NVIDIA has just launched its GeForce GTX 1630, its newest entry level graphics card. We are sure there will be plenty of excitement when NVIDIA is going to launch the GeForce RTX 40 series which will be based on the Ada Lovelace. Till then, this launch is ideal for gamers who like to stay on a budget and wouldn’t mind getting a little upgrade over the integrated graphics without having to spend an arm and a leg.
The GTX 1630 forms part of the GTX 16 series and is a low end graphics card. All cards part of this series are based on the company’s Turing architecture. Although the entire series is based on the same architecture, you will be surprised to find out how big of a gap there is in specs when it comes to the next one in line – the GeForce GTX 1650.
Some of the specs are similar to those featured on the GeForce GTX 1650 such as the memory which is a GDDR6 of 4 GB, however, the memory has been reduced by almost half on this one at 64-bit only. This is definitely going to be a huge drawback for gamers opting for this card. The GTX 1630 is going to feature a total of 512 CUDA cores with a base clock of 1740 MHz and a boost clock of 1785 MHz on reference specifications.
The GeForce GTX 1630 might be a notch up from the GTX 1030, but it is surely a big downgrade from the GTX 1650. 1030 is probably the oldest card that 1630 can be compared to. It was launched almost five years ago and is based on the outdated Pascal with a total of only 384 CUDA cores. It features a GDDR5 memory of 2 GB spread across a meager 64-bit bus which leaves the memory bandwidth at 48 GB/s. When we were talking about a notch up, we really did mean it as the GTX 1630 can offer memory bandwidth of around 96 GB/s.
We haven’t tested this card as of yet, but there are some reviews out there from those who have. One of them is TechPowerU which has managed to test the card during various games. The result being, on average the GTX 1630 is three times faster than the GTX 1030. The results are all relative and don’t give an ideal overview of the actual performance because at the same time the site also claims that at a resolution of 1080p, the card was lacking in performance.
Regardless of these reviews, many of NVIDIA’s hardware partners have added the GTX 1630 to their lineup. These include the Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac, and EVGA among a few others. At this moment, we only see EVGA up for sale at 199.99 USD.
