Much like AMD though to a significantly lesser extent, NVIDIA's lower cost GPU lineup was made up almost entirely of previous generation offerings. While both the Maxwell and Pascal architecture benefited from high end refreshes, the GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti have remained untouched in their positioning for the better part of two years. Indeed, even those highly competitive ?for the time- cards were launched at $150 and $120 respectively and NVIDIA's options below that were relegated to OEM-focused options like the GT 740. That's about to change since the new GeForce lineup is about to add two new entrants which fight to reduce the cost of entry-level GPUs while taking performance per dollar to a whole new level.

Typically the under-$150 market segment sees a race to the bottom of the performance barrel with cards offering truly pathetic value. The GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050 aim to change that by leveraging the Pascal architecture's inherent strengths of efficiency, performance and broad-scale optimizations into something that approaches acceptability for budget conscious gamers.

Efficiency will continually play a large role in this review since it is actually the largest contributing factor to the GTX 1050-series? success and pricing. You see, the new GP107 core produces such a small amount of heat and requires so little power that board partners don't? need to install extravagant heatsinks to keep it cool or even add a PCI-E power connector since the cards will draw all they need directly from the motherboard. This effectively lowers BOM costs and allows these two new cards to sell for less than they otherwise would.