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Update 3/6/19: It turns out that the GeForce RTX 2050 was indeed a placeholder. Dell has updated the laptop's page stating that the graphics card is the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.
There haven't been many rumors about the GeForce RTX 2050. Before this, the most recent RTX 2050 leak is from December, when the graphics card, this time named "GTX 2050" instead of RTX 2050, showed up in Geekbench. As mentioned, Nvidia has never said it will make a GTX or RTX 2050, so this Dell listing could be a simple typo or a placeholder, such as in the case of HP referencing a GeForce GTX 1180 in its documents.
What we know for a fact so far is that Nvidia has released mobile versions for its RTX 2080, RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 graphics cards. The mobile variants are codenamed N18E-G3, N18E-G2 and N18E-G1, respectively. According to Notebookcheck, there is already a N18E-G0 graphics card out in the wild. If we go by logic, the N18E-G0 codename could correspond to the RTX 2050, assuming Nvidia is really making one.
RTX 2050 Specs
So what can we expect from the RTX 2050 in terms of specifications? To be honest, it's pretty hard to predict. The RTX 2060 features 30 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), which gives it 1,920 CUDA cores, 30 RT cores and 240 Tensor cores. This graphics card is considered the minimum requirement to achieve a decent ray tracing experience. If Nvidia were to release a RTX 2050, the chipmaker would be forced to equip it with less CUDA cores and RT cores, which would affect its real-time ray tracing potential. Since the whole RTX 20-series is built around ray tracing, we don't think Nvidia would roll out a new RTX graphics card that doesn't fulfill the promise.
Also, let's not forget that the GTX 1660 Ti is already out, and the GTX 1660 and GTX 1650 are rumored to be hitting the market in the coming months. Without promising ray tracing, Nvidia would have an even tougher job separating the RTX 2050 from its GTX 16-series offerings in terms of performance.
Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
