Everyone deserves great gaming. This sequel to 2013's Tomb Raider was one of the first AAA titles to offer DirectX 12 support. But when it finally did, in early 2015, it brought a number of graphical improvements and tweakable visual settings that pushed the game far beyond its console roots. The MSI card is a smidge faster, but the two are close enough to be within the margin of testing error, essentially. We haven't tested all of the cards we outline here on the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark yet; it's a test from the Futuremark suite that was only relatively recently finalized. It gets all the juice it needs from the PCIe x16 slot it drops into. In other words, don't draw any set-in-stone conclusions from the DX12 results below. As we've noted in previous Nvidia 10-series reviews, though, it's highly likely that the card's real-world boost speeds will exceed these conservative clock-speed estimates, so long as Zotac's cooler and fan do their jobs as expected. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Just kidding, of course; he kills loads of people in this one, just like the rest. © 1996-2020 Ziff Davis, LLC. Both GTX 1050s were only able to reach 46fps, which is certainly playable but not quite as fast as we would have liked to see. It’s loaded with innovative NVIDIA Game Ready technologies that let every gamer experience the latest titles in their full glory in super compact form. https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/zotac-geforce-gtx-1050-mini. 174mm x 111.15mm (70mm LP) x 35.3mm (6.85in x 4.38in (2.76in LP) x 1.39in), ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3070 Twin Edge OC White Edition. The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the endorsement of PCMag. These results are interesting, in that the PowerColor Red Dragon RX 460 lags behind the Zotac GeForce GTX 1050 Mini, despite the fact that the AMD card did better on our real-world DirectX 12 benchmarks than elsewhere. On the AMD Radeon front, the smallest Radeon RX 460 we could find was from MSI (specifically, the MSI Radeon RX 460 2G OC). Search. We used the Medium setting here. As a result, the card has just three video outs: a DVI, an HDMI, and a DisplayPort. Open Apps wechat and Scan the above QR code. Both GTX 1050 cards ran at very good frame rates in this test, too, surpassing 60fps. All of the recent-generation cards we've tested in the $100-to-$200 range have also been added to the benchmark charts below, with a few higher-end cards, such as the GeForce GTX 1060 and Radeon RX 480, thrown in for good measure. While some GeForce GTX 1050 cards are larger and do require a supplementary power connector for overclocking purposes, as you can see below, the Zotac GeForce GTX 1050 Mini has no power-connector plug. The Zotac GTX 1050 Mini sports 2GB of memory, just like other GTX 1050 and RX 460 cards. In order to double that allotment to 4GB, you'll need to fork over between $30 and $50 more for the GTX 1050 Ti, a card that is also usually a little larger. So it's important to know if a card can handle DX12 well before buying. In Bioshock, the GTX 1050 Ti didn't perform much better than the GTX 1050, which really strengthens the lesser cards' value proposition. We'll tackle the former (DX11) first. smartphones smartwatches headphones tablets. Both cards delivered a gaming experience here as smooth as soft-serve ice cream. Both GTX 1050 cards were able to achieve a very respectable 58fps on this demanding game at 1080p resolution, making them both excellent choices for 1080p gaming with older titles. Also, we need to consider cards based on the AMD Radeon RX 460 ( at Amazon) , as they cost about the same, landing in the $100 to $110 range. This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. This more or less reiterates what we've been saying all along: DirectX 12 just isn't mature enough yet to get a solid sense of where things stand. Cycle through the above images to see the individual gaming benchmarks. It does offer gorgeous graphics in both DX11 and DX12 varieties, though. en. Categories. Another example of that: The GTX 1050 Ti was just as fast as the RX 480 at 1080p, despite the fact that the AMD card costs about $70 more. The RX 460 was unable to compete, though, delivering a decent, but not competitive, 40fps. As far as the Zotac GTX 1050 Mini goes, this card is "stock" in every sense of the word, not deviating from Nvidia's baseline specifications in any real way. Find out which is better and their overall performance in the graphics card ranking. So it can be plugged in to many existing machines that are currently making do with integrated graphics or an older, weaker dedicated graphics card. In some instances, titles running under DX12 offered performance gains, but elsewhere we saw lesser performance. This is an extremely narrow range which indicates that the Nvidia GTX 1050 performs superbly consistently under varying real … It was able to deliver only 28fps, which is borderline unplayable. It's tough to get any rock-solid sense of DirectX 12 performance at this point. en. We see both GTX 1050 cards performing similarly again, and the GTX 1050 Ti was incapable of distancing itself from those cards this time, running just a handful of frames per second faster than the GTX 1050 cards. So, if VR is your aim, you'll want to step up to the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 480.