NVIDIA Could Be Prepping A GeForce GTX 1050 3GB For Entry-Level Gaming
Most of the rumors surrounding NVIDIA's future graphics card plans are related to whatever it has in store as a successor to Pascal, whether that means porting Volta over to the gaming sector or rolling with Turing or Ampere. However, NVIDIA might not be finished with Pascal. The latest GPU rumor about team green is that NVIDIA is prepping a 3GB version of its entry-level GeForce GTX 1050 card for cost conscious gamers.
If that comes to fruition, budget gamers would have three GeForce GTX 1050 models to choose from, including 2GB and 3GB variants of the GeForce GTX 1050, and the Ti model with 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Before we get to the rumor, let's have a look at the specs of the existing GeForce GTX 1050 and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti cards:
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| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti | ||
| GPCs | 2 | 2 | |
| Streaming Multiprocessors | 5 | 6 | |
| CUDA Cores (SP) | 640 | 768 | |
| Texture Units | 40 | 48 | |
| ROP Units | 32 | 32 | |
| Base Clock | 1354MHz |
1290MHz | |
| Boost Clock | 1455MHz |
1392MHz | |
| Memory Clock (Data rate) | 3504MHz (Effective Speed - ~8Gbps) | 3504MHz (Effective Speed - ~8Gbps) |
|
| L2 Cache Size | 1024KB | 1024KB |
|
| Total Video Memory | 2048 MB GDDR5 | 4096 MB GDDR5 |
|
| Memory Interface | 128-Bit |
128-Bit |
|
| Total Memory Bandwidth | 112 GB/s |
112 GB/s |
|
| Text. Filtering Rate (Bilinear) | 54.2 GigaTexels/sec |
61.9 GigaTexels/sec |
|
| Fabrication Process | 14 nm |
14 nm |
|
| Transistor Count | 3.3 Billion | 3.3 Billion |
|
| Connectors | 1 x Display Port 1 x Dual-Link DVI 1 x HDMI |
1 x Display Port 1 x Dual-Link DVI 1 x HDMI |
|
| Form Factor | Dual Slot |
Dual Slot |
|
| Power Connectors | NONE | NONE |
|
| Recommended PSU | 300 Watts |
300 Watts |
|
| TDP | 75 Watts |
75 Watts |
|
| Thermal Threshold | 97°C |
97°C |
|
| Price | $109 MSRP - Find Them At Amazon | $139 MSRP - Find Them At Amazon |
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Those are launch MSRPs, by the way, and not current inflated pricing caused (in part) by cryptocurrency mining. That's a topic for another day. What's of interest here is the rumored GeForce GTX 1050 3GB model. Having an additional 1GB of GDDR5 memory would presumably help in some games, especially if attempting to run at a higher resolution. What isn't known, however, is if the added memory would come at the expensive the memory bus width—NVIDIA could decide to go with a 96-bit bus instead of a 128-bit pipe.
That wouldn't be necessary in our opinion, as even with a bigger frame buffer, there would still be separation between the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB, as the later has more CUDA cores and texture units. The bigger question is how would NVIDIA price its new card?
Going by the original MSRPs, there's not much gap between the 1050 and 1050 Ti—just $30. Rather than split the difference, we could see a price cut on the 1050 2GB to make room for the 3GB model. That's assuming the rumor is accurate in the first place, which we don't know. If it is, another possibility is that this could be a SKU specifically for the Chinese market, or for use in OEM systems only, neither of which would be unprecedented.
