The once one of the most used NVIDIA graphics cards according to Steam’s most popular gaming GPU survey, the GTX 1650 4GB, reportedly will be receiving a higher component upgrade.
The reasoning behind this is that the NVIDIA TU117 GPU has been running out of stock and board manufacturers have been told to replace it with more powerful TU116 or TU106 GPUs instead if they wanted to continue producing the GPU.
The GTX 1650 GPU is currently the cheapest entry-level GTX card that NVIDIA is offering and while it was never meant for gaming, the prior unfortunate series of events that happened a few years ago led to this card becoming one of the “budget” graphics cards available on the market.
In the capture above, it is mentioned that this “upgrade” should be very much effective starting mid-April this year. It should be mentioned however, that the upgrade serves as an option to board manufacturers should they be willing to keep producing this GPU for the market and therefore there is a probable chance that instead of upgrading, the manufacturers could just stop producing them altogether.
However, it should be noted that this is not the first time the 1650 family has the newer Turing architecture variant as the 1650s, which was first released back in 2019, already has TU116 embedded in it as well as several 1650 with GDDR6 configuration released in 2020.
Bottom line
The NVIDIA GTX 1650 GPU is reported to be silently upgraded using TU106 starting this mid-April. TU106 is the newer Turing architecture used by graphics cards such as the 2060.
This means that any 1650 series produced after the mandate becomes effective, will be uniformly used the same architecture except for the 1650Ti as it is still unknown if the mobile variant will receive the same treatment.
The GTX 1650 price as of early April 2023 is sitting around A$300 on Amazon.
