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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 850A

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 850A: Review and Analysis for Gamers and Professionals

April 2025

Introduction

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 850A is a new budget graphics card positioned between the outdated GTX 16 series and the more expensive RTX 40 models. It is aimed at users who value stable performance in Full HD gaming and basic professional tasks without paying a premium for high-end technologies. Let's explore what sets it apart in 2025.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Architecture: The GTX 850A is based on an updated version of Turing (TU117), adapted for TSMC's 6nm process technology. This has allowed for reduced power consumption and increased clock speeds.

Unique Features:

- DLSS 2.0+: Support for improved upscaling to increase FPS in games with minimal loss of quality.

- NVENC 7th Generation: Enhanced video encoding acceleration for streamers.

- No RT Cores: Hardware ray tracing is not available; this requires an RTX series card.

The card focuses on optimizing classic rendering, making it cost-effective for gaming without ultra settings.

2. Memory

- Type and Size: 6GB of GDDR6.

- Bus and Bandwidth: 192-bit bus with a bandwidth of 288GB/s.

- Impact on Performance: This is sufficient for comfortable gaming at Full HD (1080p) and working with medium-quality textures. In 1440p, there may be drops in demanding projects (e.g., Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield). The card is not recommended for 4K.

GDDR6 memory provides adequate speed for most modern games, but the limited capacity (6GB) may become a bottleneck in future releases.

3. Gaming Performance

Average FPS in Popular Games (1080p, High Settings):

- Fortnite: 90-110 FPS (with DLSS up to 130 FPS).

- Call of Duty: Warzone 3: 65-75 FPS.

- The Elder Scrolls VI: 50-60 FPS (optimal settings).

- Apex Legends: 85-95 FPS.

Resolutions:

- 1080p: An ideal choice for smooth gameplay in most projects.

- 1440p: Only for less demanding games (CS2, Valorant) or lowering settings.

- Ray Tracing: Not supported in hardware. Software solutions (like Reshade) provide limited effects and reduce FPS by 30-40%.

4. Professional Tasks

- Video Editing: Thanks to NVENC, rendering in DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro is accelerated by 20-30% compared to CPU.

- 3D Modeling: The card handles simple scenes in Blender and Maya, but for complex projects, it is better to choose an RTX with a higher number of CUDA cores.

- CUDA/OpenCL: 1024 CUDA cores provide basic support for calculations in MATLAB or Python, but for high-complexity scientific tasks (neural networks, rendering in 8K), the power is insufficient.

Summary: The GTX 850A is suitable for beginner editors and designers but will not replace professional GPUs.

5. Power Consumption and Thermal Management

- TDP: 85W.

- Recommendations:

- Power Supply: 400W (with headroom for upgrades).

- Cooling: A dual-fan system handles the load — the temperature under stress does not exceed 72°C.

- Case: Minimum of 2 expansion slots and good ventilation (e.g., Zalman S2 or Fractal Design Focus G).

The card does not require additional power — it is powered via PCIe x16.

6. Comparison with Competitors

- AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT: Weaker in DX12 projects (up to 15% difference) but wins in Vulkan (Doom Eternal). Price: $180.

- Intel Arc A580: Better in professional tasks, but drivers are still unstable. Price: $200.

- NVIDIA RTX 3050 6GB: 25% more powerful, has RT cores but is more expensive ($250).

Conclusion: The GTX 850A ($200) is a sweet spot for budget builds focused on stability.

7. Practical Tips

- Power Supply: 400-500W (Corsair CX450, EVGA 500 BQ).

- Compatibility: PCIe 4.0 x8 (backward compatible with 3.0).

- Drivers: Regularly update through GeForce Experience — NVIDIA maintains support for Turing until 2028.

- Platforms: Compatible with Windows 11, Linux (via Nouveau), but Windows is preferred for gaming.

Important: Check the length of the card (215mm) before buying for compact cases.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Affordable price ($200).

- Low power consumption.

- Support for DLSS 2.0+.

Cons:

- No ray tracing.

- Only 6GB of memory.

- Limited performance in 1440p.

9. Final Verdict

The GTX 850A is suitable for:

- Gamers who play in Full HD and do not seek ultra settings.

- Streamers valuing NVENC for encoding without taxing the CPU.

- Beginner professionals in editing and 3D.

Why this card? For $200, it is one of the best cards in its segment, offering an optimal balance of price, performance, and reliability. However, if you plan to transition to 1440p or want to experiment with ray tracing, consider looking at the RTX 4050 or AMD RX 7600.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

March 2014

Model Name

GeForce GTX 850A

Generation

GeForce 800A

Base Clock

902MHz

Boost Clock

936MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Transistors

1,870 million

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

28 nm

Architecture

Maxwell

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

2GB

Memory Type

DDR3

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

128bit

Memory Clock

900MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

28.80 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

14.98 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

37.44 GTexel/s

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

37.44 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.174 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

640

L1 Cache

64 KB (per SMM)

L2 Cache

2MB

TDP

45W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

3.0

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (11_0)

CUDA

5.0

Shader Model

5.1

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.174 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Radeon E9174 MXM

1.223 +4.2%

Radeon R7 250X

1.192 +1.5%

GeForce GTX 850A

1.174

Quadro Plex 7000

1.152 -1.9%

FirePro V5800 DVI

1.126 -4.1%