NVIDIA has just announced that the GeForce GTX 1050 ($109) and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti ($139) will launch on October 25th. Both of these Pascal-based cards target the 75W thermal point, which allows them to be powered by a PCIe bus without being tethered directly to the power supply. Like the GTX 750 Ti before it, this allows users to drop it into many existing desktops, upgrading it with discrete graphics.

Most of NVIDIA's press deck focuses on the standard GTX 1050. This $109 SKU contains 2GB of GDDR5 memory and 640 CUDA cores, although the core frequency has not been announced at the time of writing. Instead, NVIDIA has provided a handful of benchmarks, comparing the GTX 1050 to the earlier GTX 650 and the Intel Core i5-4760k integrated graphics.

It should be noted that, to hit their >60FPS targets, Gears of War 4 and Grand Theft Auto V needed to be run at medium settings, and Overwatch was set to high. (DOTA2 and World of Warcraft were maxed out, though.) As you might expect, NVIDIA reminded the press about GeForce Experience's game optimization setting just a few slides later. The implication seems to be that, while it cannot max out these games at 1080p, NVIDIA will at least make it easy for users to experience its best-case scenario, while maintaining 60FPS.

So yes, while it's easy to claim 60 FPS is you're able to choose the settings that fit this role, it's a much better experience than the alternative parts they list. On the GTX 650, none of these titles are able to hit an average of 30 FPS, and integrated graphics cannot even hit 15 FPS. This card seems to be intended for users that are interested in playing eSports titles maxed out at 1080p60, while enjoying newer blockbusters, albeit at reduced settings, but have an old, non-gaming machine they can salvage.

Near the end of their slide deck, they also mention that the GTX 1050 Ti exists. It's basically the same use case as above, with its 75W TDP and all, but with $30 more performance. The VRAM doubles from 2GB to 4GB, which should allow higher texture resolutions and more mods, albeit still targeting 1080p. It also adds another 128 CUDA cores, a 20% increase, although, again, that is somewhat meaningless until we find out what the card is clocked at.

Update: Turns out we did find clock speeds! The GTX 1050 will have a base clock of 1354 MHz and a Boost clock of 1455 MHz while the GTX 1050 Ti will run at 1290/1392 MHz respectively.

NVIDIA's promotional video

Obviously, numbers from a vendor are one thing, and a third-party benchmark is something else entirely (especially when the vendor benchmarks do not compare their product to the latest generation of their competitor). Keep an eye out for reviews.