It was rumoured last week that NVIDIA is not sitting idly by when it comes to the budget and entry level graphics card segment and was planning on a GeForce GT 1030 GPU to counter AMD’s new Radeon RX 550. That fact has now been confirmed by EXPreview in the form of a photo, showing the GP108-300 GPU with the cooler and thermal interface material removed. The non-GT name has been confirmed by a submission of an Ashes of the Singularity benchmark screenshot from VideoCardz.com showing the GT 1030 naming scheme. The GT 1030 is expected to have 512 CUDA cores and have sub 50W TDP, releasing on middle of May 2017.
The AMD Radeon RX 550 is priced around $80 with 2GB or 4GB variants while the RX 570 and RX 580 have the faster memory GTX 1060, GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050 to contend with so NVIDIA has room to counter at the lower entry level as well. Historically, these lower level cards have mostly been rebadged previous generation GPUs underneath (the last release was over two years ago) and NVIDIA tends to ignore releasing updates for it, but they seem to be aggressive with this release cycle to prevent AMD from getting a foothold even on the sub-$100 market.
The GT 1030 is expected to be priced similarly to the Radeon RX 550 and NVIDIA has left room for the GT 1040 release as well. While not many DIY video gamers use these video cards, net cafe owners and system integrators utilize them on their systems.
