Why is the GTX 1650 getting GDDR6? Because “the industry is running out of GDDR5”

We already know that Nvidia’s GTX 1650 graphics card is getting a GDDR6 upgrade, but until now it was unclear why the green team decided to make this decision. Was Nvidia trying to up the GTX 1650’s performance to better compete with AMD’s Radeon RX 5500 XT, or did Nvidia think that the GTX 1650 needed a performance boost to secure sales?    

Well, according to Nvidia, neither of those possibilities prompted the GTX 1650’s shift to GDDR6, market forces created the GDDR6-based GTX 1650, as GDDR5 memory supplies are starting to dry up. 

When PC Gamer’s Alan Dexter contacted Nvidia, the green team confirmed that “The industry is running out of GDDR5, so we’ve transitioned the product to GDDR6.”

While the GTX 1650’s new GDDR6-based variant delivers a 50% increase in memory bandwidth, the graphics card isn’t expected to see transformative performance benefits because of the change, unlike Nvidia’s GDDR6-based GTX 1660 Super. The original GTX 1650 wasn’t bandwidth starved, though the move to GDDR6 memory could help increase the overclockability of Nvidia’s low-power Turing GPU.