TECH NEWS – Nvidia has used a sneaky trick to keep this video card’s price as low as possible.

The Nvidia GTX 1650 is based on the Turing architecture, and it is intentionally cheaper than the recently launched GTX 1660, or the price/performance champion GTX 1660 Ti: the GPUs come with a new encoder per architecture since Kepler, but this time, the company has skipped it, as they use the previous, Volta NVENC instead of the Turing one! The NVENC is Nvidia’s encoder that offloads encoding tasks to have the processing power for other tasks. This move is surprising from Nvidia because there’s roughly a 15% performance difference between Volta and Turing.

There is no official explanation for this move yet, but one of the reasons is likely cutting costs to have new, cheaper GPUs on the market against AMD’s solutions. The other thought behind it is probably the reduction in power draw – the company wants to cut all possible corners to succeed, and this is probably why they reduced the number of transistors in the GTX 1650.

The Nvidia GTX 1650 launched less than a week (!) ago, as it became available from April 23. It is an entry-level GPU: you will not play any games on a 4K resolution with maximum graphical settings… for that, you need the RTX 2000 series, which, as the name hints at it, come with real-time ray-tracing.

So Nvidia’s trick has been figured out – of course, the company will get away with it, but the rival, AMD, isn’t in a bad situation either, as, with the PlayStation 5 (the name is still not official…), it has been confirmed to use an AMD Ryzen Zen 2 CPU and a Navi GPU. Meanwhile, Nvidia has only the Nintendo Switch by its side…

Source: PCGamer