Snuck out a few weeks back, the GeForce GTX 1050 3GB has been met with some degree of bafflement and bewilderment from the PC hardware press, but choose the right model - like the Gigabyte example reviewed here - and you have the best entry-level budget GPU on the market. As things stand, our only major criticism of the vanilla GTX 1050 is its meagre 2GB of framebuffer memory - not enough for console-quality textures on many games. This revised model beefs up processing power and adds that crucial extra gig of RAM, but it comes with a sting in the tail - memory bandwidth drops significantly, meaning a performance penalty in some games.
It's a curious situation but the bottom line is that the GP107 processor used in both 1050 and 1050 Ti comes equipped with a 128-bit memory interface - good for 2GB and 4GB VRAM configurations but incompatible with a 3GB set-up. The only way Nvidia can create this new model is by shaving the memory interface down to 96-bits, meaning a substantial 25 per cent hit to memory bandwidth - 112GB/s becomes a mere 84GB/s. By extension, ROP count is hit too - this is reduced to 24 instead of the usual 32. On paper, it looks like a fudge - a round peg forced through a square hole, especially considering that lower-end GPUs can use all the memory bandwidth they can get.
Nvidia's solution to the potentially crippling performance hit? The GTX 1050 3GB comes with the full complement of CUDA cores found in the top-end GTX 1050 Ti, meaning 768 of them up against the cut-back 640 in the vanilla two gig version of the same card. This is backed by a higher boost clock, meaning that Nvidia is attempting to mitigate the bandwidth cutbacks by brute-forcing higher performance through sheer compute alone. Almost inevitably then, in-game frame-rates vs other GP107 cards will depend very much on how much they rely on compute power or memory bandwidth. The benchmarks later on will reveal all.
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