Rumor mill: Nvidia's irritating strategy of 'just good enough' seems to be making an ugly return, after it had seemed they'd turned over a new leaf with the GTX 1660. Benchmark entries from Final Fantasy XV's database have arrived showing wildly different results, but even taking the best one, at an expected price of $179 it's way off the mark.
The first benchmark, conducted at 1440p on FFXV's 'Lite' preset puts the GTX 1650 1% behind the GTX 1050 Ti, and 23% behind the Radeon RX 570. It's 40% slower than the 1060 6GB, and 49% slower the GTX 1660. The second benchmark was run at 1080p on 'High' and it outdoes the GTX 1050 Ti by 38%, the Radeon RX 570 by 2%, and falls just 8% behind the GTX 1060 6GB.
In the second benchmark, the 1650 is 35% slower than the GTX 1660, which is about what you'd expect from two different tiers in Nvidia's lineup. For that reason, and because it's much more common for a card to underperform than overperform, I'd say it's more likely that the 1080p benchmark reflects the card's true performance.
It also lines up pretty well with the specs we've seen trickling down over the last few months. Built on the same TU117 GPU as the GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti, it's alleged to have 896 cores running with a base clock of 1,485 Mhz with boost clocks reaching into the 1,600s. A standard 4GB of GDDR5 will run at 8Gbps on a 128-bit bus, and the card will consume about 75W of power so it won't need a power cable.
The big question is, of course, price. DigiTimes claims that the card will launch at $179. That's the same price the 1050 Ti is at now, but despite being faster it still wouldn't be an appealing buy. Presently the RX 570, which is 43% faster than the 1050 Ti on average, costs drastically less at $130-$150. To price the 1650 competitively it would have to be roughly $150, so we'll have to wait and see.
There's not too long to wait, however. A leaked release schedule of March got pushed back to April 30th, but more recent leaks say April 22nd. Either way, we'll be benchmarking in only a matter of weeks.