The elusive GeForce GT 1010 graphics card has been tortured by 3DMark’s 4K benchmark

The graphics market is pretty much broken at this point, but is it this broken? Pictures and benchmarks of Nvidia’s elusive GT 1010 have surfaced. Sadly, Nvidia seems to have neglected the runt of the litter and the result does not make for encouraging reading. 

A Twitter user by the very unlikely name of MEGAsizeGPU (via Videocardz) has taken some pictures of a Leadtek GeForce GT 1010 and went on to post a TimeSpy Extreme benchmark. The result? A graphics score of 153. For reference, the RTX 3080 manages about 8800. The RTX 2060 is around 3500. We have no idea about the overclocking potential of the GT 1010 but its pretty safe to say its got a bit of catching up to do to match that.

We’ve had an eye out for the GT 1010, and previously reported on an equally unimpressive Geekbench score which places it alongside mid-range GTX 650 Ti and GTX 660 cards from ten years ago. We’re not sure if anyone has ever run TimeSpy Extreme on those cards, but if they did, they were clearly bored that day.

The GT 1010 is a Pascal generation card with 256 CUDA cores and 2GB of GDDR5 memory running over a 64-bit bus. It uses a PCIe x4 interface, much like the not-quite-as-slow RX 6500 XT, though the GT 1010 is limited to PCIe 3.0. The Leadtek version has twin HDMI ports and power consumption is a low 30W. The card is listed for sale in China for around 450 RMB, which equates to roughly $70 USD. 

All mockery aside, in fairness to Nvidia the GT 1010 is not a gaming card. It’s simply designed to add graphics support to systems that don’t have integrated graphics. Its limited capabilities means it’s best suited to an office machine, a resurrected old clunker, or tasks such as signage or embedded applications. 

We’re pleased to see a low 30W power consumption which means it doesn’t require any external power and even the most basic of coolers won’t struggle with it. However, it’s not the kind of card that you would include with a new system. A modern Intel CPU with integrated graphics would be far more effective. But it would be a cheap card you could add to an older system to bring it back to life.

At least its price tag is pretty good. $70 for a ‘new’ graphics card in the current market is commendable, but from a gaming perspective that’s about all the GT 1010 has got going for it.