Nvidia’s rumoured budget GeForce GTX 1630 desktop GPU will seemingly arrive in the next week or so, and when it does, it will likely be among the cheapest new cards on the market. VideoCardz reports that the GTX 1630 will essentially be a watered-down version of the GTX 1650, an entry-level graphics card released in 2019.
Based on the last-gen TU117-150 GPU (Turing architecture), the GTX 1630 will supposedly have fewer cores and a lower memory bus than the GTX 1650. In fact, both are seemingly halved, with the GTX 1630 shipping with 512 CUDA cores and a 64-bit memory bus driving 4GB of GDDR6 vRAM at 12Gbps.
The GTX 1630 makes up ground with what the leak says is faster GPU boost clock speeds, reaching up to 1800 MHz compared to the GTX 1650’s 1665 MHz. It does so despite requiring the same 75W of power, making this a low-power option.
If news of an entry-level “GTX” card makes you furrow your brows, you aren’t alone. Nvidia, we assumed, would phase out its last-gen nomenclature in favour of its latest RTX naming. This would also be the first time an xx30-series GPU had “GTX” before it. In the past, Nvidia’s xx50-series processors used GTX while the others (10, 20, 30, and 40) used only “GT” branding.
Nvidia will supposedly release the GTX 1630 on May 31, signalling that we can expect a mention at the company’s Computex keynote on May 23. When it arrives, the GTX 1630 will compete directly against AMD’s Radeon RX 6400, so we’re expecting it to be priced at around $US150 ($208).
Even at that low price point, the GTX 1630 will likely struggle to find much of an audience. Launching an inexpensive GPU made sense during the worst periods of supply shortages and price inflation, but GPU prices are now steadily declining, and cutting-edge options are becoming more accessible. Not only will Nvidia need to be aggressive with pricing, but the GTX 1630 will need to significantly outperform integrated graphics to have any chance of commercial success.