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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Max Q

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Max Q: The Resurrection of a Legend for Compact Systems

April 2025

Introduction

In 2025, NVIDIA surprised fans by releasing an updated version of the iconic GTX 1050 Ti in the Max Q format. This graphics card is positioned as a solution for budget laptops and compact PCs, combining energy efficiency with sufficient power for modern tasks. But what can this “reincarnation” do? Let’s find out.

Architecture and Key Features

Architecture: The card is built on an upgraded Pascal+ architecture that uses an optimized 6nm TSMC manufacturing process. This has reduced power consumption by 20% compared to the original GTX 1050 Ti (14nm) and increased clock speeds (base - 1490 MHz, boost - 1620 MHz).

Features:

- Support for DLSS 2.0 (through software emulation, as Tensor cores are absent).

- AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) — compatibility with the clarity-enhancing technology.

- No RT Cores — ray tracing is implemented through CUDA computations, significantly burdening the GPU.

Despite the lack of hardware support for RTX, the card features updated AV1 decoders and enhanced support for the Vulkan API.

Memory: Modest but Effective

- Memory Type: GDDR6 (previously used GDDR5).

- Size: 4 GB — sufficient for Full HD gaming at medium settings, but may experience stutters at 1440p due to a lack of VRAM.

- Bus and Bandwidth: 128-bit bus and 14 Gbps speed (total bandwidth - 224 GB/s).

For projects like Cyberpunk 2077: Enhanced Edition (2024) with FSR Quality and medium settings at 1080p, the video memory is adequate. However, in games with high-resolution textures (e.g., Horizon Forbidden West PC), 4 GB becomes a bottleneck.

Gaming Performance: A Modest Workhorse

The card is aimed at 1080p/60 FPS gaming for titles from 2023-2024 at medium settings:

- Apex Legends — 75-80 FPS (high settings, no ray tracing).

- Elden Ring — 45-50 FPS (medium settings + FSR Balanced).

- Counter-Strike 2 — 120-140 FPS (maximum settings).

Ray Tracing: Enabling ray tracing effects (e.g., in Minecraft RTX) drops FPS to 20-25, making it impractical.

1440p and 4K: The card is underpowered for these resolutions. For example, in Fortnite (Epic settings, DLSS Performance) at 1440p, the average FPS is about 35-40.

Professional Tasks: Not Its Main Specialization

- Video Editing: In Adobe Premiere Pro, rendering 1080p video takes 30% longer than on the RTX 3050.

- 3D Modeling: In Blender, rendering a mid-complexity scene takes about 15 minutes (compared to around 8 minutes on the RTX 2060).

- CUDA/OpenCL: The 768 CUDA cores handle basic scientific calculations, but for machine learning or neural networks, it’s better to choose cards with Tensor Cores.

Overall: The GTX 1050 Ti Max Q is suitable for students and entry-level professionals, but not for experts.

Power Consumption and Heat Output

- TDP: 50W — this allows the card to be used in ultrabooks and mini-PCs.

- Cooling: A passive cooling system is insufficient. Active cooling with a heatsink and an 80mm fan is recommended.

- Cases: The optimal choice is compact Mini-ITX cases with 2-3 fans for airflow.

Even under load, the temperature rarely exceeds 75°C, making the card quiet and reliable.

Comparison with Competitors

- AMD Radeon RX 6500M (4 GB GDDR6): Performs better at 1080p (+10% FPS in Call of Duty: Warzone), but consumes 65W.

- Intel Arc A380M (6 GB GDDR6): Excels in tasks with AV1 encoding support, but suffers from driver instability.

The main advantage of the GTX 1050 Ti Max Q is its price: $179 compared to $199 for the RX 6500M and $209 for the A380M.

Practical Tips

1. Power Supply: A 300W PSU is sufficient (for PCs). For laptops, a 90W adapter is enough.

2. Compatibility: Requires PCIe 4.0 x8 for maximum performance.

3. Drivers: Regularly update software via GeForce Experience — NVIDIA continues to optimize for older architectures.

Beware of counterfeits: the original card is only available in OEM builds, retail versions are rare.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low power consumption.

- Support for modern codecs (AV1, VP9).

- Affordable price ($179).

Cons:

- Only 4 GB of memory.

- No hardware ray tracing.

- Limited performance at 1440p.

Final Verdict: Who is the GTX 1050 Ti Max Q For?

This graphics card is an ideal choice for:

- Budget-conscious gamers looking to play in Full HD at medium settings.

- Owners of compact systems where silence and low heat output are important.

- Students and office users needing a reliable GPU for work and study.

If you're looking for a “workhorse” without frills, the GTX 1050 Ti Max Q will meet expectations. However, for future upgrades or professional tasks, it's better to consider the RTX 4050 or similar models.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

January 2018

Model Name

GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Max Q

Generation

GeForce 10 Mobile

Base Clock

1152MHz

Boost Clock

1291MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Transistors

3,300 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

Samsung

Process Size

14 nm

Architecture

Pascal

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

4GB

Memory Type

GDDR5

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

1752MHz

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.

112.1 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.

41.31 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.

61.97 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. 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.

30.98 GFLOPS

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.

61.97 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.

1.943 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

SM Count

Multiple Streaming Processors (SPs), along with other resources, form a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM), which is also referred to as a GPU's major core. These additional resources include components such as warp schedulers, registers, and shared memory. The SM can be considered the heart of the GPU, similar to a CPU core, with registers and shared memory being scarce resources within the SM.

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.

768

L1 Cache

48 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

1024KB

TDP

75W

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 (12_1)

CUDA

6.1

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.4

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

1.943 TFLOPS

Blender

Score

198

OctaneBench

Score

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

GeForce GTX 660

2.021 +4%

GeForce GTX 760 OEM Rebrand

2.005 +3.2%

GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Max Q

1.943

Jetson Orin NX 16 GB

1.918 -1.3%

Radeon R9 270 1024SP

1.856 -4.5%

Blender

Radeon RX 6850M XT

1497 +656.1%

GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER

847 +327.8%

Quadro T1000 Mobile GDDR6

415 +109.6%

GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Max Q

198

GeForce GT 1030

45.58 -77%

OctaneBench

GeForce RTX 4050 Mobile

260 +477.8%

Quadro P5200 Max Q

123 +173.3%

Tesla K40m

69 +53.3%

GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Max Q

GeForce GTX 1080 Max Q

10 -77.8%