According to a recent set of leaks, it appears that Nvidia has just added support for two new variants of the GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card. This will bring up the total number of versions of the GTX 1650 to four – a pretty impressive number of options.
We first got a taste of the original GeForce GTX 1650 early last year. It took the shape of a TU117 silicon card with 896 CUDA cores and 4 GB of 8 Gbps GDDR5 memory. We didn’t have to wait too much longer for an updated version either. The GeForce GTX 1650 GDDR6 quickly came along and offered an upgrade to faster 12 Gbps GDDR6 memory, at the cost of slightly lower clock speeds.
This resulted in around a 14% boost to performance with the gains mainly coming from a 50% higher memory bandwidth. This begs the question, where can the GTX 1650 go from here?
Leaks Introduce The TU116 And TU106 Variants
Although this hasn’t been confirmed by Nvidia, information from AIDA64’s latest changelog shows that there will be both a GeForce GTX 1650 TU106 and GeForce GTX 1650 TU116 on the way.
In a similar way to how the name of the GTX 1650 GDDR6 showed that the memory is upgraded, the TU106 and TU116 on these cards refer to the refreshed silicon inside each model. The TU116 die is the same one that is currently used in the other GTX 16-series graphics cards including the GTX 1650 Super, GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Ti, and GTX 1660 Super.
The TU106 die is usually found within Nvidia’s RTX 20-series models such as the RTX 2060, RTX 2060 Super, and the RTX 2070 – could this mean we’ll see some ray-tracing on the 16-series card?
Why Are We Seeing More 16-Series Cards?
It seems strange for a card that isn’t that old to get so many updates in such a short space of time. Some sources point towards this being a way for Nvidia to make use of defective dies that don’t match the requirements for higher models and others seem to think it could be to pave the way for the upcoming Ampere cards. At the moment, it’s anyone’s guess.
With the GeForce GTX 1650 being a pretty popular card, to begin with, it’s going to be great to grab an updated version. We don’t yet have a release date, price, or even official confirmation just yet though.
We’ll keep our eyes peeled for any more news on these updated cards. For now, drop us a comment below telling us what you think about these cards? Would you be tempted to grab one?