The GeForce GTX 1050 is Nvidia's $109 answer to AMD

Nvidia has cleared out the high end graphics card competition with its new 10-series of cards. At each price point above $200, AMD struggles compete with the price, performance, or efficiency of Nvidia's more modern Pascal architecture. Now Pascal is coming to the budget category with the new GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti cards. They have a starting price of $109 and $139, respectively. That $30 difference is important: the Ti version has 4GB of DDR5, while the 1050 has half that. The 1050 Ti also has 768 CUDA cores, while the 1050 has 640.

For comparison, Nvidia's 1060 cards come in 6GB and 3GB flavors, with a faster memory speed, faster clock speed, and many more CUDA cores. It's also important to note that the 1050 is the first Pascal card not labelled "VR ready," although it's likely it will match the new minimum spec Oculus just published.

Meanwhile, it's rumored AMD will cut the price of its Radeon RX 470 card to $169 to compete. We'll have to wait for relative benchmarks to see what's the better deal, but it's great to see a fight break out in this price range.

The 1050 Ti will be available on October 25, while the 1050 will be out "on or before" November 8, and all the usual suspects (ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac, etc.) will be making custom versions.