Synthetic Benchmarks
To start off the testing on the GTX 1050 Ti Gaming X, I started off with our Synthetic benchmarks. They may not be a perfect representation of the exact FPS you will see in game, but they are consistent and give us a great comparison point between similar cards. Considering I was testing the Gaming X with its 1468 MHz clock speed (in gaming mode) against MSIs also overclocked regular 1050 Ti with a clock speed of 1342 MHz I knew I would need a consistent result to best compare them. So I started with 3DMark using the Fire Strike benchmark for DX11 and Time Spy for DX12. In Fire Strike using the performance setting (1080p), the Gaming X put up a 7989 graphics score compared to the 7618 of the regular Ti. This was enough to jump above the GTYX 960’s and isn’t a bad bump in performance with just more of an overclock. The Time Spy benchmark didn’t show as big of a gap with the different being 101 points.
My second test was Unigine’s Valley Benchmark on its highest setting and this is as close as a synthetic benchmark gets to being an in game result. This is because this is a good test to give an idea of performance of games using the Unigine game engine. That said the Gaming X pulled an average of 40.7 FPS. This was half an FPS higher than the less overclocked 1050 Ti putting it only slightly closer to the RX 470’s that were 5 or more FPS away.
Next, I tested using the Catzilla benchmark both because it’s an awesome one to watch a huge cat destroy half a city with its laser eyes and because it is a good test that can be run at multiple resolutions. I tested the 1050 Gaming X at 1080p, 1440p, and 4k to cover the whole range but I wanted to focus on the 1080p results because that is where this card is designed to run. With an 8711 it did get a nice bump with the extra overclock but the gap between it and the slightly more expensive 470 Gaming X is still very noticeable.
For the last test, I ran SteamVR to take a peek at potential virtual reality performance. The GTX 1050 Ti isn’t exactly designed for VR but I was curious to see how the card would do. The 3.5 score isn’t all that inspiring, but it does fall into the playable range though I wouldn’t expect too much.
