Nvidia GeForce 1050 and 1050 Ti now officially available for mobile gaming

By Mark Coppock Published January 3, 2017

Nvidia has been making some serious noise with its Pascal architecture, pushing out high-performance GPUs at highly competitive price points. Notably, the company has been focusing as much on mobile gaming as on the desktop, offering versions of their best GPUs for notebooks that share specifications with their desktop counterparts.

On Tuesday, Nvidia got CES 2017 started off a little early by formally announcing the availability of its latest mobile GPUs, the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti. Nvidia isn’t letting anything out of the bag, though, given that manufacturers like Acer have already announced notebooks utilizing the newest Nvidia part. In total, more than 30 notebooks will utilize the new GPU.

Recommended Videos

The GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti are aimed at providing decent gaming performance in machines, with chassis as thin as 17mm while offering the latest version of Nvidia’s BatteryBoost technology to gamers playing for longer sessions while unplugged. According to Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 1050/Ti can provide up to three times the performance of the previous generation of GPUs.

Other functionality provided by the GeForce GTX 1050/Ti is full support for DirectX 12 in Windows 10, with up to 1080p at 60 frames per second. Nvidia GameWorks is supported for interactive and cinematic experiences, and the GeForce Experience utility is available to keep drivers up to date and to optimize settings for specific titles. Nvidia Ansel provides an in-game camera for making professional screenshots easier, and G-Sync support provides smooth gameplay on supported machines.

Nvidia notes that a host of manufacturers will be supporting the GeForce GTX 1050/Ti, including Acer, Alienware, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI. Prices will start as low as $700, making midrange gaming a reality on a much wider array of mobile gaming systems.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Topics

Computing Writer

Mark Coppock is a Freelance Writer at Digital Trends covering primarily laptop and other computing technologies. He has…

Computing

25 years ago, Nvidia changed PCs forever

The GeForce 256 sitting next to a Half Life box.

Twenty-five years ago, Nvidia released the GeForce 256 and changed the face of PCs forever. It wasn't the first graphics card produced by Nvidia -- it was actually the sixth -- but it was the first that really put gaming at the center of Nvidia's lineup with GeForce branding, and it's the device that Nvidia coined the term "GPU" with.

Nvidia is celebrating the anniversary of the release, and rightfully so. We've come an unbelievable way from the GeForce 256 up to the RTX 4090, but Nvidia's first GPU wasn't met with much enthusiasm. The original release, which lines up with today's date, was for the GeForce 256 SDR, or single data rate. Later in 1999, Nvidia followed up with the GeForce 256 DDR, or dual data rate.

Computing

Nvidia just made GeForce Now so much better

Playing games with GeForce Now on a laptop.

Nvidia has just added adaptive refresh rates to GeForce Now, its cloud gaming service. The new tech, dubbed Cloud G-Sync, works on PCs with Nvidia GPUs first and foremost , but also on Macs. These include Macs with Apple Silicon, as well as older models with Intel CPUs and AMD GPUs. On the Windows PC side more broadly, Intel and AMD GPUs will not be supported right now. Nvidia has also made one more change to GeForce Now that makes it a lot easier to try out -- it introduced day passes.

Cloud G-Sync's variable refresh rate (VRR) feature will sync your monitor's refresh rate to match the frame rates you're hitting while gaming with GeForce Now. Nvidia's new cloud solution also uses Reflex to lower latency regardless of frame rates. Enabling VRR in GeForce Now should provide a major boost by reducing screen tearing and stuttering, improving the overall gaming experience on PCs and laptops that normally can't keep up with some titles. To pull this off, Nvidia uses its proprietary RTX 4080 SuperPODs.

Computing

Nvidia just fixed a major issue with its GPUs

The Nvidia RTX 4080 Super on a pink background.

If you've been unhappy with the performance of your graphics card lately, you might want to check out Nvidia's latest beta driver. This is a hotfix driver, which is pretty unusual for Nvidia, but it can be helpful if you've been dealing with micro-stuttering, both in games and on the desktop. The update addresses four issues in total, but to get it, you'll have to dig a little deeper than the standard path of updating your drivers.

Nvidia typically bundles bug fixes with its usual Game Ready drivers, as urgent hotfixes tend to be few and far between. However, this time, Nvidia chose not to wait any longer and pushed four updates for its GPU range. The new driver version, 551.46, may fix annoying stuttering issues.