Nvidia claims the GTX 1650 will be up to twice as fast as a GTX 950 and 50 percent faster than the GTX 1050, and that's probably a fair estimate, especially since both of those cards only have 2GB VRAM. Given the specs, it should also be about 25-30 percent faster than the GTX 1050 Ti, but that also means it's likely slower than the GTX 1060 models.

Taking everything in to consideration: price, the ability to watch and stream 4K resolution videos, the ability to create a workstation that can handle more demanding programs, and also have the chance to game every once in a while, this card has the best overall value. If you’re looking to upgrade your SFF computer’s graphics card, the MSI GTX 1650 Gaming LP is the perfect choice to do so. It has a boost memory speed of 1665 MHz, 4GB of GDDR5 V-RAM, the standard 896 CUDA cores, two 40mm fans, and 8 Gbps memory speeds.That's the primary draw I think, the ability for the GTX 1650 to work in pretty much any PC that has an x16 PCIe slot. It could also make sense as a cheap upgrade for an older PC, but it's not necessarily the best performance or value you can find right now. Further, a majority of them DO require external power, including the one tested for this review, and the ones that don't tend to perform a little slower. Les termes HDMI, interface multimédia haute définition HDMI et habillage commercial HDMI, et les logos HDMI sont des marques commerciales et des marques déposées de HDMI Licensing Administrator, Inc. That means support for H.265 8K encode at 30 FPS is gone, along with the 25% bitrate savings for HEVC and up to 15% bitrate savings for H.264 that Nvidia touted when Turing launched. Putting It All Together…

Why the Radeon RX 550 you may ask? Well currently it appears that the Radeon RX 550 and the GeForce 1050 Ti are the perfect GPUs available for HTPCs – considering hardware and price – even in 2020. Wrapping up the charts, above are two different views of performance per monetary unit (using Germany for Euro pricing, if you're wondering). I've calculated "value" for these midrange, budget, and select high-end models using the best available pricing as of April 23. Prices do fluctuate, but most of these graphics cards are readily available at the prices used.Whereas GeForce GTX 1660 is armed with 22 Streaming Multiprocessors, the 1650 features just 14 SMs spread across two Graphics Processing Clusters. One GPC hosts four Texture Processing Clusters and the other has three. With 64 FP32 cores per SM, we end up with 896 active CUDA cores and 56 usable texture units. It's not a major loss, as people using a budget GPU are less likely to do streaming, but it's more than a little odd. How many transistors were shaved off the die size by omitting the newer NVENC? Possibly a couple hundred million at most, but that's only a 2-4 percent increase in die size. It speaks to the constraints that budget GPUs have to work in, however, where every penny counts. About the only real advantage these cards hold is that they have low power draw, allowing them to run on low-end 300-350 watt power supplies found in some pre-built systems, at least assuming you get a card that doesn't require a PCIe power cable, but those will likely perform slightly behind what's shown here.

The GTX 1650 isn't a bad GPU by any means. It can hit 60fps at 1080p medium to high quality in most games, and it's affordable. Just make sure you understand what you're getting, because if you're looking at building a budget gaming PC, you'll almost always be better served by spending a bit more money. Another point of interest: 2014's GTX 970 is only slightly faster (1-3 percent on average) than the GTX 1650, mostly due to improvements in architecture over the past two generations. Newer games tend to favor the GTX 1650, while older games are more likely to favor the GTX 970. The GTX 1650 uses a new TU117 GPU, which is a smaller and thus less expensive variant of the TU116 that powers the GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti cards. The key differences relative to the 1660 line are in the memory configuration and number of SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors), which in turn determines the number of CUDA cores, texture units, and ROPs. It's still built using TSMC's 12nm lithography, leaving 7nm for AMD's Radeon VII for now. The result is a die size that's about a third lower than the TU116, with 4.7 billion transistors. That's not to say the card is useless though, and for someone looking for a budget card for a pre-built system with something like a 350 watt PSU, it could make sense (provided they are not trying to fit it in a slim case). Overall, the GTX 1650 lands right about where expected. It's clearly faster than the GTX 1050, by 57 percent at 1080p medium and 73 percent at 1080p ultra in my testing. Again, a lot of that is due to the 1050's limited VRAM, as the GTX 1050 Ti is much closer—the 1650 is about 30 percent faster. The GTX 1060 3GB meanwhile leads by 17 percent at 1080p medium and 9 percent at 1080p ultra, and the RX 570 4GB is in a similar position.

Theoretical Performance

The difficulty with budget GPUs is that they never represent something "new" in terms of performance. Yes, the GTX 1650 is faster than the previous generation GTX 1050 Ti, but it's also roughly the same performance as a high-end GPU from nearly five years ago. Now that level of performance is available from a substantially less expensive 75W TDP card (give or take), and there will eventually be low profile card models using the GTX 1650.