The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630 began popping up in rumors in leaks just a few months again. A part of me thought, “Certainly Nvidia will not launch a brand new and pathetically sluggish Turing variant this late within the sport.” However the realist in me knew it was solely a matter of time — the GT 1030 and GT 730 playing cards that began delivery once more final yr was the one proof we wanted.
Let’s be blunt: The GTX 1630 is not wherever near being one of many greatest graphics playing cards, and actually it lands close to the very backside of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. The one slower GPUs that we have examined are the GTX 1050, RX 560, RX 550, and the aforementioned GT 1030. None of these are price your time or cash both, however at the least they don’t seem to be being launched in mid-2022.
The one actual contender for the GTX 1630 is AMD’s lately launched Radeon RX 6400, however this new Nvidia card really makes the lackluster 6400 look good. Really, the true competitors — and the explanation nobody ought to give the GTX 1630 the time of day — comes from the prevailing GTX 1650 and GTX 1650 Tremendous. The latter mainly doubles the specs of the 1630, and just about doubles efficiency as properly.
Colourful despatched us this pattern for overview, however there would not appear to be an official worth from Nvidia. What we will discover on-line means that the tender MSRP has been set at $199, which is simply foolish. EVGA lists its personal GTX 1630 for $199, or you may as well purchase the far superior GTX 1650 Tremendous for $199. The 1630 additionally nominally replaces the GT 1030, which had a launch worth of $79 — $70 for the sooner GDDR5 variant. It feels as if the GTX 1630 was priced in accordance with mid-2021, but it surely’s now laughably costly.
Here is how the specs for Nvidia’s old-timer Turing TU117 GPUs stack up, with the RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT for comparability.
| Graphics Card | GTX 1630 | RX 6500 XT | RX 6400 | GTX 1650 Tremendous | GTX 1650 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Structure | TU117 | Navi 24 | Navi 24 | TU116 | TU117 |
| Course of Know-how | TSMC 12FFN | TSMC N6 | TSMC N6 | TSMC 12FFN | TSMC 12FFN |
| Transistors (Billion) | 4.7 | 5.4 | 5.4 | 6.6 | 4.7 |
| Die dimension (mm^2) | 200 | 107 | 107 | 284 | 200 |
| SMs / CUs | 10 | 16 | 12 | 20 | 14 |
| GPU Cores | 512 | 1024 | 768 | 1280 | 896 |
| RT/RA Cores | N/A | 16 | 12 | N/A | N/A |
| Enhance Clock (MHz) | 1775 | 2815 | 2815 | 1725 | 1665 |
| VRAM Pace (Gbps) | 12 | 18 | 16 | 12 | 8 |
| VRAM (GB) | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 6 |
| VRAM Bus Width | 64 | 64 | 64 | 128 | 128 |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 | 48 | 32 |
| TMUs | 32 | 64 | 48 | 80 | 56 |
| TFLOPS FP32 (Enhance) | 1.8 | 5.8 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 3 |
| Bandwidth (GBps) | 96 | 144 | 128 | 192 | 128 |
| PCIe Hyperlink | Gen3 x16 | Gen4 x4 | Gen4 x4 | Gen3 x16 | Gen3 x16 |
| TDP (watts) | 75 | 107 | 53 | 100 | 75 |
| Launch Date | Jun-22 | Jan-22 | Jan-22 | Nov-19 | Apr-19 |
| Launch Worth | $199 | $199 | $159 | $159 | $149 |
| On-line Worth | $199 | $168 (opens in new tab) | $149 (opens in new tab) | ~$125 used (opens in new tab) | ~$90 used (opens in new tab) |
AMD’s RX 6400 mainly tied the GTX 1650, so there’s little query it should simply beat the decrease spec GTX 1630. About the one benefit that the GTX 1630 has is the presence of video encoding {hardware} — the TU117 has Pascal-era {hardware}, not the improved Turing encoder, but it surely’s nonetheless higher than nothing.
What’s significantly odd with the GTX 1630 is that Nvidia has been delivery the identical TU117 GPU in laptops because the MX450 (and extra lately MX550) for a few years, although granted NVENC is disabled on these elements. Apparently, there have been sufficient chips that could not attain the required 14 SMs for the MX450 or GTX 1650, and Nvidia and its companions figured a cut-down 10 SM variant may nonetheless promote on desktops — to the uninformed, anyway.
You mainly get all the identical options as a GTX 1650, simply with much less efficiency. You do not even essentially get a decrease energy card, because the GTX 1630 fashions we have seen nonetheless include a 6-pin energy connector. That is perhaps as a result of these have been much less fascinating chips with defects, or perhaps it is as a result of Nvidia tried to make up for the shortage of GPU cores with barely larger clocks. At the very least the RX 6400 might be present in half-height fashions and would not require extra energy.
The 4GB GDDR6 comes clocked at 12Gbps, with a 64-bit interface. As famous already, that is precisely half of what the GTX 1650 Tremendous gives. Additionally observe that, not like AMD’s RDNA 2 GPUs, there is no Infinity Cache to make up the distinction, although the 512 GPU cores are already going to be a limiting issue.
With most fashionable graphics card promoting at near MSRP, the GTX 1630 looks like far too little, far too late. Final yr we noticed GTX 1650 playing cards going for $300 or extra, and a $200 GTX 1630 may need made some sort of warped sense. At the moment, you will get the RX 6500 XT, RX 6400, GTX 1650, and even GTX 1650 Tremendous for $200 or much less. Perhaps this was imagined to be for giant OEMs, so they may toss in a weak GPU and declare to nonetheless supply devoted graphics, however that is in the end simply going to result in upset prospects.
