The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Review, Feat. Zotac: Fighting Brute Force With Power Efficiency
by Ryan Smith & Nate Oh on May 3, 2019 10:15 AM ESTWolfenstein II: The New Colossus (Vulkan)
id Software is popularly known for a few games involving shooting stuff until it dies, just with different 'stuff' for each one: Nazis, demons, or other players while scorning the laws of physics. Wolfenstein II is the latest of the first, the sequel of a modern reboot series developed by MachineGames and built on id Tech 6. While the tone is significantly less pulpy nowadays, the game is still a frenetic FPS at heart, succeeding DOOM as a modern Vulkan flagship title and arriving as a pure Vullkan implementation rather than the originally OpenGL DOOM.
Featuring a Nazi-occupied America of 1961, Wolfenstein II is lushly designed yet not oppressively intensive on the hardware, something that goes well with its pace of action that emerge suddenly from a level design flush with alternate historical details.
The game has 5 total graphical presets: Mein leben!, Uber, Ultra, Medium, and Low. Staying consistent with previous 1080p testing, the highest quality preset, "Mein leben!", was used, in addition to Ultra and Medium. Wolfenstein II also features Vega-centric GPU Culling and Rapid Packed Math, as well as Radeon-centric Deferred Rendering; in accordance with the presets, neither GPU Culling nor Deferred Rendering was enabled.
To preface, an odd performance bug afflicted the two Maxwell cards (GTX 960 and GTX 950), where Medium Image Streaming (poolsize of 768) resulted in out-of-memory sub 2-fps performance. Using the Medium preset but with any other Image Streaming setting returned to normal performance, suggesting an issue with memory allocation, and occuring on earlier drivers as well. It's not clear how much this affects sub 2-fps performance at the "Mein leben!" preset, which is already much too demanding for 2GB of framebuffer.
With the VRAM-hungry nature of Wolfenstein II, the GTX 1650's 4GB keeps it from suffering a premature death like all the other 2GB cards. Or even the 3GB card, in the case of the GTX 1060 3GB. Even at medium settings, the bigger framebuffer turns the tables on the GTX 1060 3GB, which is faster in every other game in the suite. So the GTX 1650 takes the lead in both performance and smoother gameplay experience.
The VRAM-centric approach does uncover more oddities; here the GTX 1650 overcomes the RX 570 4GB at higher settings, but the RX 570 8GB remains undeterred.
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onbquo - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link
Why is it nobody talking about coming 7nm Radeons mopping the floor in the 75W segment?PeachNCream - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link
Because no one has been able to benchmark said graphics cards so no one knows if something is going to mop floors or just draw polygons. (Personally, I'm in for a GPU that will mop my floors for me. I'd also like one that will mow the yard, wash the dishes, and take care of the laundry.)onbquo - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link
Good point but I seriously believe the next architecture Radeon built on 7nm could perform almost twice as fast than a RX 560 with 1024 CUs. Am I the only one hyped for 7nm graphics cards?guidryp - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link
You are making a pile of assumptions with no evidence.Process bumps aren't the big win that they once were. Radeon 7 is 7nm and it didn't get twice as fast. RTX2080 outperforms it while using less power.
7nm is NOT a magic bullet. We need to wait and see what actually happens.
Cooe - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link
More recent benchmarking actually shows the RVII with the performance edge vs the RTX 2080 (AMD just completely botched the launch drivers-wise, as isn't particularly uncommon for them) as many recent videos have shown, but you're totally passing over the fact that it uses the exact same Vega architecture as 14nm Vega 10 but manages to outperform it by around 30% while pulling LESS power than a V64. That's nearly a 40-50% boost in power efficiency per fps, with absolutely no arch changes beyond 2x additional memory controllers. Even if Navi only matches that kind of efficiency bump vs Polaris it'll still be looking really good just as long as they maintain their performance advantage as well.guidryp - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link
Better in one or two AMD favorable games, but not overall. Beating power of V64 is needed, but still doesn't come close to NVidia power usage.Oxford Guy - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link
7nm TSMC isn't nearly as impressive as 5nm TSMC. 80% increase in density with 5nm. 7nm is a little bit sad, really. But, it saves companies money because it doesn't require nearly as much design rules modification, so porting existing 14nm stuff is much easier.PeachNCream - Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - link
I'm really looking forward to seeing what 7nm GPUs do once they hit the market, but I want to hold back on making judgements before we see what sorts of performance and power numbers emerge. I'm also more interested in mobile than desktop components because I have not put together or purchased a desktop PC in the past 5 years since I find laptops and phones a better fit in my living space and lifestyle.nevcairiel - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link
Personally, the only reason I would ever care about a 75W card is for video duties - and AMDs video decoding/encoding is significantly worse then Intels or NVIDIAs. So there is that.I would be excited if they were trying to make a high-end 7nm card that doesn't suck, but apparently its once again just low-power cards. same old same old. I'm bored already.
Oxford Guy - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link
"Personally, the only reason I would ever care about a 75W card is for video duties "Then the lack of B frame support in the encoder is a deal-breaker.