Friday, March 29, 2024

Nvidia GTX 1650 Super vs. GTX 1650: A budget battle

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Nvidia’s Super refresh of its RTX and GTX series of Turing graphics cards has been swift and expansive and the latest model to hit is the GTX 1650 Super, launching just seven months after its non-Super alternative. With just a few dollars between the two cards, how they compare on performance is of major import. To see just how much value there is left in the stock 1650 in a world with Supers in it, we pitted the GTX 1650 vs. 1650 Super, in a classic head to head.

Interested in more than just Nvidia’s budget cards? These are the best GPUs you can buy.

Pricing and availability

MSI

The GTX 1650 went on sale in April 2019 with a launch price of $150 and in November, that’s much the same at most retailers, with some overclocked and enhanced-cooling versions reaching as high as $175.

The GTX 1650 Super debuted on November 22, 2019, with a launch price of $160. There are no Nvidia Founders Editions versions of these cards, so you’re only getting ones from Nvidia board partners. Some of those with fancier cooling go for as much as $180, but most are around the $160-$170 mark.

These prices are very, very close, especially when you consider the overclocked versions that some manufacturers are selling. Close enough, that we wonder whether the GTX 1650 Super will ultimately just replace the standard 1650 as the entry-level GPU from Nvidia, though it’s also possible we’ll see prices for the original 1650 fall once the market has had time to correct.

Performance

The GTX 1650 Super might have a similar name to the 1650, but that’s more for marketing than anything else. The 1650 Super is an altogether different GPU. It has substantially more CUDA cores than the 1650, as well as a higher clock speed and 50% faster memory. It’s a big upgrade. On paper, it’s within striking distance of a stock GTX 1660.

GTX 1660
GTX 1650 Super
GTX 1650
GPU
TU116
TU116
TU117
CUDA Cores
1,408
1,280
896
Base Clock
1,530MHz
1,530MHz
1,485MHz
Boost Clock
1,785MHz
1,725MHz
1,665MHz
Memory
6GB GDDR6
4GB GDDR6
4GB GDDR5
Memory speed
8Gbps
12Gbps
8Gbps
Bandwidth
192GBps
192GBps
192GBps
TDP
120w
100w
75w

In developing the 1650 Super, Nvidia gave it GDDR6 memory running at a faster clip than that found in the 1650 or the 1660. That’s what enables it to match the GTX 1660 in memory bandwidth, despite its narrower memory bus. It has a higher base and boost clock, but the biggest differentiating factor is the 42% increase in CUDA core count. That should, when combined with the other performance enhancements, deliver a noticeable improvement in the card’s capabilities.

That seems to play out in testing, too. In games where the standard GTX 1650 performed poorly, the GTX 1650 Super really picked up the slack. In TechPowerUp’s testing in games like Metro Exodus, we see the 1650 Super reach speeds in excess of the RX 580. In the Witcher 3, the 1650 almost catches up with the RX 590, where the standard 1650 falls well behind even the RX 570 and the GTX 1060 3GB.

TechSpot’s results echoed these findings, showing the GTX 1650 Super as an excellent 1080p video card, with no problem hitting a consistent 60 FPS in a number of games. Hardware Unboxed amalgamated 17 of its various game tests into one results graph and found that where the standard 1650 is often noticeably less capable than the 1060 3GB and RX 570, the GTX 1650 Super delivers performance that is within a few FPS of the RX 580.

This makes Nvidia’s budget graphics card line far more competitive, especially since with a little overclocking, you’re likely to be able to reach near-GTX 1660 speeds, saving yourself a lot of money in a tight and competitive price range.

What about ray tracing?

Both the GTX 1650 and GTX 1650 Super technically support ray tracing, thanks to Nvidia’s expansion of the previously-RTX-exclusive feature early in 2019. That said, neither of these cards sports the RT cores that provide hardware acceleration for ray-tracing calculations. We’ve seen previously that only the GTX 1080 Ti really has the general computing grunt to deliver even passable ray tracing experiences without those RT cores, so don’t expect to enjoy ray tracing in games with either of these cards at anything close to comfortable frame rates.

You can turn it on to see what it looks like, but it is almost certainly not going to be playable, regardless of your choice of game.

The upside is that you can still enjoy other Nvidia features like its support for Reshade post-processing effects in the Geforce Experience, and its NULL (Nvidia Ultra Low Latency) enhancement for competitive gaming.

The 1650 Super is the new 1650

With the way prices are right now, there is no point in buying a GTX 1650. If you’re in the market for a new graphics card at around the $150 point, spend the extra $10 and get the GTX 1650 Super. It is a far superior graphics card that will serve you far better now, and last you much longer in the future, too.

Considering the broad disparity in performance and the incredibly narrow difference in pricing, Nvidia will need to either drop the standard 1650 entirely or more likely, adjust its pricing downwards so it competes more directly with AMD’s ultra-budget cards, like the RX 560.

The only caveat with both of these cards is that with 4GB of memory apiece, they aren’t going to be the best for handling high-resolution textures. That could become a problem following 2020 when a new generation of home consoles is likely to raise the bar for what we can expect on a visual front.

But that’s not something that you need be overly concerned within the budget sector, where playing with settings can avoid the memory bottleneck for the most part. And if you really want more, there’s always the GTX 1660, which you might be able to find a great deal on this Black Friday.

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