Well, Nvidia just announced three new laptop GPUs including the RTX 2050, but why? Let’s discuss!
According to Nvidia, these new mobile graphics options are going
to give more choices to gamers in Spring 2022, so still a while away.
These are the official specs listed on Nvidia’s website right now, so we can
see where the RTX 2050 fits in behind the RTX 2060. The new 2050 has 4 gigs of GDDR6 memory,
something the RTX lineup didn’t see until the newer 3050 earlier this year. The 2050’s memory
interface is much smaller than the 2060, and the memory bandwidth is also a third of the 2060,
so much lower. That said, the 2050 does have almost 7% more CUDA cores compared to the 2060,
the same 2048 that the 3050 also has, however the power limit range of the 2050 is far lower
at just 30 to 45 watts, so think either budget friendly or thinner and lighter laptop designs.
Something I found interesting is that when we scroll down to the features, we can see that
the 2050 doesn’t offer G-Sync support. HDMI and DisplayPort are also listed as not applicable,
which I’m guessing means that any display outputs on the laptop will connect to the
integrated graphics of the processor rather than there just not being any such ports. It also
makes me think that laptops with the 2050 may be stuck to using optimus, so probably no mux switch.
Compared to the 3050, the 2050 has a lower maximum power limit, and still slower memory bandwidth
and smaller memory interface, despite having the same 4 gigs of GDDR6 memory capacity,
and as mentioned both have the same CUDA core count.
It is worth keeping in mind that the RTX 20 series for laptops was
originally announced at CES in 2019, so by the time the RTX 2050 actually comes out
in 2022 the rest of the 20 series laptops will be over 3 years old.
Of course that in itself isn’t news,
as Nvidia have already re-released the 2060 but with 12 gigs of VRAM on the desktop side,
now they’re just doing something kind of similar for laptops but worse.
Now Nvidia themselves haven’t actually mentioned what architecture the RTX 2050 will use,
but others like computerbase have reported that the 2050 will be based on Ampere,
using the GA107 die, just like the more powerful 3050 and 3050 Ti. The actual chip being used is
early information that I haven’t been able to verify, so take it with a grain of salt.
Considering how constrained Ampere supply is, at first this didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
If Nvidia can make 2050 GPUs then why wouldn’t they make 3050 GPUs if
they use the same die? It would probably make more sense if the 2050 was Turing
based like the rest of the 20 series laptop GPUs, say TU106 like the 2060.
If the 2050 does actually come up being Ampere based,
then it’s likely that they’re just 3050 dies that didn’t quite make the bin,
so I guess if they’ve been saving up a bunch of chips that didn’t quite make the 3050 that
they can’t otherwise use then it might make sense to put those as the 2050. I guess at
least that way from Nvidia’s perspective you still get some return on your investment.
Now based on things like the low power limit and smaller memory bus,
the RTX 2050 isn’t exactly going to be a powerhouse,
so even if it is Ampere based maybe they didn’t name it something like a 3040 or 3030 because
they just didn’t want to taint the new 30 series branding. That’s just me speculating though.
I guess at least to be fair to Nvidia they are using a new product name here,
because they definitely have introduced a new GPU with the same name in the past,
so at least if anything 2050 is a new product name they haven’t used yet.
I’m guessing the RTX 2050 will probably beat the GTX 1650, given the 1650 has like half the CUDA
core count, a similar sort of power limit range, a similar memory bandwidth, granted double the
memory interface, though it uses GDDR5 memory, despite both having 4 gigs of total capacity.
If the RTX 2050 ends up offering GTX 1650-like levels of performance for a similar price but
you get features like DLSS, then I don’t have that big of a problem with it. That sounds like
a pretty reasonable improvement over the older GTX 1650. Personally, I’m not a fan of the “RTX”
branding on the 2050 because Nvidia has taught people that that means ray tracing, and well,
based on the specs I’m just not expecting the 2050 to do so well at tracing those rays,
though of course it will depend on the specific game and RT settings.
Now I thought the timing of this news was a bit strange, given CES is just a little more than 2
weeks away. Instead this 2050 news was dropped on us on a Friday when a lot of tech media outlets
have probably just shut down for the Christmas break. Not to mention that the 2050 isn’t even
going to be here until Spring 2022, so it’s still more than 3 months away, potentially way more.
Nvidia also announced the MX570 and MX550 laptop GPUs,
though I don’t think I’ve ever been sent any MX series GPUs the whole
time I’ve been running the channel, so I don’t have a whole lot to say there.
All things considered, it feels like Nvidia’s kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel to
get something out in the time of supply shortages, and I guess they might even
feel like they’re going backwards based on how they’ve gone about announcing it.
Look, all jokes aside if the RTX 2050 does end up being a decent 1650 replacement but you get DLSS,
then I won’t hate on it too much. DLSS is actually a pretty good feature that
is available in a lot of games now. The GTX 1650 is meant to be more of a entry
level budget friendly gaming option these days, but yeah it can’t currently do DLSS,
so if the 2050 offers somewhat similar performance to the 1650, ideally a little
better but also with the option of DLSS then that’s fine. The problem that I’ve got with it
is the whole ray tracing part, because just based on what I’ve seen with the RTX 2060 and RTX 3050,
yeah I would only expect basic ray tracing effects to actually be used with the 2050.
Of course it’s all yet to be seen, make sure you get subscribed for when I actually get
one of these RTX 2050 laptops in for testing, and also for all of my upcoming CES coverage,
there should hopefully be a lot more interesting news than this.