The Performance-Per-Watt From The GeForce GTX 650 To GTX 1050 Series, Compared To AMD RX 460/470

Now having had the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards in my possession for a few days I have some more interesting data to share today compared to just last week's raw OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan raw Linux performance data. In this article is a look at the power use and performance-per-Watt of the GeForce GTX 650, GTX 750, GTX 750 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 1050, and GTX 1050 Ti compared to the AMD Radeon RX 460 and RX 470. Additionally, for the newer cards still relevant, there is also performance-per-dollar metrics too.

The GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti Linux articles last week contained a wealth of NVIDIA/AMD Linux comparison performance data while in this article is a focus on just the NVIDIA x50 cards and then the RX 460/470 for being AMD's relevant competition at this time and with a focus on the power efficiency and value of these lower-cost graphics cards. With the AMD graphics cards, the tests were done with both the open-source driver stack (Linux 4.8.4 + Mesa 13.1-dev Git on Padoka PPA built against LLVM 4.0 SVN) and then using the new AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 hybrid driver release.

During the testing process the AC power consumption was monitored using a WattsUp Pro that was automatically polled by the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. The Phoronix Test Suite used this data to also generate performance-per-Watt metrics and was also monitoring the GPU core temperatures too during testing (via the MONITOR=sys.power,gpu.temp PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 environment variables). The performance-per-Watt is calculated based upon the actual power consumption data during each particular test.

The performance-per-dollar metrics were also calculated by the Phoronix Test Suite and made use of the pricing of the specific graphics cards on NewEgg.com as of this weekend. The graphics cards used for testing were an MSI GeForce GTX 650, EVGA GeForce GTX 750, a reference GeForce GTX 750 Ti, EVGA GeForce GTX 950, Zotac GeForce GTX 1050 Mini, and EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti SC GAMING. The AMD hardware was a PowerColor Radeon RX 460 2GB and Sapphire Radeon RX 470.

That should about cover all the grounds for these benchmarks to end out October. Check out all of the data on the pages ahead for a interesting power and dollar results on the pages ahead -- or if you are a Phoronix Premium members, you simply need to keep scrolling down this single, ad-free page.