by
Zak Killian
—
Friday, May 20, 2022, 02:25 PM EDT
AMD's next-generation Ryzen processors, intended to launch later this year, will include a basic graphics processor so you don't have to add a discrete GPU. That doesn't help anyone building Ryzen right now, though. If you want Ryzen, you need to either buy one of the models that includes a GPU—limiting your maximum CPU speed—or add a discrete GPU.
So what, no problem, right? Just throw in a cheap GeForce GT 730 or Radeon 520 graphics card and you're good to go. Except the problem with that plan lies in that those GPUs are based on old architectures that won't have driver support for much longer. The GT 730 is already relegated to security and maintenance updates, and the Radeon 520 isn't getting new drivers at all.
AMD's already solved this problem with its Radeon RX 6400, which is based on its latest RDNA 2 architecture that should remain supported for a good while yet. NVIDIA doesn't have anything that low-end based on Ampere, but it does still sell the Turing-based GeForce GTX 1600-series cards. As we reported on Wednesday, the company is purportedly bringing out a GeForce GTX 1630, but at that time we didn't have specifications on the card.
Now, thanks to the same source, we do—at least if said source has it right. The GTX 1630 will allegedly be based on the Turing TU117-150 GPU, which would be the smallest Turing GPU to date. It'll feature just some 512 CUDA cores, and a rather thin 64-bit memory bus connected to 4GB of GDDR6 running at 12 Gbps. This gives it a peak memory bandwidth of 96 GB/second, which is even less than the Radeon RX 6400's 128 GB/sec.
So saying, this GPU probably won't be much good for playing Cyberpunk 2077, although we bet it'll handle games a lot better than you might expect—good enough to get in a couple matches of Soul Calibur VI on your break, probably. That's not the point of this card, though. As we discussed in the opening, the point of this card is really just to have a basic GPU on a relatively modern architecture so NVIDIA doesn't cede the whole "basic GPU" market to its competitors by default.
Videocardz says that NVIDIA will launch the GTX 1630 on May 31st, but that pricing hasn't been confirmed. We'd expect it to come in around $150 or less. We'll probably hear some official news at Computex starting next week.