NVIDIA GTX 1050 3GB Is An Unexpected New Budget Option

Despite the growing threat from AMD's Radeon Vega, NVIDIA continues to enjoy a period of popularity in no small part thanks to its aggressive push in the machine learning market. Of course it hasn't forgotten about regular consumers and, in fact, has a new graphics card for them. That said, there is nothing really groundbreaking with the new GTX 1050 3GB. In fact, there's nothing entirely new about it either. It's a surprising new low-end card that comes at a time when NVIDIA is just about to wrap up its Ge-Force 10 chapter.

The GTX 1050 3GB sits in the middle of the GTX 1050 and the GTX 1050 Ti, though it leans closer to the higher end model. It has the same 768 CUDA Cores as the Ti though has a higher base frequency at 1.392 MHz. In fact, the GTX 1050 3GB is practically the GTX 1050 Ti with one key difference.

Memory is down to 3 GB only and, though it's the same GDDR5, is clocked lower to 96-bit bandwidth instead of 128-bit. This, according to Tom's Hardware, is NVIDIA's strategy to discourage cryptominers from taking advantage of the cheaper prices. This affordable card is meant for gamers, not cryptominers, and definitely not data scientists.

It might be a bit puzzling to see NVIDIA launch a new 10-series card when the 11-series is probably just months away. But considering how the market flows, the first GeForce 11 cards will be for hardcore gamers who can afford the power they will offer. For the rest of the gaming population, a GTX GeForce 3GB might just be enough to get by.