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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile in 2025: Is This Graphics Card Worth Considering?

Professional Analysis for Gamers and Users

1. Architecture and Key Features

Turing without RTX: A Modest Foundation

The GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile graphics card, released in 2019, is based on the Turing architecture — the same used in the more powerful RTX series. However, unlike the RTX 2060 or RTX 3050, the GTX 1650 lacks dedicated ray tracing units (RT cores) and tensor cores for DLSS. This makes it a "simplified" version of Turing, aimed at the budget segment.

Manufacturing Technology: 12nm process from TSMC. By 2025, this process is already outdated, but at its time it provided a balance between performance and energy efficiency.

Unique Features:

- Support for DirectX 12 Ultimate (without hardware-accelerated ray tracing).

- NVIDIA Technologies: Adaptive Shading, Ansel, ShadowPlay.

- Lack of RTX and DLSS — a major downside. In ray tracing games (for example, Cyberpunk 2077), FPS drops to 15-20 even at low settings.

2. Memory: A Modest but Important Resource

Type and Size: Depending on the laptop model, the GTX 1650 Mobile uses either GDDR5 or GDDR6 with a size of 4 GB. By 2025, even GDDR6 in this card seems insufficient, especially for games with highly detailed textures (like Horizon Forbidden West or Starfield).

Bandwidth:

- For GDDR5: 128-bit bus + 8 Gbps → 128 GB/s.

- For GDDR6: 14 Gbps → 224 GB/s (less common).

Impact on Performance: 4 GB of memory becomes a bottleneck in games with resolutions above 1080p. For instance, in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla at ultra settings in 1080p, video memory fills up to 90-100%, causing micro-stutters.

3. Gaming Performance: Realities of 2025

Full HD — Comfortable Zone

- Cyberpunk 2077 (without RT): Medium settings — 40-45 FPS, high — 25-30 FPS.

- Fortnite (Epic, without DLSS): 60-70 FPS.

- Apex Legends: 70-80 FPS on high.

1440p and 4K: Not recommended. In lighter projects (CS2, Valorant), 60 FPS is possible at 1440p, but in AAA games, it's better to reduce the resolution to 720-900p.

Ray Tracing: Hardware support is absent. Enabling software emulation (e.g., through Proton for Linux) reduces FPS by 3-4 times.

4. Professional Tasks: Not Just Gaming

Video Editing: In DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro, the card can handle 1080p rendering thanks to CUDA cores. However, a 4K timeline may cause lags.

3D Modeling: The GTX 1650 Mobile shows modest results in Blender: rendering a scene in Cycles takes 30-50% longer than with the RTX 3050.

Scientific Computing: Support for CUDA and OpenCL allows the card to be used for simple tasks (data analysis in MATLAB), but for neural networks (TensorFlow), the absence of Tensor cores is critical.

5. Power Consumption and Heat Dissipation

TDP: 35-50 W depending on the version. This makes the card compatible with thin laptops but requires a quality cooling system.

Recommendations:

- Choose laptops with 2-3 heat pipes and adjustable-speed fans.

- Avoid ultrabooks with passive cooling — throttling is likely.

- Use cooling pads for long gaming sessions.

6. Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon RX 5500M:

- Pros: 8 GB GDDR6, handles textures better.

- Cons: Higher power consumption (65 W).

Intel Arc A370M:

- Pros: Hardware ray tracing and XeSS support, better drivers in 2025.

- Cons: Price is 20-30% higher.

NVIDIA RTX 2050 Mobile:

- Pros: DLSS and RT cores, comparable TDP.

- Cons: More expensive by $100-150.

7. Practical Advice

Power Supply: Laptops with GTX 1650 Mobile are fine with a standard adapter of 90-120 W.

Compatibility:

- Optimal processors: Intel Core i5-12450H, AMD Ryzen 5 5600H.

- Avoid pairing with weak CPUs (Pentium, Celeron) — this will create a bottleneck.

Drivers: NVIDIA continues to release updates, but the focus has shifted to RTX series. For stability, use Studio Drivers.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low price: laptops with GTX 1650 Mobile cost $400-600 (2025).

- Energy efficiency.

- Support for modern APIs (DirectX 12 Ultimate, Vulkan).

Cons:

- 4 GB of memory.

- No hardware ray tracing and DLSS.

- Outdated architecture.

9. Final Conclusion: Who Should Consider the GTX 1650 Mobile?

This graphics card is a choice for:

- Budget gamers ready to play at 1080p with medium settings.

- Students who need a laptop for studies and light editing.

- Office users who value silence and battery life.

Alternative: If your budget allows for an additional $200-300, consider laptops with the RTX 3050 or Intel Arc A550M — they will provide future-proofing.

The GTX 1650 Mobile in 2025 is a "workhorse" for undemanding tasks, but its time is nearing its end. Purchase it only if other options are unavailable.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

April 2020

Model Name

GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile

Generation

GeForce 16 Mobile

Base Clock

1380MHz

Boost Clock

1515MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Transistors

4,700 million

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

12 nm

Architecture

Turing

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

4GB

Memory Type

GDDR6

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

128bit

Memory Clock

1500MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

192.0 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

48.48 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

96.96 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

6.205 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

96.96 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

3.041 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

SM Count

Multiple Streaming Processors (SPs), along with other resources, form a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM), which is also referred to as a GPU's major core. These additional resources include components such as warp schedulers, registers, and shared memory. The SM can be considered the heart of the GPU, similar to a CPU core, with registers and shared memory being scarce resources within the SM.

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

1024

L1 Cache

64 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

1024KB

TDP

50W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

3.0

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (12_1)

CUDA

7.5

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.6

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

3.041 TFLOPS

3DMark Time Spy

Score

3514

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Radeon Sky 700

3.291 +8.2%

FirePro S9050

3.161 +3.9%

GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile

3.041

GeForce GTX 1650 GDDR6

2.906 -4.4%

Radeon HD 7950

2.81 -7.6%

3DMark Time Spy

GeForce GTX 1070 Ti

6669 +89.8%

Radeon R9 FURY

4682 +33.2%

GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile

3514

GeForce GTX 970M

2237 -36.3%

Radeon Vega 8 Mobile

1398 -60.2%