The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Super Review, Feat. Zotac Gaming: Bringing Balance To 1080p
by Ryan Smith on December 20, 2019 9:00 AM ESTFinal Words
For our final video card review of the year, the GeForce GTX 1650 Super admittedly doesn’t bring any surprises. But then it didn’t need to. As the 4th TU116 card released this year alone, and the 12th Turing GeForce card overall, we generally have a good grip on what the current generation of GeForce cards can do. All that’s really needed to change was for NVIDIA to get a better grip on what the market is looking for in performance for a sub-$200 card, and with the GTX 1650 Super they’re finally doing that.
Looking at things on a pure performance basis, the GTX 1650 Super makes significant strides over the GTX 1650, never mind NVIDIA’s last-generation cards. As it should: it offers a very hefty increase in the number of CUDA cores as well as memory bandwidth, and even with the TU116 GPU in its cut-down state for this card, it’s still just a whole lot more GPU than the TU117 in the GTX 1650. NVIDIA has thrown significantly more hardware at this segment, and the net result is a big performance boost.
And just in time as well. The launch of AMD’s rival Radeon RX 5500 XT immediately took the original GTX 1650 down a peg, as AMD’s card offered a lot more performance for only a small increase in price. So one way or another, the GTX 1650 Super is NVIDIA’s counter-play to AMD’s new card.
| Performance Summary (1080p) | |||||
| Relative Performance | Relative Price |
Relative Perf-Per-Dollar |
|||
| GTX 1650S vs GTX 1650 | +33% | +7% | +25% | ||
| GTX 1650S vs GTX 1660 | -11% | -24% | +16% | ||
| GTX 1650S vs GTX 1050 Ti | +77% | +14% | +55% | ||
| GTX 1650S vs RX 5500 XT 4GB | 0% | -6% | +6% | ||
The outcome is surprisingly even-handed between AMD and NVIDIA. With regards to framerates, the $159 GTX 1650 Super and the $169 RX 5500 XT 4GB are at a dead heat. As is usually the case, the cards are anything but equal on a game-by-game basis, constantly trading wins and losses, but at the end of the day they’re fighting over the same market with the same performance. NVIDIA has a slight edge in price, and perhaps an even slighter edge in overall energy efficiency, but that’s it. As a result, the GTX 1650 Super is significantly better than the GTX 1650, but it’s not able to meaningfully pull ahead of AMD’s card.
Meanwhile, although the original GTX 1650 is now well outclassed in terms of performance, the card isn’t going anywhere, and for good reason. It remains NVIDIA’s best option for the 75W market. GTX 1650 Super improves on performance by almost 33%, but it requires just as much additional power to get there. For system builds that aren’t sensitive to power/thermal needs, then this isn’t going to matter, and the GTX 1650 Super is well worth the $10 price premium. Otherwise the original GTX 1650 is still the best card available for the 75W, maximum compatibility PCIe-slot-power-only market.
Though like last week’s Radeon review, I’ll also note here my general hesitation with cards that have 4GB of VRAM. VRAM isn’t cheap, and GDDR6 even less so, so both vendors are using VRAM capacity as product differentiators and to upsell their better cards. But as VRAM capacity in the $150-$200 price range has been pretty stagnant for the last couple of years now, I do have some concerns about the long-term implications for 4GB cards, especially with the next-generation consoles set to launch in a year’s time. With the consoles setting the baseline for most multiplatform games, it’s a reasonable bet that VRAM requirements aren’t going to stay put at 4GB much longer.
Unlike AMD, the situation isn’t quite as black and white in the NVIDIA ecosystem, as NVIDIA doesn’t offer an 8GB GTX 1650 Super – or even an 8GB GTX 1660 series card for that matter. So the answer can’t just be “buy the 8GB card” like it is with the RX 5500 XT. Still, along with offering better performance, the GTX 1660 cards and their 6GB of VRAM stand a better chance of delivering solid, unimpeded gaming performance in a year or two’s time. At the end of the day, I don’t think any 4GB cards are a great choice right now; if you can afford to go higher, you should.
Finally, we have the particularities of Zotac’s card, the Zotac Gaming GeForce GTX 1650 Super. Zotac is one of NVIDIA’s most regular and reliable partners, and it shows, with the company producing a card that may just as well be the official GTX 1650 Super reference card. It is as good of an example of the baseline GTX 1650 Super experience as one could hope for, right on down to the fact that it’ll fit into virtually any PC.
But like it’s predecessor, the original Zotac GTX 1650, I remain unimpressed with the coolers on Zotac’s GTX 1650 series cards. We have seen and tested other similar double-slot cards before that are quieter, including cards from Zotac. So for the Zotac GTX 1650 Super land among the loudest of our low-end cards is unfortunate. While I admire Zotac’s commitment to making such a small card, I can’t help but think that, if nothing else, a single, larger fan would have fared better. Low-end cards are always a design challenge in terms of profit margins, but I think there’s room here for Zotac to do better, even for a baseline card like their Gaming GTX 1650 Super.
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guachi - Friday, December 20, 2019 - link
The 1650S overall is the card to get if buying a new card. But I'd still recommend a used 570 or 580 (and maybe a new 570 if you get one in sale).Polaris will never die.
I just wouldn't buy THIS 1650S. The noise. Ouch! 50dB?
No.
lmcd - Friday, December 20, 2019 - link
It's a convenient size, enough so that airflow in my case will result in better overall acoustics in my case compared to a larger card. Agreed that there's better designs yet but this isn't as awful as you're implying.Spunjji - Monday, December 23, 2019 - link
50db is terrible under any circumstance.lmcd - Friday, December 20, 2019 - link
Gonna be honest I don't quite understand why the 1050 Ti and 1060 3GB both need to be in this graph set while the 1070 didn't make it in. Usually there aren't performance regressions from one generation to another, so it's more interesting to compare a higher card from the previous generation to a lower card from the current generation.Ryan Smith - Friday, December 20, 2019 - link
The 1070 was a $350 card its entire life. Whereas the 1050 Ti and 1060 3GB were the cards closest to being the 1650 Super's predecessor (1050 Ti was positioned a bit lower, 1060 3GB a bit higher). So the latter two are typically the most useful for generational comparisons.At any rate, this is why we have Bench. So you can use that to make any card comparisons you'd like to see that aren't in this article itself. https://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU19/2638
catavalon21 - Saturday, December 21, 2019 - link
In doing so, it paints an interesting light for those of us who do not upgrade every generation. While the 970 can't be compared directly to it in Bench, it's interesting to see how many benchmarks show it besting the 980 - which was a $550 card when it debuted. Maybe the RTX series cards are worthy of their criticisms for gen-over-gen improvement in performance per dollar, but not this guy. Yes, I know 980 was 2 generations ago, but still. The 980 takes some of the benchmarks, especially CUDA, but across the board, the 1650S competes very well. For a card to have 980-like performance for $160 at 100 watts, I'm impressed.The_Assimilator - Saturday, December 21, 2019 - link
No you're wrong, according to forum keyboard warriors there's been no improvement in price/perf in the last half decade because they can't get top-tier performance for $100. ;)Spunjji - Monday, December 23, 2019 - link
That we're only seeing a price/performance improvement over Pascal more than half-way into the Turing generation kinda proves those "keyboard warriors" correct, though. It's nice, but it was annoying when on release a large chunk of the press decided to sing songs about how new boundaries of performance were being pushed (true!) while downplaying how perf/$ remained still or regressed (equally true). Throwing up some straw men now doesn't change that.Spunjji - Monday, December 23, 2019 - link
The 1060 6GB already beat out the 980 under most circumstances - at worst it was roughly equal. That was a very nice perf/$ improvement indeed for a single generation, and it's where we got most of the gains the 1650 Super is now building on.The 2060 is an instructive example of how the RTX series disappointed in that regard, as the cost increase roughly matched the performance increase and its RTX features are arguably useless.
Kangal - Saturday, December 21, 2019 - link
Thanks for the review Ryan.But I have to go against you on the mention of 4GB VRAM capacity for 2020. You have forgotten something very important. Timing.
Sure, PC Gaming makes a lot more money than Console Gaming (and Mobile Gaming is even larger!!), but that is because the wealth is not distributed fairly, it's quite concentrated. Whereas the Console Market is more spread out, so publishers can make profits more universally and over a longer timeframe. On top of that, there's the marketing and the fear of piracy. Which is the reason why Game Publishers target the consoles first, then afterwards port their titles to PC... even though originally they developed them on PC!
I needed to mention that above background first to give some clarification. Games for 2020 will primarily be made to target the PS4, and they might get ported to the PS5 or Xbox X. Or even those launch titles for the PS5/XbX, they will actually be made for the PS4 first, and had enhancements made. Remember the 2014 games which were still very much PS3/360 games?
And it will take AT LEAST a full-year for the transition to occur. So games in Early 2022 will still target the PS4, which means their PC Ports will be fine for current day low-end PCs. I mean even with the PS5 release, the PS4 sales will continue, and that's a huge market base for the companies to simply ignore. And even in the PC Market, most gamers have something that's slower than a GTX 1660 Ti. Besides, low VRAM isn't too much of an issue, most of the time the game will only require 3GB RAM to run perfectly. If you have more available, say 8GB, then without any changes from your end, you will see it now start using say 6GB of VRAM. That's Double! And you didn't even change the settings! Why? Most games now use the VRAM to store assets it thinks it might use later on, so that it doesn't have to load them when required. This is analogous to how Mac/Linux uses System RAM, as opposed to say Windows does. If it does have to load them, performance will take a momentary dip, but perfectly playable.
And even if the games now require more VRAM by default to be playable, in most cases that problem too can be solved. You can change individual settings one-by-one and see which has the most effect to the graphical fidelity, and how much it penalises your VRAM/RAM usage, and your framerates. I mean look at lowspecgamer, to see how far he pushes it. Though for a better idea, have a look at HardwareUnboxed on YouTube, and see how they optimise graphics for the recently released Red Dead Redemption 2 (PC) game. They fiddled with the graphics to get a negligible downgrade, but boosted their framerates by +66%.
So I think 4GB VRAM will become the new 2GB VRAM (which itself replaced the 1GB VRAM), but that doesn't mean they're compromising on the longevity of the card. I think 4GB will be viable for the midrange upto 2022, then they're strictly just low-end. Asking gamers to get 8GB instead of 4GB for these low-midrange cards is not really sensible at the prices... it is exactly like asking the GTX 960 buyers to get the 4GB Variants instead of the 2GB Variants.