Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

8owners with an opinion

43%of verdicts positive

2/1positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and value; criticized for reliability and noise.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like itOwned 3 years

I could care less about how it works with free-sync HDR gaming, &c. My laptop with 3 year old Intel Pro graphics is fast enough for everything I do on Linux, but my two workstations with an nvidia 1050Ti and A 3 year old Radeon Pro are both unusable for me. If Intel made a 8+ core Xeon with built-in graphics for under $1000 I would buy it over a $300 Ryzen and a $200 discrete GPU just to have stable graphics on Linux because I'm experiencing $500 worth of pain in my graphics not working on a near daily basis.

Doesn’t like it

probably. I’ve got a 4K monitor with a 1050 Ti and the moment I open the site, GPU usage jumps from 1% to 99% and the fans go wild.

Likes it

Mine is surprisingly still serviceable at 60fps 2560x1600 on older games, but I feel like it'd choke hard on this one too. The laptop performs much much better but obvs can't run it.

Likes it

I just sold my old GTX 1050 Ti for $35, and it vastly outperforms Vega 11. iGPUs are useful, they just aren't great value for budget gaming PCs (unless we're talking super-duper low budget, where a $50 used GPU is really going to break the bank). HTPC/NAS that's going to run Jackbox at 4K occasionally? Great use case for an R5 with an iGPU.

Doesn’t like it

The sound is an internal meme where the linux devops would regularly have to drop off calls to talk (restart to unmute :)). On my desktop I couldn't even boot installer without running with safe mode, otherwise I'd just get stuck on a blank screen (ancient 1050 TI GPU and standard desktop components otherwise, so not exotic/new stuff). I've used linux desktop for >decade and Gnome shell feels like home but these days I feel like I don't have the time for linux adventures. Maybe I'll mix it up with my next device, but I'm not reading great things about AMD power modes and Linux.

Doesn’t like it

> No? Nouveau is an awful experience on Wayland if you intend to get more than 30% of your GPU's performance, doubly so for a recent GPU. The benchmarks are atrocious: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-nouveau-2019 Forget performance, I get display corruption and crashes on both Wayland and X/kwin with compositing enabled if I use Nouveau. This is on a GTX 1050 Ti. I should point out that the issues Nouveau went from daily occurrences to a bit less than weekly over the time I've owned the card, but I'd like to not have to restart my desktop that often.

Doesn’t like it

I can’t do 512x512 on a laptop 1050 ti 4gb

Likes it

Slightly OT: I have been playing around with whisper.cpp; it's nice because I can run the large model (quantized to 8-bits) at roughly real-time with cublas on a Ryzen 2700 with a 1050Ti. I couldn't even run the pytorch whisper medium on this card with X11 also running. It blows me away that I can get real-time speech-to-text of this quality on a machine that is almost 5 years old.

Neutral

The coprocessors (TouchID, SecureEnclave, NNE) are not yet supported. These will be next in line once the webcam/mic/speakers are fully functional, so probably worth waiting a bit more (few months?) if this is critical. Most of my usage is browsing, emails, and light development - so it works good enough for now. If I need a GPU, I run Jupyter on my homeserver with a 1050Ti.

Likes it

I guess you could try running your games at 800p on your current system and see what it's like. I actually do a lot of gaming at 1280x800 on an old Macbook. I'm using Parsec to connect to an Optiplex with a 1050ti in the basement. Timberborn is a favorite of mine and even with tons going on it's a good experience at 800p. I think the Steamdeck is right around 1050/1050ti performance too and that's better than you'd think at 800p. I'm currently playing Doom 2016 at Ultra and the card can pump 110FPS+ (though I'm limited to 60 on the laptop).

Doesn’t like it

I have a 1050Ti and there is no combination of graphics drivers and KDE compositor settings that will let me browse the web stably with firefox and webrender. I don't care if it's 20% slower than the GT1030 if I can browse the web in firefox under KDE with default settings! Since I replace my graphics card less often than I replace my CPU, I would pay a premium for such a device.

Likes itDoesn’t say they own it

Supported on CUDA 12 no less! To get an idea, the 1050ti is a card with an MSRP of $140 - almost seven years ago when it was released. Between the driver and CUDA support matrix it will likely end up with a 10 year support life. While it's not going to impress with an LLM or such it's the lowest minimum supported card for speech to text with Willow Inference Server (I'm the creator) and it still puts up impressive numbers. Same for the GTX 1060/1070, which you can get with up to 8GB VRAM today for ~$100 used. Again, not impressive for the hotter LLMs, etc but it will do ASR, TTS, video encoding/decoding, Frigate, Plex transcoding, and any number of other things with remarkable performance (considering cost). People also run LLMs on them and from a price/performance/power standpoint it's not even close compared to CPU. The 15 year investment and commitment to universal support for any Nvidia GPU across platforms (with very long support lifecycles) is extremely hard to compete with (as we see again and again with AMD attempts in the space).