At the more affordable end of Nvidia’s 10-series line-up you’ll find the GTX 1050Ti and 1060 cards. If you’re putting together a budget gaming PC, or making an upgrade to an older system, you might have been tempted by both. But which one is best? We explain the differences between the two cards, and help you decide which one best suits your needs.

3GB or 6GB?

Complicating matters is the fact that there are two versions of the 1060 card to choose from. One comes with 3GB of VRAM; the other comes with 6GB. So, while you can generally expect a 1060 to beat a 1050Ti in terms of raw firepower, you might find that some 4GB 1050Ti cards actually have a slender advantage over their cousins in certain memory-intensive applications.

The 6GB version of the 1060 also comes with a more generous complement of CUDA cores than the 3GB (1,280 compared with 1,152). More accurately, Nvidia has elected to disable those extra cores to make its 6Gb card artificially more powerful. The upshot of this is that there’s a potential for confusion. If you’re looking at what appears to be a bargain, then be sure to check how much VRAM you’re getting for your money. You don’t want to be disappointed when you check the system monitor and discover that you’re mistakenly installed an inferior graphics card.

What difference does VRAM really make?

In the same way as your CPU will make use of system RAM, your GPU will make use of VRAM – lightning-quick memory that’s built right into the graphics card for easy access. If you’re running your games in higher resolutions, you can expect them to eat up more of your VRAM. A given portion of the card’s onboard memory will be used to buffer frames before they’re sent to the display. The more pixels on a frame, the more memory this buffer will consume. Of course, we can compensate for this by disabling things like multi-sampling anti-aliasing (which smoothes out jagged edges by rendering the same frame repeatedly), but then the quality of the picture will begin to suffer.

4K gaming is (near enough) impracticable at this price point, but we should expect a 6GB card to turn in perfectly respectable performance at 1440p. If you only have 3GB to play with, then 1080p will probably be the limit in most modern, mainstream games.

If you end up using more VRAM than you have, then games will begin to store the data they need elsewhere. This will result in hideous slowdown and crashes, as it’ll suddenly take much longer to store and retrieve data from memory.

As such, when you’re contemplating your decision, you’ll need to think about which games you’re going to be playing, and those you’re likely to play in the future. Many popular games are playable even on weaker hardware. Something like Minecraft, for example, is not demanding at all; you’ll be able to play it at 4k even with a paltry amount of VRAM, because the textures are all very small. This isn’t the case with modern, good-looking games like Tomb Raider and Battlefield.

Benchmarks

Given that these cards have been on the market for almost two years, there’s a wealth of information out there. Compare the 6GB 1060 and the 1050Ti and you’ll find an effective improvement of around 84% across all setups. This figure rises to 143% when we just consider more demanding reflection performance in HDR ‘teapot’ benchmarks.

While it’s difficult to state with certainty how big the difference will be on your machine, it’s easy to predict that it’ll be noticeable. If you opt for a 1050Ti, you can expect to have to turn certain settings in your games down or off.

The differences between the two flavours of 1060 are less dramatic, but the contrast between them is still consistent across just about every game and benchmark. We should consider, however, that the 3GB limit will be more restrictive in certain games (those which demand that large amounts of high-resolution textures be loaded into the card’s onboard memory). Don’t expect, in other words, the difference to be evenly spread across your playing experience: rather, expect performance to fall off a cliff whenever your character wanders into a large outdoor scene which crams lots of assets into the screen-space.

The 6GB version of the 1060 offers substantially superior performance to the 1050Ti, and, if your budget allows, we’d recommend it for that reason. The price difference between the three cards isn’t trivial, however. If you’re building a new machine with a 1050Ti, then you’ll need to find another £80 or so to bring the 6GB 1060 into your set-up. If you’re doing a lot of gaming, finding this money might be worthwhile in the long-run.

Take a look at the other elements of your would-be set-up – can you afford to cut any of them? AMD’s Ryzen CPU chips tend to command lower prices than its Intel equivalents, and for a gaming build, the switch becomes near-irresistible. The increased power draw of the 1060 might, however, mean that you need to invest in a heftier power supply in order to accommodate it. If that isn’t an issue, it’s difficult to make the case for the 1050Ti in serious gaming setups.

AMD has little that can stand up to any of the 10-series Nvidia cards, and given the importance of graphical muscle to games performance, it’s difficult to look beyond the 6GB version of the 1060 for optimal bang for buck.