Opinion A Long, Boring Rant About a Graphics Card (that may not even exist)

BakaTheIdiot

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Alright, I've had enough! I've been simmering on my thoughts with this for about 3 weeks now and it's time to put them in writing. I highly doubt anyone will read this - much less respond - but eh.

A little background: a little more than a month and a half ago, AMD launched the Radeon RX 6400 as a low-budget-option for people just trying to play some Minecraft on weekends. I call it "low-budget," but in actuality it's still priced at over $150 - which, frankly, is outrageous. Now the card does have some very clear perks: single slot low profile options (for really old or really small office PCs), extremely appealing power draw (<60 Watts!), and most importantly widespread availability can give it a serious edge in the budget space. The performance is sorta subpar, but for 150 bucks, it's one of the cheapest cards you can get that supports DX12.

That's not to say it's all glitter and rainbows: it has no hardware video decoding (why?) which means that streaming or uploading video via screenshare or twitch is gonna really tax your system, it comes with a measly 4x4 PCIe lane configuration (which, for the uninitiated, is half of the bandwidth of a 3x16 config, which is what the majority of buyers would have anyway!!), the heat dissipation sucks (on the XFX model at least), and the price is too damn high! I mean, come on! 80 bucks is a budget card. Hell, even 100 bucks could maybe squeeze into the budget label!

But at least I can say AMD really, really tried with this card. It's still a decent budget card, but it's plagued by stupid decisions for seemingly no reason. It's not malicious, at least I don't think so, but it is a blunder.

I didn't come here to talk about AMD. You might be wondering why I even brought up the RX 6400 then. The answer is simple: I'm here to talk about the rumored GTX 1630, which may or may not be launching in about a week. The key word here is may.

Nvidia has an opportunity here. AMD shot themselves in the foot with numerous terrible decisions on the RX 6400, and while that won't hinder sales, I do think it'll prevent it from really exploding into the budget mainstream like they had hoped. Here's a little history lesson: the GT 1030, which for a time was Nvidia's champion low-profile graphics card (I will stick anyone who says GTX 1050 Ti. It's not a single slot card and you know it!) wasn't really intended for gaming, or even intensive work in the first place, but nevertheless it had just enough muscle to play some popular titles at perfectly acceptable framerates. CS:GO? No problem. Genshin Impact? If you lower your expectations and resolution, sure! Rocket League? You bet. League of Legends? That doesn't count, it'll run on anything. Keep in mind, this card is over five years old now, and you can still find it on the Steam Hardware Survey at just under 1% - hundreds of thousands of Steam users have a GT 1030 as their video card. By comparison, the RX 550 (its main competitor) had the same MSRP, more VRAM, even mightier processing muscle (to a point) - but if the hardware survey is anything to be believed, ultimately the 1030 outlasted it.

Nvidia had an opportunity then to make a card just powerful enough to run some games, but small and cheap enough that any old kid could walk into a bestbuy and get the card, slap it in his grandma's PC, and play some games. They took it, and now the GT 1030 is a staple.

Nvidia is now being presented this opportunity again.

Nvidia has one - exactly ONE - chance to capitalize on this. AMD has made some serious missteps, and if Nvidia can just SEE THAT, they can deliver a new GPU that will absolutely slaughter the RX 6400 in sales - in the middle of a GPU shortage no less! Let's assume for a moment that the GTX 1630 really does exist (it might) and really is coming in a week. What can Nvidia do to not completely botch this the way AMD did?

The first thing is something they've already (allegedly) done: use PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 instead of Gen 4.0 x4. Now you have all of the bandwidth you can get from older systems, with no caveats and no compromises. Perfect! An excellent upgrade from the 1030, and might even have a little staying power with newer CPUs - key word being might. I'm retro by trade, so I couldn't say for sure.

The second thing is hyper-aggressive pricing. I am already very, very concerned that Nvidia is going to screw this up royally - hence this rant. The 1630 is rumored to be MSRP'd at $150, and while that's too high for really anyone to believe, Nvidia has been an absolute mess lately, so I wouldn't dismiss that idea right off the bat. If they price it like the RX 6400, they've already lost: the RX 6400, even with the stupid decisions, is an objectively better value, hands down. They need to get mean with this pricing. We're talking sub $100 pricing! You know how hard it is to get a sub-100 GPU these days? It's nearly impossible without getting something either woefully obsolete, or... actually, just woefully obsolete. The GTX 670 was a solid card for used a couple years ago, but its been permanently discontinued, won't be getting any more driver updates, and doesn't support DX12 anyway - yet another thing that the GT 1030 has. Just because a card is low-spec doesn't mean that it shouldn't have some staying power!

Which leads me to number three: they need to treat the 1630 like what it actually is, instead of what they sorely want it to be. It's a replacement for the GT 1030, not a competitor to AMD. As soon as they come to terms that AMD's RX 6400 is, and always will be, superior to their 1630, they can actually highlight its strengths instead of trying to "fix" weaknesses. This ties back into the whole pricing thing: the 1630 is a 30 series card, one of the cheapest cards you can supposedly buy before a 50 series. One way they can fix this weird naming mess they've already backed themselves into is to drop the X - nobody will mind. It's a GT 1630, not a GTX. If they apply the GTX tax to this card, I am going to throw a table.

Fourth, they have a GOLDEN opportunity to tack on some hardware video decoding, even if it's not awesome. Again, AMD did this to themselves, and if Nvidia can't see that and capitalize on it, they're doing it wrong.

And finally, one of the most important things they can do, if nothing else, is this: keep that single-slot low-profile configuration. If they even want a chance for the 1630 to sell, this is NOT optional. Dual slots are for 1650s. Dual slots are for true gaming cards. The 1630 is not, and should not be marketed as, a gaming card. Whether that's true or not, the fact remains: if there are no single-slot configurations for this card, they've failed spectacularly. The power draw is low enough, they can make it work.

Is Nvidia gonna do any of this? Honestly, probably not. They're a husk of their former selves, and I'm already gearing up for disappointment - assuming the card is more than just a rumor.

But.

On the off chance that Nvidia DOES pull this off, and DOES exploit the shortcomings of AMD, and delivers a truly awesome ultra-low-budget GPU component, you better believe I would hop on the Nvidia wagon for 80 bucks. It's not even a debate.

So now, we wait. It's supposedly launching next week, though I have some serious doubts about that. Whether or not it exists, it's one of the first cards I've gotten truly excited about in recent memory - because it's a graphics card I can actually afford. To say that it won't be "worth anything" is frankly both elitist and misleading: it will have an audience. We just need to wait and see who they're trying to swing.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
 

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