The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630 raises quite a few eyebrows, but not just because team green is bolstering a now three-year-old line-up when the Nvidia RTX 4000 series looms on the horizon. Now that the graphics card is official, aftermarket brands are drawing their own comparisons, and you can expect performance to sit around the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and its Ti-less little brother.
It’s not too surprising, considering the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630 specs show a cutdown GTX 1650, but it’s not the graphics card launch any of us envisioned in 2022. The GTX 1630 will set you back anywhere from $169 USD to $199 depending on which model you go for, while Inno3D indicates (via ITHome) it’ll pump out similar performance to the GTX 1050 Ti, which launched way back in 2016 for $139 USD MSRP.
Nvidia hasn’t just done a copy and paste job, though, as there are some subtle differences. The GTX 1630 is based on Turing architecture, which it has in common with the RTX 2000 series but without the ray tracing capabilities. This means it’s a little beefier than the Pascal architecture of the past, featuring a better media decoder that can handle VP8 or H.265 (HEVC) 4:4:4 codecs.
We could throw numbers at you, telling you that the 1,815MHz clock speed on the GTX 1630 is far superior to that of the GTX 1050 Ti’s 1,392MHz (and a record for the GTX 16 series), or that its 512 CUDA cores falls short of its predecessor’s 768 CUDA cores. All that really matters is that gaming performance is on par with a near-six-year-old graphics card, and falls short of the more affordable $159 USD MSRP AMD Radeon RX 6400 in the TechPowerUp review.
Every time you go to upgrade your graphics card, you might hear people barking that you should wait and that there’s a new release just around the corner. Well, this time it’s true, and it looks like the GTX 1630 sets the bar low enough that it’s worth hanging fire. Hell, even the GTX 1650 apparently performs 54% better and can be found around the same price point if you look around the internet.