Nvidia GT 1010 now available for US$70, GP108 Pascal card 40% slower than GT 1030; entry-level Radeon RX 6500 XT is a cool 1,378% faster ^↺

The Nvidia GT 1010 is a strange card. It is not clear whether Nvidia actually wants the card to be widely available, but we've been seeing sporadic news of the card now and then. The Pascal GP108-based GT 1010 was first known to be real about a year ago, and now we are getting to see the GPU for the first time in flesh along with the odd benchmark or two and even an e-tailer listing.

The Nvidia GT 1010 is now available for 450 RMB (about US$70) on Chinese marketplace Tabao. The listing on Tabao is of a Lenovo GT 1010. The card does not seem to carry any Nvidia branding from the looks of it. For those not in the know, the GT 1010 offers 256 CUDA cores (two streaming multiprocessors), 2 GB GDDR5 RAM on a 64-bit memory interface, a base clock of 1,228 MHz, and a boost of 1,468 MHz.

Apart from this, the card also offers 16 texture mapping units (TMUs), 16 raster operation pipelines (ROPs), and runs at a 30 W TDP directly on the PCIe Gen 3 x4 interface. The Lenovo GT 1010 offers a HDMI-out and VGA-out for hooking up displays.

Meanwhile, @Zed_Wang on Twitter put out pictures of a Leadtek-branded GT 1010 along with a teardown of the card that clearly shows the GP108-200-A1 GPU and a 3DMark Time Spy Extreme and GPU-Z result. Interestingly, the Leadtek GT 1010 offers two HDMI ports instead of one of them being a VGA or DVI-D-out.

We had previously seen the GT 1010 in a Geekbench 5 OpenCL test wherein the card scored 7,983 points max in the benchmark. The GT 1030, on the other hand, can be up to 34.4% faster in the same test. In 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, the GT 1010 seems to have scored 153 points in the graphics test. Comparatively, the GT 1030 about 67% faster in this test with a score of 255 points.

The raison d'etre for this card is still not clear. It could be that Nvidia does see a potential market where users just need a card for streaming movies with support for modern codecs such as H.265 and VP9. With low-end modern GPUs such as the RTX 3050 and the Radeon RX 6500 XT still retailing higher-than MSRP and in limited quantities, salved GPUs such as the GP108 may find takers who have extremely basic needs.

In case you are wondering, the Radeon RX 6500 XT is a cool 1,378% faster in Time Spy Extreme GPU than the GT 1010 while the GeForce RTX 3050 is further ahead by 1,699% :)

Availability of the Nvidia GT 1010 outside of China is not yet known.

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