Nvidia quietly released the GTX 1630 on Tuesday, following a reported delay at the end of May. The card, which is around $150 and built on the older Turing architecture, won’t be making it into our roundup of the best graphics cards, though. Early reviews show that even the six-year old RX 470 beats the GTX 1630 by as much as 52%.
It’s a dire situation for Nvidia’s new GPU. Guru3D’s review of the Palit GTX 1630 4GB Dual showed that the card sits at the bottom in every benchmark. And that’s not just against the latest graphics cards. In Far Cry 6, for example, the GTX 1630 was beaten by Nvidia’s GTX 1650 Super by a massive 64% at 1080p. AMD’s RX 470, which is twice as old as the GTX 1650 Super, won out by 52%.
TechPowerUp reported even worse results, with the GTX 1630 rendering only 14.8 fps in Dying Light 2 at 1080p. For reference, the GTX 1060 that’s six years old and the most popular GPU on Steam, was 110% faster in Dying Light 2 at 1080p based on TechPowerUp’s tests. That’s downright embarrassing.
We knew the GTX 1630 was a bad idea the moment rumors started coming out. It’s built on Nvidia’s last-gen Turing architecture, which didn’t launch in the best state. Nvidia released Super variants less than a year after the initial range launched, and that was three years ago.
The GTX 1630 significantly cuts back the specs, too. Compared to GTX 16-series cards, which Nvidia hasn’t revisited in over two years, the GTX 1630 has 43% fewer cores than the next step up (the GTX 1650). It also has half of the memory bandwidth due to a 64-bit bus, vastly limiting the card’s potential in older systems.
Price is another major problem. Although rumors suggested $150 was the price for models in the U.S., EVGA’s first GTX 1630 is listed for $200. With GPU prices where they are now, you can purchase a brand-new RX 6500 XT for less money. And despite the fact that we called it one of the worst tech products of the year in our RX 6500 XT review, it’s still twice as fast as the GTX 1630.
Given the results we’ve seen so far, there is no reason to buy the GTX 1630. New options are few and far between, but you can pick up the RX 470 for as little as $60 on eBay — a fourth of what some GTX 1630 models are selling for. That won’t lock you out of features, either. Unlike Nvidia’s latest GPUs, the GTX 1630 doesn’t support ray tracing or Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).
The card could be an option if you’re sitting on a budget GPU from multiple generations back. It’s a step up from the GT 1030, and it’s faster than some GPU deals you’ll find for cards like the GT 710 and Radeon 5450. Still, there are multiple options around the same price as the GTX 1630 that are almost universally twice as fast (or more).
