Nvidia has introduced a new GPU to the market. This graphics board, unlike almost all of the current gaming cards, will almost certainly be released in large numbers; the Nvidia GeForce GT 1010 just shows up in the drop-down menu on Nvidia's graphics driver download page, It was launched with no fanfare at all, and as a very important GPU.

Yes, this is a new board based on the old Pascal architecture that first appeared in 2016; according to Videocardz, this is not just any old Pascal GPU, but the powerful one found in the GT 1030 and various GeForce MX series GPUs for laptops It is a GP108 GPU.

All kidding aside, this GPU replaces the unprecedented GT 710, a card based on the GK108 chip, a Kepler-era 7 series GPU and Nvidia's lowest desktop GPU. Incidentally, the current GT 710 has over 192 CUDA cores, just shy of the 10,496 CUDA cores of the RTX 3090, the current champion of Nvidia's new Ampere family.

The new GT 1010 increases the number of CUDA cores to 256; since the GP108 has 384 CUDAs, this chip is a scaled-down version of the GP108. In other words, this is hardly a performance GPU by any measure. In fact, it will lose to most modern integrated graphics cores by a comfortable margin. Damn.

As for why this exists, there are currently reports that the new GT 1010 is an OEM-only board, designed to provide discrete video capabilities at the lowest possible price. However, availability seems to be a good thing, thanks to the fact that it is based on a cut-down version of an older GPU: not only are GP108 GPUs very small, but dozens of them can be mounted on a single wafer. However, these GPUs do not even need to be fully functional to be used on a GT 1010 board. [The Nvidia GeForce GT 1010 card is for your friends, especially those who complain that they can't get their hands on one of the brave new generation of high-performance GPUs from Nvidia or AMD. Just don't expect to actually use it for gaming. It won't.