stood out to me when sorting through them. For starters, across the board the 1050’s outperformed the RX 460, even getting a little close to the RX 470 in a few of the tests. The Doom Vulkan test was interesting, typically all cards benefit from running Vulkan, but in my testing, the 1050 and 1050 Ti both performed better in Open GL. The other really abnormal result was Hitman. I ended up testing this one 3 or 4 times on each card because I was sure it was wrong but the results were always the same, even with another 1050 Ti. The 1050 Ti actually performed below the GTX 1050 in all four of those tests. I thought it may have been a driver issue but looking at it more I wonder if the higher clock speed of the GTX 1050 actually helped more here. It is possible that the lower CUDA count and less memory didn’t hurt the GTX 1050 like it normally does. Similar to how sometimes in CPU benchmarks a CPU with only a few cores can be much faster than high-end multi-core CPUs due to having a higher clock speed. On the topic of driver issues, I ran into a few times where games seemed to want to run at a little higher refresh than my monitor was wanting, causing a flashing black screen until I changed it or tabbed out and back in. It might be an issue with a cord or our monitor as well, but I did want to mention it here on the off chance that it was an issue with the release drivers.