There’s a curious anomaly sitting among all the Nvidia GeForce RTX GPUs at the top of the latest Steam Survey. Right there at number four sits the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650, a budget gaming GPU from 2019 that not only has no ray tracing hardware, but also has no Tensor cores – it can’t even run first-gen DLSS upscaling.
In terms of specs, this Nvidia GPU is a very long way behind the best graphics card models you can buy right now. It has just 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM and 896 Turing CUDA cores. Amazingly, it doesn’t even need a power cable, with a total graphics power rating of just 75W, which means it can get all its juice directly from a PCIe slot.
Yet despite its shortcomings, it’s still used by 3.54% of the Steam users surveyed for the latest March survey. Meanwhile, the even older GeForce GTX 1060, based on the Pascal architecture, is still commanding 2.4% of the users surveyed. In fact, if you add them all up, over 20% of users in the Steam survey are using either an Nvidia GeForce GTX GPU, or an AMD Radeon GPU with no ray tracing hardware, and that doesn’t even include the many integrated graphics systems from Intel that don’t support ray tracing either.
On the other hand, nine of the top ten GPUs in the survey do have ray tracing hardware and AI cores, and the RTX 4060 is clearly extremely popular right now. What’s interesting, though, is that all these years since real-time ray tracing hardware started to be used in games, so many PC gamers still haven’t been persuaded to make a graphics card upgrade.
I think cost is a major factor here. There simply hasn’t been a true budget gaming GPU since the GTX 1650, which cost just $149 when it came out. Based on the same Turing architecture as the first-gen RTX 2000 cards, the GTX 1650 was a stripped-back GPU with no RT cores or Tensor cores, and it was cheap to make graphics cards with just 4GB of VRAM. It was never going to set frame rate graphs alight, but it didn’t need to – it could enable you to play Fortnite at decent settings for a really cheap price.
Since it came out, the nearest we’ve had is the RTX 3050, a disappointing GPU that cost $249 at launch and in reality cost much more because stock was so short in the pandemic. Then there was the Radeon RX 6550 XT, an underpowered and overpriced GPU that got royally lambasted by the press – AMD wouldn’t even send me one for review, and neither would any of its board partners. There was no RTX 4050 desktop GPU, and the AMD Radeon RX 7600 still cost $269.
PC gamers with really tight budgets have largely been abandoned by Nvidia and AMD, and while the Intel Arc B570 ostensibly covers the budget price range, the shortage of GPUs means they still realistically cost over $300.
Until there’s a genuine new budget gaming GPU that can handle ray tracing, even if it’s at 1,600 x 900 with low settings, it’s going to be a tough sell to persuade gamers to ditch their GTX 1650. It needs to be equipped with cheap VRAM (there’s absolutely no need for GDDR7 here), it needs to be power-efficient and cool-running, it needs to be cheap for board partners to make cards, and above all, it needs to have a genuinely affordable price.
My (perhaps naively optimistic) hope is that this GPU will be the much-rumored Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050, if and when it comes out, but only if it doesn’t have a silly price attached to it. Yes, it’s become more expensive to make GPUs over the last few years, but Nvidia clearly isn’t short of profit right now. Likewise, AMD could clear up here if it can make a decent RDNA 4 GPU for a genuinely affordable price. Price these GPUs under $200, and budget buyers will lap it up.
Without a decent budget GPU, PC gaming risks becoming an exclusive club that leaves large gaming audiences behind, and that’s not only bad for gamers without huge amounts of money, but it’s also bad for publishers wanting to sell games, as well as system builders wanting to cater for everyone.
In the meantime, there are also rumors that Nvidia has a new RTX 5060 Ti in the works, as well as an RTX 5060, but it’s that proper budget GPU that could potentially kill off the GTX era for good. Let’s hope the RTX 5050 does indeed exist, and that it has a genuinely affordable price.
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