The Rumored Nvidia GTX 1630 GPU Has Finally Been Released, and... It Doesn't Look Good

The Rumored Nvidia GTX 1630 GPU Has Finally Been Released, and... It Doesn't Look Good

Well, it happened. Nvidia's much-rumored GTX 1630 GPU has arrived, with an official launch today and models confirmed from major GPU manufacturers including EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte, and Zotac.

The GTX 1630 is based on Nvidia's old Turing architecture, similar to the GTX 1650 released in 2019. It's the first Turing-based GTX card to release in two years and will compete with AMD's Radeon RX 6400 and AMD's new Arc. Intel. A380 in the super cheap GPU bets, which run on current generation architectures.

Spec-wise, it's not very impressive. Power consumption and VRAM are basically the same as the original GTX 1650, but memory bandwidth is halved and the die also uses fewer CUDA cores.

These stats line up with recently leaked specs for the GTX 1630, which have been frequently compared to Nvidia's six-year-old GTX 1050 Ti (pictured above). Since this is the old Turing architecture, newer features like ray tracing or DLSS are not supported.

TechPowerUp (opens in a new tab) (via VideoCardz) reviewed an early GTX 1630 drive from manufacturer Gainward and concluded that while the card runs quietly and power efficiently with excellent thermal performance, it simply it's not powerful enough to warrant a purchase unless you need a very low-end discrete GPU for something specific.

The price of the new card is also unclear; Nvidia's retail price appears to be around €150 based on starting prices in China, but EVGA is pricing its model at €200 and Colorful will be priced at €169.

Review: We didn't need it. no one needed that

Considering that Nvidia already has an effective hold on the high-end of the GPU market with powerful RTX 3000 cards (and RTX 4000 on the not-too-distant horizon), it's hard to see why Nvidia would release this low-end card now. , when the market is relatively crowded.

Cuando miras el precio, se vuelve aún más extraño. AMD's RX 6500 XT officially retails for €200, and the massively recalled memory bandwidth on the GTX 1630 means it offers less than half the in-game performance of the AMD card although it's not much menos caro.

I don't see any reason why anyone would want to buy this new GPU, given that it's barely capable of playing modern games at 1080p and it's not even that cheap.

One interesting thing that could save the functionality of the GTX 1630 is AMD FSR, Team Red's answer to DLSS, which, unlike Nvidia's scaling technology, is actually hardware agnostic and could theoretically work on the 1630 for improve performance, albeit rather ironically. since the GTX 1630 can't even run Nvidia's own competitor FSR.

Nvidia may have planned to release this card earlier in the year to directly combat AMD's budget GPU launch and provide some relief to cash-strapped gamers drowning in a world of cryptocurrency speculators and miners. We know that the GTX 1630 has been affected by multiple delays, which could explain why it is now being phased out without much fanfare.

It's also possible that Nvidia wants to get rid of excess stock of the 177nm TU12 chip that powers this GPU (and older GTX cards) before the RTX 4000 series launches.

I couldn't quite understand Nvidia's reasoning, but hey; the GTX 1630 here, and that, well… that doesn't look good.