According to a Weibo post by Inno3D, Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 1630 is an incredibly slow gaming GPU, with new benchmarks showcasing performance parity with the entry-level GTX 1050 Ti from six years ago. If Inno3D's benchmarks are applicable to most titles, this makes the GTX 1630 one of the slowest GPUs on the market right off the bat, and perhaps little more than a refreshed GTX 1050 Ti with newer video encoders and decoders thanks to the newer Turing architecture.
The GTX 1050 Ti came out in 2016 as Nvidia's entry-level gaming GPU powered by the Pascal architecture. The 1050 Ti features 768 CUDA cores running on a 128-bit memory bus with 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Power consumption peaked at 75W with clock speeds starting at 1290MHz for the base clock, and boost frequencies hitting 1392MHz for the reference model.
But even in 2016, we were not completely satisfied with its performance. In our original review, when compared to the vanilla GTX 1050, the 1050 Ti showed lackluster performance for the $130 price point it originated at.
The GTX 1630 is Nvidia's latest entry-level GeForce GPU, marking the first time Nvidia has ever used an xx30 series badge for a GTX GPU. As expected, this GPU features less memory bandwidth and fewer cores than the GTX 1650, with a grand total of 512 CUDA cores running on a tiny 64-bit bus with 4GB of GDDR6 (12Gbps) memory. Thankfully clock speeds have been increased over the 1650 to compensate for the reduced specifications, featuring a 1,785 MHz boost clock vs 1,590 MHz on the 1650.
Benchmarks
Inno3D showed a benchmark chart comparing the GTX 1630, against the GTX 1050 Ti and the GTX 1050 in 12 titles. Some of these titles include popular AAA games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Control, Call of Duty Cold War, Assasins Creed Valhalla, Forza Horizon 4, and New World.
On average, the GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1630 showed roughly equal performance, with the GTX 1050 being noticeably worse in most games. But there are a few exceptions where the GTX 1050 TI and even the 1050 were beating out the GTX 1630 in three of the twelve titles. Of course, game selection will absolutely affect the results.
This is some exceptionally slow performance for a brand new graphics card, even AMD's new but unexceptional Radeon RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT can outperform the GTX 1050 Ti.
This makes Nvidia's GTX 1630 truly the slowest modern GPU we've seen in a very long time and a GPU that almost no one will buy for gaming with its rumored price of $165. A year ago, a case could have been made for the GTX 1630 during the global GPU shortage. But with GPU prices now at MSRP and the used GPU market becoming a gold mine for PC gamers, the GTX 1630 is already obsolete before it hits store shelves.
The only saving grace for the GTX 1630 is in its multi-media prowess with support for VP8 and H.265 codecs. It also features a much newer NVENC encoder for recording gameplay or just screen capturing from your monitor, which cannot be said of the RX 6400 which lacks H264 encoding entirely.
