Nvidia has released the GTX 1650, its latest Turing-based graphics card, to about as much fanfare as the Sultan of Brunei unveiling their new LGBTQ ambassador. Nvidia’s high volume sub-$150 card seems to have been more or less been released as little more than a footnote to its new line of mobile Turing GPUs. Nvidia has only released supporting drivers today, meaning press reviews are inevitably delayed post-launch, and today’s press release, also detailing the new mobile GTX 16-series graphics cards, only gets around to mentioning the existence of the GTX 1650 in desktop form on its third page in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it four line paragraph. Which initially seems a bit harsh on the new TU117-based graphics card. It’s the direct replacement for the GTX 1050, offering 70% higher frame rates at 1080p and for just $149 (£138). Like the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti it doesn’t need any external power as its 75W TDP means it can slurp up all the juice it needs from your motherboard’s PCIe slot alone. That makes the GTX 1650 a great drop-in upgrade for any off-the-shelf PC, allowing you to turn your boring black box office machine into a 1080p gaming rig for just $150, and without having to do anything more invasive than simply dropping the card in and hooking up your monitor. Except that we live in a world which still has a lot of AMD RX 570 graphics cards floating around in the channel for a good chunk of change less than the new GTX 1650. The second tier, second generation Polaris GPU was a mean gaming chip when it first launched, offering frame rates only just short of its bigger RX 580 sibling. And, despite the fact we’re a couple of years on from its launch, the RX 570 has found a new lease of life at its new budget positioning. Read more: These are the best graphics cards around today For the last six months at least it’s been the best budget graphics card you can buy, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change with the launch of the GTX 1650. Which might explain why Nvidia seems almost intent on burying the release of its latest GPU… GTX 1650 GTX 1050 RX 570 GPU Nvidia TU117 Nvidia GP107 AMD Polaris 20 Lithography 12nm 14nm 14nm Stream processors 896 640 2,048 Memory size 4GB 2GB 4GB Memory type GDDR5 GDDR5 GDDR5 TDP 75W 75W 150W Price $149 $109 $130 In its own press materials Nvidia claims the GTX 1650 is up to 70% quicker than a GTX 1050 at 1080p. That’s a pretty impressive generation-on-generation speed bump, but considering the RX 570 is at least 70 quicker than the GTX 1050 TI – sometimes up to 85% faster – in our own relative benchmarking, it’s looking like it might be pretty tough to recommend the GTX 1650 when it comes in more expensive and quite probably much slower. There has been mention of a potential GTX 1650 Ti card, as a result of manufacturer submissions to the ever-reliable Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC). The latest of which shows a bunch of Asus GTX 1650 Ti cards, as well as GTX 1650 SKUs with just 2GB of video memory. The fact that we’ve seen a huge number of EEC submissions recently which haven’t materialised as actual product makes me rather skeptical that we’ll see any of these proposed GTX 1650 Ti variants. If the standard version is too expensive given its relative performance then a pricier Ti isn’t going to do much to help. We’ll have a GTX 1650 up on our test bench as soon as humanly possible, but the chance of it beating the performance of an RX 570 is going to be rather minimal to say the least. But we’ll soon know for sure.<doc-sep>The GTX 1060’s years-long reign over the mainstream gaming laptop market is ending. On Tuesday, Nvidia announced that its GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1650 GPUs are coming to gaming notebooks, where they’ll join the more powerful mobile GeForce RTX options introduced earlier this year. (Haven’t heard of the latter GPU? Surprise!) Nvidia also announced the GeForce GTX 1650 desktop graphics card today. Interestingly, Nvidia did not announce a non-Ti mobile version of the GTX 1660. Based on previous pricing trends, we’d expect the GTX 1650 to slip mostly into systems costing less than $1,100, while the GTX 1660 Ti will likely be reserved for laptops in the $1,000 to $1,600-or-so range. Beyond that lies the mobile RTX 2060’s territory. These new GPUs should provide a substantial boost over their predecessors. While we haven’t had an opportunity to test any laptops equipped with Nvidia’s latest hardware yet, Nvidia says the mobile GTX 1660 Ti should be up to 1.5X faster than the mobile GTX 1060, while the mobile GTX 1650 can deliver up to 1.7X better performance than the GTX 1050. Nvidia Nvidia Don’t expect such a big leap in every game, though. The GeForce GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti are built with Nvidia’s cutting-edge Turing GPU architecture (albeit without the RTX-exclusive hardware that enables real-time ray tracing). The Turing architecture overhauled how Nvidia GPUs handle certain tasks, splitting integer and floating point instructions into two separate pipelines that run simultaneously, rather than dropping both into a single pipeline and creating a logjam. That tweak helps Turing run much better in modern games that lean on asynchronous compute features, such as Strange Brigade and Rainbow Six Siege. Look for bigger gains in titles like those, as you can infer from Nvidia’s performance numbers in this mobile GTX 1060 vs GTX 1660 Ti comparison: Nvidia Performance can also vary based on whether your laptop’s equipped with a full-force version of these GPUs, or a more energy-efficient Max-Q variant. Nvidia says the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti will use 80 watts untethered, or 60W in its Max-Q form. The GTX 1650, meanwhile, can be configured for either 50W or 35W. If you’re coming from an older laptop, you’re in for a big treat. Nvidia claims that 75 percent of GeForce-equipped notebooks in the wild pack GTX 960m performance or less. The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti stomps all over it. Nvidia You’ll see an explosion of laptops with the new mobile GPUs on store shelves sooner rather than later. Nvidia says more than 80 different laptops with the GTX 1650 or GTX 1660 Ti inside are coming from all the major notebook vendors. The vast majority of those should appear within the next month. Pricing will start at $799. Again, expect that lower price to be for GTX 1650 laptops. GTX 1660 Ti laptops will likely cost north of a grand. Nvidia didn’t provide a list of which laptops will ship with the new GPUs installed, but its press briefing showcased some individual models. The following gaming notebooks will start offering the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti as an option: Asus ROG Zephyrus GU502 HP Omen 15 Acer Nitro 7 Dell G5 Meanwhile, these laptops will come with the mobile GTX 1650: GTX 1650 MSI PS63 Lenovo Y540 Nvidia Finally, Nvidia’s making its newest hardware even more enticing by offering a “GeForce Fortnite bundle” with all GTX 16-series notebooks and graphics cards until May 22. It comes with 2,000 V-Bucks and the Counterattack cosmetic set shown above.<doc-sep>
(Image credit: Square Enix) Update 3/29/19, 1:45 p.m. ET: The GeForce GTX 1650 has been listed for a second time on the Final Fantasy XV benchmark scoreboard. On this occasion, the mid-range graphics card from Nvidia was benchmarked at a resolution of 1920x1080 on the High Quality graphics preset. According to the latest result, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650's performance is reportedly right in the AMD Radeon RX 580 2048SP's alley. In comparison to Nvidia's other graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 1650 finds itself just 2.58 percent short of catching up to the GeForce GTX 1060 (3GB). Original article, 3/21/19: (Image credit: Square Enix) The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650, a rumored graphics card, just made its first appearance in the Final Fantasy XV benchmark scoreboard. Nvidia has already released the GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660, so we're expecting the entry-level GTX 1650 should arrive shortly There are talks that the GTX 1650 will feature a different silicon than its older brothers. The GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti are powered by the Turing TU116 die, which TSMC produces for Nvidia on the 12nm process node. Rumor has it that TSMC is cooking up the TU117 for the GTX 1650. The TU117 is expected to come without RT cores, for real-time ray tracing, or Tensor cores, for AI workloads. The GTX 1650, rumored to sport up to 896 CUDA cores, could feature a 1,485MHz base clock and a boost clock that climbs over the 1,600MHz mark. The only concrete spec on the graphics card so far is the 4GB of memory clocked at 2,000MHz (8,000MHz), although the type of memory remains a mystery. It's possible that Nvidia will use GDDR5 memory with the GTX 1650. It's unknown whether the GTX 1650 benchmarked with the Final Fantasy XV tool is the desktop or mobile version. So take the results with a bit of salt. The graphics card was tested at the 2560x1440 resolution with the Lite Quality preset. The Final Fantasy XV results showed that the GTX 1650 performs just like the current GTX 1050 Ti. Based on the leaked benchmark, the performance difference between the two graphics cards is less than 1 percent. But let's not jump to conclusions just yet. The GTX 1650 could very well be the mobile variant, which would lead to a lower score. Plus, that graphics card could easily be an engineering sample, which would mean it's still susceptible to further tweaking from Nvidia. Also, there's the matter of having compatible drivers for the graphics card to truly perform properly. The GTX 1650 is expected to be on shelves by the end of March or on April 30, depending on which media (DigiTimes or HardOCP) you trust. The price tag for the budget graphics card is reportedly set at $179 (~£137.05), but, of course, that isn't carved in stone either.