Sketchy Nvidia RTX 4010 performs surprisingly well without official driver support

Nvidia is gearing up to launch the RTX 50 series, but ahead of this launch, an unannounced 40 series GPU has popped up. It's seemingly the Nvidia RTX 4010, which hasn't been officially announced by the company yet.

However, strange and sketchy GPUs are nothing new for the Chinese market, and that's where this alleged RTX 4010 has been sourced from. The GPU was obtained by a YouTuber called Budget-Builds Official, who has looked at multiple weird GPUs from China before.

Getting back to what's seemingly the Nvidia RTX 4010, given that it's not commercially available, there's no official driver support. Even GPU-Z doesn't recognize it as the GPU that it's meant to be, but Budget-Builds Official was able to make it work with a Chinese RTX 4090 D driver.

While it sounds odd, the GPU actually works with that driver. As a matter of fact, the seemingly RTX 4010 has even made past benchmarks and could run games smoothly with that driver. Of course, given that it's an entry-level option and there's an odd driver situation going on, not all games could hit the solid 60 FPS average mark.

In the 1080p resolution, most of the games were around 30 FPS in mixed visual settings. Among the notable games that ran really well, however, are GTA Online, Counter-Strike 2, and Crysis. This supposed RTX 4010 basically offers the same performance level as the RTX A400 Ampere, and that's not surprising as the specs also match.

Regardless, in China, this seemingly RTX 4010 goes for around $100. This price point isn't bad for a GPU that has ray tracing capabilities, but for the driver issue, it's better to get a low-profile RTX 3050 instead (Gigabyte 2X Windforce curr. $171.99 on Amazon).