NVIDIA 1050: Bringing PC Gaming to the Masses

NVIDIA 1050 is the cheapest card you can get with the Pascal architecture in the market now. But how does it stand up regarding performance? Surprisingly good! The new card can bring the cost of PC gaming down to Console levels.

We reviewed the MSI 1050 and not the founder’s edition this time around. The reason being, NVIDIA decided not to do a Founders edition for the 1050, and there is a whole range of partner cards which come with different designs, ports and some are over-clocked.

Starting with the design, the 1050 is really small. It is about half the size of a 1080 and should slide into small cases. On the top, there’s a heat sink and one large fan. There is no backplate on the back. On the side, you have the PCIe connector, and there’s the MSI branding on the other side. For connectivity, you get three ports: Display Port 1.4, HDMI 2.0 and DVI.

The heatsink was held together with 4 screws and removing it was extremely easy. Also, there was just one connector to the fan.

Specs:

14nm Processor
3.3 Billion Transistors
768 CUDA Cores
1354 MHz Base Clock
1455MHz Boost Clock
2GB VRAM
75 Watts Power

The best part of 1050 that I was most impressed with is that it operates with very less power, about 75W. The GPU does not require an external power supply! It is entirely driven by the PCIe slot.

Coming to the actual performance, the 1050 was extremely impressive. We’ve not reviewed the RX 460 from AMD, but it is at the same price level of 1050 and the 1050’s performance is a lot better. I play a lot of DOTA, and I did not notice one bit of difference between my 1080 and the 1050 which is no understatement. I always got above 120fps with everything set to high. But when switching to other games like GTA V and Mafia III, the performance was obviously not the best.

I got about 40-50 fps in GTA V with everything set to high. For Mafia III, the game was smooth, but it looked bad because we could not get high-quality textures. This was mainly because of the lack of V-RAM.

The 1050 is superb value if you intend to play games like DOTA 2, CS:GO and a small level of intense games. But the solution for that will be 1050Ti which gives double the VRAM, improving the texture quality in games like GTA V and Witcher III.

One of the recent games I tested the 1050 with, is Planet Coaster where there is a lot of intense calculations being done real time. The game ran without any hiccup, and I did not notice a lot of difference between 1050 and 1080.

Benchmarks

I tested it on my Primary PC with the following specs:

Asus Maximus VIIIHero Alpha
Intel i7 6700K
16GB DDR4 Corsair RAM
Corsair RM1000X

All games were stored on SSDs and ran on 1080p screen. Also, we’ve not used any of the other entry level cards. So we won’t be benchmarking the 1050 against other cards. Instead, we just have the highest fps and the lowest fps we got with the following games.

Battlefield 1(Medium): 72, 64
DOTA(High): 180, 140
Overwatch(Ultra): 90, 84
Starcraft 2(Ultra): 224, 169
Doom(High): 60, 51
GTA V(High): 78, 51
Project Cars(Medium): 40, 35
Witcher 3(Medium): 54, 41
Rise of the Tomb Raider(High): 45, 26
Tom Clancy’s the Division(Ultra): 30, 24
Planet Coaster(High): 85, 59

The 1050 costs about Rs. 10,000 and it is an exceptional value for money, especially if you play games like DOTA and CS:GO. The 1050Ti though seems like a better option if you play other latest tiles for high texture quality.

The 1050 brings the price of PC gaming way low. This can bring good quality sub 50K PCs without compromising on the games. Also, this is not just for new PCs. The 1050 is a fantastic card to get if you already own a non-gaming PC(Chances are, everybody owns one). Just get one of these, and you are ready to go for all your gaming needs.