NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (Desktop) vs NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 (Desktop) vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (Desktop)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is the fastest desktop consumer graphics card (beginning 2017). It is based on the same GP107 chip as the Titan X but with slightly higher clock speeds and a different memory configuration. It offers one memory controller less (and 11 instead of 12 GB), but the GDDR5X memory is faster clocked (11 GHz) leading to a comparable memory bandwidth. Due to the higher boost clock, the 1080Ti should be around 5 % faster compared to the Pascal Titan X and about 35 % faster compared to the GTX 1080. The TDP is equal to the Titan X with 250 Watt. A new cooler of the Founders Edition should be more efficient and quieter.

NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GT 1030 (sometime GTX 1030 called) is an entry level dedicated graphics card for desktops. It is based on the GP108 chip using the Pascal architecture in 14nm FinFET. It features three streaming multiprocessors (SMs) and therefore 384 shader cores, 24 texture units and 16 ROPs. The 2 GB GDDR5 memory are connected with two 32 Bit memory controller (48 GBit/s). The shaders are identical to other Pascal cards like the GTX 1050 and therefore also the support for DirectX 12 FL 12_1.

The performance is slightly below the Radeon RX 550 from AMD and therefore only suited for low to medium detail settings of modern games like Battlefield 1.

The TDP of the GT1030 is specified as 30 Watt.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 is an entry level graphics card for desktops based on the Pascal architecture. It uses the same GP107 chip as the GTX 1050 Ti, but with only 640 instead of 768 shaders. The chip is manufactured at Samsung in 14 nm (opposed to the 16 nm TSCM based Pascal chips of the 1060 and up). The performance and specs should be similar to the GTX 1050 laptop version, that will be released later (early 2017). Compared to the faster GTX 1050 Ti, the 1050 offers less shaders (640 instead of 768) and only 2 GB of GDDR5 (instead of the 4 GB of the 1050 Ti).

Gaming benchmarks by Nvidia state that the GTX 1050 is about 30% faster on average than the Radeon RX 460 with 2 GB VRAM. The 4 GB version of the RX 460 should be about 10% slower and the older GTX 950 should reach a similar performance level as the new GTX 1050. Therefore, the GTX 1050 should be ideal for 1080p gaming with high detail settings (but not max settings).