GeForce GTX 1050 3GB vs GeForce GTX 650

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1050 3GB makes use of a 14 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 1392 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this specific card. It features 768 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 650, which comes with clock speeds of 1058 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 384 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.