NVIDIA Launches Entry Level GeForce GTX 1630 4GB Graphics Card For Budget Gaming
NVIDIA today quietly introduced a new entry-level graphics card, the GeForce GTX 1630. You can expect a much bigger hoopla from NVIDIA when its eventual GeForce RTX 40 series based on Ada Lovelace launches, but in the meantime, budget gamers looking for some added oomph over integrated graphics have another low end option to consider.
And yes, this is a decidedly low end graphics card. It settles in at the bottom of the GTX 16-series stack and like all the rest, it's based on NVIDIA's Turing GPU architecture. However, there's a pretty big gulf in specs between this latest addition and the next one up on the GTX totem pole, that being the GeForce GTX 1650.
Here's a broad overview...
So we're looking at 512 CUDA cores and a 1,740MHz (base) to 1,785MHz (boost) clock if sticking with reference specifications. It's also equipped with 4GB of GDDR6 memory, which is the same as the GeForce GTX 1650, but it's attached to a 64-bit bus width that's only half as wide. That's undoubtedly going to serve as a choke point in certain situations.
To be fair, while the GeForce GTX 1650 looks like a fairly big step down from the GeForce GTX 1650, it's a big step up from the GeForce GTX 1030 that it kind of supplants. That's a 5-year-old card based on Pascal with 384 CUDA cores and a mere 2GB of slower GDDR5 memory, linked to the same 64-bit bus, resulting in a tick over 48GB/s of memory bandwidth. In comparison, the GeForce GTX 1630 offers up 96GB/s of memory bandwidth.
We haven't tested this card, but there are reviews out there. The folks at TechPowerUp tested it in a whole bunch of games and found that on average, it's three times faster than the GeForce GTX 1030. It's all relative though, as at 1080p the site also found that it was "severely lacking in performance."
From the outside looking in, this appears better suited for a media PC that needs a bit of extra grunt over integrated graphics. But until we've tested it for ourselves, we don't want to make any final judgements or recommendations.
In any event, several of NVIDIA's hardware partners have already added the GeForce GTX 1630 to their lineup, including EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, and Zotac, to name a few. EVGA is the only one we see available in the US at the moment, and it's asking $199.99.
