Should you buy a laptop with Nvidia’s 1050 or 1050 Ti graphics card?
We’re going to benchmark two laptops in a number of games to see the performance differences
between them to help you decide if it’s worth paying more money for the Ti.
The two laptops that I’m testing here are very close to being the same in terms of specs.
Both have an Intel 7700HQ quad core CPU with 16GB of DDR4 memory running at 2,400MHz and
use an SSD for the primary hard drive, which is running Windows 10 with all available updates
applied.
No manual overclocking was performed for any of these tests, and G-Sync was disabled.
The main difference between the two laptops is of course that one is running an Nvidia
GeForce GTX 1050, while the other laptop has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti.
The specs between these two graphics cards are slightly different, and we can see here
that the Ti has more cuda cores with higher base and boost clock speeds.
With that in mind let’s take a look at our benchmarks and find out how each of these
cards perform!
We’ll cover both real world gaming benchmarks, as well as the results of some benchmarking
tools.
All games were tested with a 1080p using all available setting presets.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was tested with the latest 1.0 version using the replay
feature.
We can see that in order to get a good frame rate here lower settings are required with
either card, however the 1050 Ti is still performing almost 25% better than the 1050,
a nice boost.
Rise of the Tomb Raider was tested using Direct X 12, we can see that the 1050 Ti is again
getting a nice performance increase compared to the 1050, although slightly lower this
time, at around 19% of an improvement on average.
Watchdogs 2 is a fairly resource intensive game, and we can see there is a larger difference
between the two at higher settings whereas they come very close at the lowest settings,
as at higher settings the GPUs can be utilized properly.
Interestingly at ultra even the 1% lows with the 1050 Ti are above the averages of the
1050, and on average the 1050 Ti is performing 14.5% better throughout all setting levels.
In the Witcher 3 there’s not too much of a difference between the two cards, especially
with the 1% lows.
On average over all setting levels tested the 1050 Ti is performing just under 12% better
than the 1050.
Ghost Recon is another resource intensive game, not something I’d want to play on
either card.
Again we can see just a similar difference in performance between the two cards here,
and on average the 1050 Ti is performing around 18% better than the 1050.
Shadow of War didn’t show too much difference at the higher setting levels, a larger difference
was noticed at the lower settings, and on average the 1050 Ti was performing around
14% better than the 1050.
Battlefield 1 is running quite well on either card at high or lower settings, in general
I’ve found this game to perform quite well and on average I found that the 1050 Ti performed
about 12% better than the 1050.
Doom is another game that usually performs pretty well regardless of graphics power,
and we can see that the 1050 Ti appears to be a better option for 60 FPS gaming in this
title, performing around 24% better on average than the 1050, quite a larger difference here
compared to most of the other games.
Finally Ashes of the Singularity is another resource intensive game, and running the built
in benchmark in Direct X 11 we’re seeing a 14% boost with the 1050 Ti compared to the
1050.
Before we get into the benchmarking tools I’ll just quickly note that so far the performance
improvement over the games tested is a 16.9% increase for the 1050 Ti, not too bad.
Although many of these games aren’t what you’d typically play on these graphics cards,
they’re what I had available at the time and should still show you the performance
difference between the two in terms of an overall percentage.
Now onto the benchmarking tools, while a useful indicator note that these results are less
practical compared to the real world gaming tests previously shown, as synthetic tests
seem to scale better compared to real games with better hardware as we’ll see.
First we’ll check the Unigine benchmarks.
We can see the larger jump straight away in the Heaven benchmark, then again with the
Valley benchmark and superposition benchmarks.
Finally I’ve tested the Fire Strike benchmark from 3DMark, which showed a similar increase.
On average from these benchmark tools the 1050Ti is performing over 30% better than
the 1050, a much larger difference compared to the real world gaming tests, so I wouldn’t
trust these alone for the reasons already mentioned.
When we combine both the gaming and benchmark tool results we get just under a 20% percent
improvement with 1050Ti over the 1050.
Overall I don’t think the results are that surprising, there’s a nice little performance
boost with the 1050 Ti although nothing too crazy.
It depends on the games you plan on playing as to whether or not it’s worth it, as some
games had larger performance differences while others were much lower.
If you’ve already got a laptop with a 1050 it’s not really practical to upgrade, as
that usually requires buying a new laptop, an expensive process.
For the games I’ve tested the 1060 seems to be a great sweet spot for 1080p 60 FPS
gaming on high settings, but as we’ve seen in many of these games the 1050 Ti can still
do quite well if we drop the settings down a little, so it could be a good option if
you want to save some money and not pay even more for a 1060.
Due to this I’d personally pick the 1050 Ti over the 1050.
I’d only look at the 1050 if I was either doing light gaming or playing less demanding
games such as CS:GO or Overwatch, and let’s not forget you’ll probably get a longer
life with your laptop with a more powerful GPU.
Although I didn’t measure the power draw, the 1050 Ti will use more power to run, something
to keep in mind with a laptop if you’re running on battery power.
I also didn’t compare temperatures, as both laptops have different cooling systems so
it’s not really a fair comparison.
I hope that these benchmarks have shown you the real world differences in performance
between the Nvidia 1050 and 1050 Ti laptop graphics cards, and helped you choose between
them.
Let me know down in the comments which graphics card you’ll be getting in your next laptop
and why, and leave a like on the video if you found the information useful.
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one.