Just this Tuesday, AMD released their new RX 500 lineup. Along with refreshing their cards and GPUs from the RX 400 lineup, we also have the new budget RX 550. While the value isn’t great compared to the RX 560, it still offers quite a punch for just $79. This marks a return after several generations without a real budget iGPU replacement graphics card. To counter this new AMD offering, Nvidia is reportedly preparing a new GT 1030.
Based off of the still current Polaris architecture, the GT 1030 is pretty much an updated version of the GTX 750. The card features the 14nm GP108 GPU with 512 CUDA cores, up to 2 GB of GDDR5 memory and a 128-bit wide interface. Compared to the GT 730, we have an additional 128 CUDA cores as well as doubling the memory bus. I expect we will see performance below where the RX 460 was sitting.
With just 128 fewer CUDA cores than the GTX 1050, the GT 1030 sits in a weird niche. Depending on pricing, there is a strong chance that there will be some cannibalization of sales. Perhaps this is why it is labeled the GT 1030 instead of the GT 1040 so as to dissuade comparisons against the GTX 1050. The report suggests that the card will be revealed sometime in mid-May. I for one welcome the attention for iGPU replacement cards which have been stuck on older architectures for far too long.
