Colorful GeForce GTX 1630

Party like it’s 2019 with this blast from the past 

- JARRED WALTON

LAST MONTH, we looked at the rather disappointing Radeon RX 6400. This month, Nvidia’s GTX 1630 gives us one reason to reconsider AMD’s budget offering. Based on the four-year-old Turing architecture, but without raytracing hardware, the GTX 1630 feels like a GPU that’s horribly late to the party. It might have made sense if it had launched alongside the GTX 1650 back in 2019, at a price south of $100. But today, with cards selling for $199? It’s everything bad from 2021’s GPU shortages, at a time when no one is interested in paying that much money for an underperforming card.

And underperform it does. Compared with the RX 6400, the GTX 1630 ends up being 36 percent slower at our mostly playable 1080p medium settings. It’s also 32 percent slower at 1080p ultra, but when a card is failing to break 30fps, there’s not much point in looking closer. At least seven of our eight test games broke 30fps at medium settings, but that still doesn’t make up for the abysmal performance.