NVIDIA has been hard at work this year rolling out a series of new video cards including the GeForce GTX 690, GeForce GTX 680, GeForce GTX 660 Ti, and many others. These new 600-series video cards are based on NVIDIA’s latest architecture: Kepler. I recently spent some time running the GeForce GTX 660 Ti, and have been impressed with what that card can do with DirectX 11 games, and other graphics-intensive scenarios.
Today NVIDIA launches the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, a new Kepler-based card that costs about ½ what the GeForce GTX 660 Ti costs, and still pumps out enough power to run the latest DirectX 11 games. With prices starting at $149.00, cards based on the GeForce GTX 650 Ti chipset will offer great bang for the buck.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti reference card (fan side)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti reference card (top side)
I like to try things out first hand, and was excited to get my hands on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti card so that I could see how it would perform. Installing the card in my HP Z820 was easy thanks to the tool-less design and thoughtful wiring layout. After installing the card I launched the driver installer, and in a few minutes I was off and running. I thought I would do a quick comparison of a couple DirectX 11 game titles that I had played while running the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti card to see how these cards compare. Note that this card is optimized for 1920 x 1080 display resolution, and I ran these tests at higher resolution settings so that I could compare with my experiences with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti.
With this new card, I played Battlefield 3 at 2560×1440 resolution, ultra graphics settings, and that translated to great gameplay and smooth motion (incredible for a card at this price). These were the same settings I used when running the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti.
When I started up Max Payne 3, I had to make an adjustment to the MSAA setting in order to get memory consumption into the proper zone (the card I obtained has 1GB RAM, not quite enough to max out all settings). The remaining settings that go up to “very high” were left at that setting. Resultant game play looked great, and was jitter-free. A great experience at 2560×1440 resolution with settings overall at “very high”. The only change compared to settings used with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti was the MSAA level.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti reference card installed in HP Z820 PC
It’s great to have such a great range of NVIDIA graphics cards to choose from. These cards range from budget-minded all the way up to the incredible GeForce GTX 690 (in case you need supercomputer graphics horsepower in your PC). If you want to play the latest DirectX 11 games, and don’t want to spend a fortune on a new graphics card, give the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti a look!
Here are some specs for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti:
- Architecture: Kepler
- Bus interface: PCIe 3.0 x 16
- Memory: 1GB
- Cuda cores: 768
- Base price: $149.00
- Power connectors: 1 x 6-pin