Nvidia seems to have released a new GTX 1650 graphics card without really telling anyone, although it's probably not on many people's wish lists The new variant of the GeForce GTX 1650, as opposed to the original GDDR5 spin, GDDR6 memory. This new variant is starting to appear in various places, including an early review posted on Expreview (via Videocardz).

We reached out to Nvidia to learn why this card has suddenly come into existence.

"The industry is running out of GDDR5, so we moved our product to GDDR6," explained an Nvidia representative.

Realistically, this is a much bigger problem than a new spin on an existing graphics card; the shortage of GDDR5 is going to affect more than just this GPU, of course. However, most current cards from AMD and Nvidia use GDDR6, with the exception of the GTX 1660.

This is unlikely to be a straight GTX 1660 recalibration, as it has already been largely replaced by the GTX 1660 Super, which uses GDDR6. Since the previous generation of cards used so much GDDR5 that updating its silicon is not feasible, it is expected to disappear altogether as soon as it is out of stock. [This new GDDR6-spin GTX 1650 uses the same TU117-300-A1 GPU as the GDDR5 version, with 896 CUDA cores, but at a slightly lower clock. It has a base clock of 1410 MHz and boost of 1590 MHz, whereas the original GDDR5 had a base clock of 1485 MHz and boost of 1665 MHz.

The gain from moving to GDDR6 is higher effective memory bandwidth, from 128 Gb/s to 192 GB/s. Overall, this appears to be a 6% improvement over the GDDR5 version of the GPU, not a bad improvement if the price remains the same.

When will this new GDDR6 GTX 1650 hit store shelves? Probably when the current inventory of GDDR5 models sells out, but given the speed at which more affordable cards are selling, that could be several weeks away. We will keep you posted as soon as further information becomes available.