Comments Locked

20 Comments

Back to Article

  • RaichuPls - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    Desktop GTX 1050/1050Ti reviews when?
  • Shadow7037932 - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    SoonTM
  • lazarpandar - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    Any word on TDP?
  • ZeDestructor - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    On a somewhat related note, any news on MXM3.0A variants? Or laptops using said variants?
  • olde94 - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    notebookchecks review have som watt-usage meassures
  • Giopriest82 - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    TDP is 75w
  • doggface - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    How about Polaris deep dive?
  • Death666Angel - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    Can you throw in the 950m in the comparison table, since that's technically the chip it replaces? :)
  • Death666Angel - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    Also, a quick search shows a ton of GTX 960M @ 2GB notebooks.
  • Death666Angel - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    I guess the best thing about these 1050s is that there won't be any DDR3 shenanigans happening like there was with the 950Ms. Unless they produce a SKU specifically for a big manufacturer, which would suck, but also just be about that one laptop range I guess.
  • Lonyo - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    Does Pascal even support DDR3?
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    we'll probably have to wait for GP108 to show up to be sure. DDR3 (or presumably DDR4 now) only shows up in the lowest xx7 and xx8 GPU dies. So far there hasn't been any indication of it for GP107. OTOH if it was going to show up anywhere it'd be on laptop parts that've just started showing up, and potentially not until they had enough dies that binned with a failed GDDR5 controller that it wasn't cutting into sales of better variants and the initial 1050 mobile hype train is ended. OTOH GP108 leaked in benchmark tools at the same time as the rest of pascal last June; and xx8 GPUs are almost exclusively standard DDR; with the last exception being a 730 desktop variant. At this point though with the DDR3/4 price gap basically gone, I'd be shocked if they don't go with the latter because less ram starvation is free speedup.
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    There was an increase in electrical energy needed when moving from DDR3 to GDDR5. In power constrained situations, manufacturers may opt for DDR. After all, midrange GPUs for laptops are demanding a lot more electrical energy than they have over the previous decade (if you go by TDP anyway...which we all know isn't the best way to determine power consumption). For instance, the GeForce 8600M GT in my ancient Vostro 1500 was rated at 20W and it was a firmly midrange graphics card in its heyday. The 1050 is probably a LOT higher and you're still, on a relative scale, only getting midrange performance. Given how much technology has improved, that's really terrible from a mobility perspective.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    The speed v power tradeoff's always been there. The cut point in the lineup above which DDR isn't used at all has been steadily moving down the line though. Looking at mobile parts because they're far more power constrained, it's GM107, GK107, GF106, GT215. I stopped there because the naming convention changed for older nVidia gpu dies. This leaves if GP107 will support DDR like Maxwell and Kepler or leave it behind the way the xx6 and xx5 parts have in previous generations. I'm not sure which way this will end up swinging, on the one hand DDR4 offers a major bandwidth/power boost over DDR3 which increases the gpu performance ceiling before memory bandwidth becomes a hard wall. On the other hand, Pascal mobile parts are probably running at higher power and performance levels than older equivalents; which argues the other direction. Until a DDR4 card launches or nVidia says something one way or the other it's an open question.

    I've seen a little speculation that GP108 might end up GDDR only; I'm more skeptical about that though. With the power creep in pascal mobile, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a GDDR5 1040 at the ~40W level, but if they do that I'd expect lower power (or just cheaper) DDR4 versions below it.
  • Hitokage_Tamashi - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    Actually, the 1060 was a 970M replacement, the 1070 was a 980M replacement. The 1050 is a direct 960M replacement, the 1050ti seems to be another 970M replacement, or perhaps a clone- it's faster than the 970M by a fair bit (sits between the 970M and 980M performance wise, hovers around 960 (non-M) performance levels iirc), while still being in sub $1000 machines. The 1050ti is definitely more exciting than the mobile 1050- the non-ti seems relatively meh at best, and 2 GB of VRAM isn't doing it any favors. Definitely can't go wrong for the price point though- $800 for this is a steal considering it's in a laptop.
  • lazarpandar - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    It's a replacement in name only. In no technical way does the 1050 replace the 950m. The two are specced completely differently and have very different thermal outputs/power requirements.
  • digiguy - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    From the first tests GTX 1050 is about 40-50% faster than the GTX 960M but 10-15% slower than GTX 965M (in the surface book with performance base) and than the desktop variant, while GTX 1050Ti is roughly on par with the desktop variant and with the GTX 970m.
  • Hitokage_Tamashi - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    Did the Surface Book get a special 965M? The 965M was only ~20% (maybe 30%) faster than the 960M, whereas the 1050 soundly beats it, the 1050ti destroys it. The 960M was essentially an overclocked 750ti anyways
  • fanofanand - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

    It's incredible that they are still shipping GPUs with 2GB of VRAM.
  • mrcaffeinex - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link

    In the class of device that they are installing these mGPUs, 2GB of VRAM is probably sufficient for the majority of titles people will be playing at the resolutions these devices support. The mGPUs would be strained to perform in a situation where 4GB of VRAM was necessary outside of caching data so that it does not need to be read from system RAM as often. These are budget parts with 2GB of VRAM to keep costs down.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now