GeForce GTX 1650 received a previous generation video encoder

After yesterday's release of the GeForce GTX 1650 video card, it turned out that its Turing TU117 GPU differs from its older "brothers" of the Turing generation not only in a smaller number of CUDA cores, but also in a different NVENC hardware video encoder.

As NVIDIA itself notes, the GeForce GTX 1650 graphics processor has all the advantages of the Turing architecture. This means that the user will receive support for simultaneous execution of integer and floating point operations, a unified cache architecture and support for adaptive shading along with improved Turing shaders. All this allows you to improve performance in games.

However, Turing's graphics architecture also includes an updated NVENC hardware video encoder that offers 15% higher encoding efficiency and avoids artifacts when recording or streaming. But despite the fact that the TU117 is built on the Turing architecture, it uses an old version of the encoder.

As it turned out, the novelty received the same encoder as the Volta GPUs, and accordingly it does not have the advantages of a Turing generation encoder. This was noticed by one of the concerned users and turned to NVIDIA for clarification. The company confirmed that the NVENC block in the new GPU is indeed more similar to the Pascal version of the GPU (GTX 10 series) than the encoder of the rest of the Turing generation GPUs. This means that users of the GeForce GTX 1650 will have less video encoding options than users of other GeForce GTX 16 and RTX 20 series graphics cards.

In fact, the use of the old version of the encoder is another oddity associated with the GeForce GTX 1650 video card. Using the old NVENC could hardly have any significant impact on the cost of the GPU and allow NVIDIA to reduce the cost of the video card. Another oddity, we recall, is that NVIDIA didn't supply reviewers drivers for testing the GeForce GTX 1650.

At the same time, according to NVIDIA, the encoder of the Volta generation has a sufficient set of features. It allows you to offload the central processor, and simultaneously play and broadcast gameplay in resolutions up to 4K. This is despite the fact that the GeForce GTX 1650 is clearly not capable of handling 4K gaming.

Source: 3dnews.ru