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Nvidia GeForce GT 1030 2GB Review

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Dota 2 (Vulkan)

Results from our Radeon RX 550 review give us some hint as to what’s playable in Dota 2 under Vulkan. We start using the game’s Medium preset at 1920x1080.

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The Radeon and HD Graphics results are slightly higher after updating to the latest drivers. But what we saw before holds true today: the Radeon RX 550 and more powerful RX 460 essentially tie when we’re bound by host processing.

Nvidia tends to fare better in those situations, and indeed three very dissimilar GeForce cards pile up on each other. Yet, they’re about 17% faster than the Radeons (and about 120% quicker than HD Graphics 530—good news for competitive gamers).

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Forcing a more taxing graphics workload alleviates some of the bottleneck, allowing these graphics cards to differentiate themselves a bit. The Radeon RX 460 carves out a sizeable advantage over the RX 550, and Nvidia’s GeForce GT 1030 falls well below the GTX 1050 and GTX 950. But the GT 1030 does maintain a 14% lead over its most modern competition from AMD (even if the RX 550 is more expensive).

Strangely, our GeForce GTX 750 Ti locked up every time we tried to run the benchmark sequence under Vulkan. The API is officially supported on Maxwell-based cards, so it’s unclear why our sample struggles.


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28 Comments Comment from the forums
  • turkey3_scratch 13 July 2017 15:56
    This is a fantastic chip! Seeing as it performs nearly on-par with the 750Ti, it has approximately double the performance/power ratio. It is also perfect for a noiseless PC, the passively cooled one is.
    Reply
  • takeshi7 13 July 2017 16:18
    Does this card work with 4K Netflix? From what I've read Nvidia requires 3GB VRAM for it which seems stupid and arbitrary. 2GB is enough to buffer several seconds of 4K movie frames.
    Reply
  • King_V 13 July 2017 16:41
    Definitely interesting. Going through the initial tests, I actually started wondering why the RX550 was lower in the hierarchy charts than the 750Ti.

    Then, when they switched positions in some other tests, it became more clear. And, I concluded that even putting certain cards in tiers relative to each other is not that easy.

    I was very glad to see this test, though, as I'd previously considered getting the GT1030. My need for it is no longer there.

    Overall, I think the 750Ti, RX 550, and RX 460 are closer to each other than I anticipated. It does seem the 1030 is behind them all, but not too far behind.

    Thanks for this review. I can't wait to see where it ultimately falls in the hierarchy chart(which, oddly, is missing the RX 560 but I suspect that is in the same tier as the RX 460)
    Reply
  • Boom_4 13 July 2017 17:02
    TAKESHI7
    yes it's enough, IDK where you heard that you need 3gb or VRAM.
    Reply
  • hendriksnyder 13 July 2017 17:15
    Will this work with a core I7 7700k? And would it be able to run games like FO4 and TitanFall 2 on ultra settings?
    Reply
  • takeshi7 13 July 2017 17:50
    19934708 said:
    TAKESHI7
    yes it's enough, IDK where you heard that you need 3gb or VRAM.

    Multiple sources say you need 3GB VRAM
    http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4457/~/preview-of-4k-uhd-netflix-content-on-nvidia-gpus
    http://www.pcworld.com/article/3193566/components-graphics/nvidia-quietly-opens-4k-netflix-streaming-on-geforce-gtx-10-series-graphics-cards.html

    It's pretty stupid because that means you have to spend twice as much to get a 1050 Ti minimum.

    Reply
  • zcat 13 July 2017 18:27
    Can't wait to swap out my miniITX's old 750Ti with a true successor that's twice as powerful at the same bus-powered max of 60W.
    Reply
  • mikegrok 13 July 2017 18:32
    I am going to be installing a bunch of these into a dental office as soon as stocks get better. Dental offices have 2 monitors per computer (usually using the gti 720). One for work, and one to show Netflix, and distract the patients. The computers have CPUs that don't accelerate h265, and the 1000 series nvidia GPUs accelerate the current video codecs.
    Reply
  • Kuo Ping 13 July 2017 19:19
    got this card for months and really love it for LOL.
    Reply
  • caamsa 13 July 2017 20:35
    Wow things must be slow in the world of computer hardware.
    Reply