NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU (for laptops, NVIDIA_DEV.2583, GN20-P1) is a faster variant of the RTX 3050 mobile card and based on the GA107 Ampere chip. The chip offers 2560 CUDA, 20 Ray Tracing and 80 Tensor cores. The clock rate depends on the used TGP-version (from 35 - 80 Watt).

The performance (of the high TGP variants) should be similar to the old RTX 2060 and therefore most suited for 1080p gaming with high detail settings. The performance is not sufficient to enable Raytracing in most games, but the Tensor cores can be used for DLSS in some games (and get a performance boost with a slight quality reduction). Beware, that the low TGP variants will offer a significantly lower performance.

The GA107 chip offers 3,072 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,536 INT32 ALUs). The RTX 3050 Ti however maybe won't use all ALUs on the chip. With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA107 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip).

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q (N18P-G62) is a dedicated mid range graphics card for laptops based on the Turing architecture. The Max-Q variant is the power saving version of the mobile GTX 1650Ti with reduced clock speeds, performance and of course power consumption. It is using the same TU117 chip with 1,024 shaders. Therefore, it is intended for thin and light gaming laptops. Compared to the faster RTX 2000 GPUs (e.g. RTX 2060), the 1650 Ti integrates no Raytracing or Tensor cores.

There are two variants of the 1650Ti Max-Q, one with 35 Watt and 1035 - 1200 MHz and a faster 40 Watt version with a clock speed of 1200 - 1365 MHz. Both however are significantly lower clocked than the normal Max-P version with 50 / 55 Watt and 1350-1385 MHz. The memory is most likely clocked at 1250 MHz = 10,000 MHz effective (Gbps) in most laptops, although there might be versions with 1500 MHz = 12,000 Gbps.

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal.

Compared to the bigger Turing chips (like the TU116 of the GTX 1660 Ti and the RTX lineup), the TU117 does not include the new NVENC encoder but an older one similar to the one used in Pascal and Volta.

The power consumption of the 1650 Ti Max-Q laptops is specified at 35 Watt TGP (Total Graphics Power) by Nvidia and therefore 25 Watt lower than the mobile GTX 1650 Ti in the same package (other variants can reach up to 80 Watt).