Geforce is a consumer brand of video cards targeting the gaming market.  Products under this brand follow a naming convention for its prefix, main code and suffix, presumably decided by the chip designer Nvidia.  Popular prefixes are GT, GTS, and GTX in increasing sequence of performance.  The main code is from 200 to 999 where digit 1 represents the generation, and digits 2&3 represent the positioning in the generation.  Popular suffixes are Ti and Ti Boost in increasing sequence of performance.  The above convention applies in 2013, because we saw 4 digits of the main code and different prefixes and suffices in previous years.

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The product code of GTX650 indicates Generation 6 and middle of the range.  Generation 6 is based on Nvidia Kepler technology whereas Gen 5 is based on Fermi.  Terms like Kepler and Fermi started at the time of Nvidia releasing CUDA which is a framework for heterogeneous parallel computing.  For example, Fermi corresponds to CUDA 2 and Kepler corresponds to CUDA 3. 

A comparison of the hardware spec is shown in the table.  The newer card is certainly more modern for graphics display as shown. 

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Performance wise, GTX650 is only marginally higher than GTX550Ti.  The chart was from http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-650/performance

For professional digital content creations such as 3D CAD and video editing, GTX650 is nothing compared to Quadro 2000 which has lesser cores.  We tested both in TSD. Quadro 2000 was tested on a system “ASUS P8Z77-V LX / i3 3220 / 4GB DDR3-1600”, and GTX 650 was tested on “ASUS P8H61MX R2.0/ i3 3220 / 4GB DDR3-1600”.  All tests were done at 1280x960 resolution with 8x FSAA.  Figures of higher value have higher performance.

For scientific computations, GTX650 showed a pleasant performance under Single Precision.  Lower figure means higher performance.  GTX650 out-performs Q2000 on SP.

In summary,

o GTX 650 is more powerful than GTX 550 Ti for gaming applications.
o GTX 650 is not suitable for professional CAD applications
o GTX 650 can be considered for scientific applications on SP   

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