The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630 started making rumors a few months back with a leak. Part of me was thinking, ‘Surely Nvidia won’t release a new, pathetically slow Turing variant late in the game. But my realist knew it was only a matter of time.
Let’s be frank: the GTX 1630 best graphics cardand in fact it lands near our bottom GPU benchmark hierarchy. The only slow GPUs we tested were GTX1050, RX560, RX550and the aforementioned GT1030None of them are worth your time or money, but at least they won’t be released until mid-2022.
The only real contender for the GTX 1630 is AMD’s recent launch Radeon RX 6400, but this new Nvidia card actually makes the lackluster 6400 look better. Found on the GTX 1650 and GTX 1650 Super. The latter basically doubles the specs of the 1630 as his and almost doubles the performance as well.
Colorful sent us this sample for review, but there doesn’t seem to be an official price from Nvidia. Anything we can find online suggests a soft MSRP set at $199 which is ridiculous EVGA lists his own GTX 1630 for $199 doing. Alternatively, you can buy the much better GTX 1650 Super for $199. The 1630 nominally replaces the GT 1030. The GT 1030 has a launch price of $79, and $70 for the faster GDDR5 variant. It feels like the GTX 1630 was priced mid-2021, but now it’s ridiculously expensive.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Nvidia’s old-school Turing TU117 GPU specs against the RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT:
| graphics card | GTX1630 | RX6500XT | RX6400 | GTX 1650 Super | GTX1650 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| architecture | TU117 | Navi 24 | Navi 24 | TU116 | TU117 |
| process technology | TSMC 12FFN | TSMC N6 | TSMC N6 | TSMC 12FFN | TSMC 12FFN |
| Transistor (billion) | 4.7 | 5.4 | 5.4 | 6.6 | 4.7 |
| Die size (mm^2) | 200 | 107 | 107 | 284 | 200 |
| SM/CU | Ten | 16 | 12 | 20 | 14 |
| GPU core | 512 | 1024 | 768 | 1280 | 896 |
| RT/RA core | none | 16 | 12 | none | none |
| Boost Clock (MHz) | 1775 | 2815 | 2815 | 1725 | 1665 |
| VRAM Speed (Gbps) | 12 | 18 | 16 | 12 | 8 |
| VRAM (GB) | Four | Four | Four | Four | 6 |
| VRAM bus width | 64 | 64 | 64 | 128 | 128 |
| ROP | 32 | 32 | 32 | 48 | 32 |
| TMU | 32 | 64 | 48 | 80 | 56 |
| TFLOPS FP32 (Boost) | 1.8 | 5.8 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 3 |
| Bandwidth (GBps) | 96 | 144 | 128 | 192 | 128 |
| PCIe link | Gen3 x16 | Gen4 x4 | Gen4 x4 | Gen3 x16 | Gen3 x16 |
| TDP (Watts) | 75 | 107 | 53 | 100 | 75 |
| Release date | June 22nd | January 22nd | January 22nd | November 19th | April 19th |
| launch price | $199 | $199 | $159 | $159 | $149 |
| online price | $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 is basically on par with the GTX 1650, so there’s no question that it easily beats the lower-spec GTX 1630. The only advantage of the GTX 1630 is the presence of video encoding hardware. An improved Turing encoder, but better than nothing.
What’s particularly strange about the GTX 1630 is that Nvidia has been shipping the same TU117 GPU in laptops as the MX450 (and more recently the MX550) for several years. Apparently, there were enough chips that the MX450 or GTX 1650 couldn’t reach the 14 SM required, and Nvidia and its partners figured the pared-down 10 SM variant could still be sold on desktops.
You get basically all the same features as the GTX 1650, but with lower performance. The GTX 1630 models we saw still have 6-pin power connectors, so you don’t necessarily need to get a low-power card. It could be because Nvidia tried to make up for the lack of GPU cores with slightly higher clocks.
4GB GDDR6 runs at 12Gbps and has a 64-bit interface. As already mentioned, this is exactly half of what the GTX 1650 Super offers. Also note that unlike AMD’s RDNA 2 GPUs, there’s no Infinity cache to make up for the difference. However, 512 GPU cores are already the limiting factor.
the most modern Graphics cards that sell for near MSRPLast year, GTX 1650 cards sold for over $300, but the $200 GTX 1630 may have had some skewed meaning. You can get the RX 6500 XT, RX 6400, GTX 1650 and even his GTX 1650 Super for under $200 right now. Presumably this was supposed to be for his large OEM so they could throw in a weak GPU and claim they would still offer dedicated graphics, but that ended up being a disappointing customer Just connect.
