Nvidia reveals their GTX 1050 3GB GPU

An upgrade in some areas and a downgrade in others...

| Source: Nvidia Author: Mark Campbell

Nvidia reveals their GTX 1050 3GB GPU

Rumours about a 3GB version of Nvidia's GTX 1050 have been circulating for quite some time, a graphics card which sits in a strange position in the GPU market with specs that are in some ways an upgrade over the GTX 1050 Ti while simultaneously being a downgrade over the GTX 1050 in other areas.



With Nvidia's 3GB Pascal series GPU, there is a common trend, they are not very similar to their standard counterparts of the same name, with their 3GB GTX 1060 offering fewer CUDA cores, making it in our eyes a product that should have released as a 1050 Ti class product.



To release with 3GB of VRAM capacity, Nvidia had to cut the memory bus of their GTX 1050 down from 128-bit to 96-bit, which cuts down the graphics card's memory bandwidth by a 25%, a downgrade when compared to the standard GTX 1050. Strangely, on the CUDA core and clock speed sides, the 1050 3GB is faster than the GTX 1050 Ti, with the same number of CUDA cores and higher base/boost clock speeds.



These specifications make the GTX 1050 3G a product that is neither a GTX 1050 or GT 1050 Ti, offering both advantages and disadvantages to create an extremely confusing product. It would have been nice for Nvidia to use 8Gbps GDDR5 memory to bump their memory bandwidth from 84GB/s to 96GB/s, which while still lower than the 112 GB/s offered by the standard GTX 1050, it would be a much smaller bandwidth downgrade for end users.





At this time it is unknown whether or not Nvidia plans to release their new 3GB GTX 1050 GPU, or if this graphics card will see a widespread release in the western market.



We are entering into an era where 2GB of VRAM is becoming too small for even low-end graphics cards in modern games, making us see why Nvidia would want to release a higher VRAM version of their GTX 1050 GPU. Even so, a simple 4GB version of the GTX 1050 would have made a lot more sense from a branding perspective, as this new model will add a lot of confusion to Nvidia's already muddled Pascal GPU lineup.



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