NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1630 Is Allegedly Coming To Rescue Gamers On A Budget
by
Zak Killian
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Wednesday, May 18, 2022, 04:10 PM EDT
One of the greatest benefits of being a PC gamer is the unfettered backward compatibility. You can load up PC games from the 1980s and 1990s right now on the same machine you use to play Cyberpunk 2077, and they'll run just fine. Moreover, they'll use a lot less power because they don't need to fire up your power-thirsty GPU.
The fact is, while we love to talk about the latest and greatest graphics cards to play the most-demanding video games, you don't need an RX 6950 XT for anything. In fact, if you consider the entire catalog, almost all extant PC games will play just fine on something as lowly as a GeForce GT 1030—the 128-bit GDDR5 version, anyway.
You see, there's a lot of gamers out there that aren't as fortunate as those of us who may ponder the purchase of an RTX 3080 or RX 6800 XT; folks in poorer parts of the world who'd like to play PC games but just don't have the dosh for a powerful GPU. AMD is currently serving that market with the Radeon RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT, but as we saw in this comparison yesterday, NVIDIA doesn't really have much to offer at those price points.
While in ages past, Intel was willing to cede the low-end market to AMD almost entirely, NVIDIA seems like it's not quite ready to give up that group to its competition. According to Videocardz, ol' Mean Green is going to serve up a slice of entry-level GPU using its previous-generation Turing architecture. The so-called GeForce GTX 1630 would presumably slot in below the GTX 1650 and see a price point in the $150 USD range. It's likely that this card is also an attempt to keep Intel's Arc GPUs from completely claiming the low-end market when they arrive in the coming months.
The site doesn't have any details on the specifications of the new card, but expects that it will be based on the TU117 GPU core that is used for some models of the Geforce GTX 1650, the GTX 1650 Ti laptop model, and the low-power GeForce MX450 and MX550. That GPU has nearly the same core configuration as the Nintendo Switch's integrated GPU, although the more-efficient Turing architecture and fast GDDR6 memory should mean that the GTX 1630 will end up being quite a bit faster than Nintendo's handheld.