Well, it happened. from Nvidia GTX 1630 GPU with many rumors is here, with an official launch today and confirmed models from leading GPU manufacturers including EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte and Zotac.
The GTX 1630 is based on Nvidia’s older Turing architecture, similar to the GTX 1650 released in 2019. This is the first Turing-based GTX card to be released in two years and will compete with AMD Radeon RX 6400 and Intel’s new Arc A380 on super-budget GPU bets – both of which run on current-gen architectures.
As far as specs go, it’s not very impressive. Power consumption and VRAM are basically identical to the original GTX 1650, but the memory bandwidth is cut in half and the die also uses fewer CUDA cores.
These stats align with the recently leaked specs for the GTX 1630, which were often compared to Nvidia’s six-year-old GTX 1050 Ti (pictured above). As this is the older Turing architecture, newer features such as ray tracing or DLSS are not supported.
TechPowerUp (opens in new tab) (through VideoCardz) reviewed an old GTX 1630 unit from manufacturer Gainward and concluded that while the card runs silently and power-efficiently with great thermal performance, it’s not powerful enough to warrant a purchase unless you need a discrete GPU of low cost for something specific.
The price of the new card is also a little unclear; Nvidia’s RRP appears to be around $150 based on the starting price in China, but EVGA is listing its model for $200 and the Colorful will retail for $169.
Opinion: We didn’t need it. nobody needed it
Considering that Nvidia already has an effective dominance in the upper end of the GPU market with the powerful RTX 3000 cards (and RTX 4000 on the not-too-distant horizon), it’s hard to understand why Nvidia would release this low-end card now, when the market is relatively crowded.
When you look at the price, it gets even weirder. AMD RX 6500XT It officially retails for $200, and the massively dial-up memory bandwidth on the GTX 1630 means it offers less than half the in-game performance of the AMD card, despite not being much cheaper.
I don’t see any reason why anyone would want to buy this new GPU considering it’s barely capable of playing modern games at 1080p and isn’t even that cheap.
One interesting thing that can save the functionality of the GTX 1630 is AMD FSRTeam Red’s response to DLSS, which unlike Nvidia’s upscaling technology is actually hardware-agnostic and could theoretically run on the 1630 to improve performance – albeit with a healthy dose of irony, as the GTX 1630 can’t even run Nvidia’s competitor FSR.
It’s possible that Nvidia planned to release this card earlier in the year to directly counter AMD’s low-end GPU launch and provide some relief to cash-strapped gamers drowning in a world of cryptocurrency exchangers and miners. We know that the GTX 1630 has been hit with a number of delays, which may explain why it’s getting kicked out without much fanfare now.
There’s also a chance that Nvidia wanted to get rid of the surplus stock of the 12nm TU177 chip that powers this GPU (and older GTX cards) ahead of the RTX 4000 series launch.
I really couldn’t understand Nvidia’s reasoning, but hey; the GTX 1630 here, and it, well… doesn’t look good.
