According to Nvidia, the RTX 4010 graphics card does not exist. However, a YouTube blogger was able to buy one and use it with mostly no problems. A video from Budget-Builds Official shows a video card that is supposedly a version of the RTX 4010.
He found this strange video card on an online marketplace called Shenzen Bitland Nvidia RTX 4010. The seller said that the card came without a warranty and was intended for OEMs, not end users.
The vlogger had previously worked with this seller to get a GT 1010 model (which is now hard to find), and the seller fulfilled the order. Therefore, the YouTuber decided to buy one of these RTX 4010s to see if it was genuine. The card cost around £80, but since it was imported from China, it cost around £120, or roughly $150.
The resulting video card was a single-slot, low-profile solution with a black cooler with the Nvidia logo. This design is not typical of a strange, made-in-China video card that shouldn’t exist. The anti-static package the card came in also had a sticker with the PNY logo, even though it was supposed to be a card made by Shenzen Bitland.
After installation in the PC, GPU-Z did not recognize the video card. However, the utility showed that the device has 768 shaders, 4 GB of GDDR6 memory with a 64-bit access bus, 96 GB/s memory bandwidth, and a PCIe 3.0 x16 interface. In comparison, the RTX 4060 has four times the number of shaders, twice the memory, twice the bus width, and almost three times the bandwidth.
However, we managed to find out that this supposedly RTX 4010 is actually a version of the RTX A400, a budget professional Ampere-generation graphics card released earlier this year. This card is manufactured directly by Nvidia and then resold by brands such as PNY, hence the nice Nvidia-branded cooler. The card should have RTX A400 written directly on the cooler next to the Nvidia logo, but it looks like the reseller has covered it with a sticker.
However, the RTX 4010 — is not just a card sold under a different name. It has been modified to work with Nvidia’s Chinese drivers (the same ones that are required for the RTX 4090D). It also has a frequency 200 MHz higher than the A400. The 4010 apparently fills a gap in the budget segment of the graphics market in China and can be used as a cheap gaming GPU or as a simple video output card. With a starting price of £80 (about $150), it is inexpensive compared to other graphics cards.
The RTX 4010 performed decently in our gaming benchmarks, reaching 30-60 FPS in most games at 1080p with high and ultra settings. However, it did not perform well in ray tracing tests, achieving only 56 FPS in Portal RTX with the resolution set to a miserable 480p, which is not surprising given the small number of processing units.
However, it was not without bugs, probably because it was running on drivers for the RTX 4090D, since there are no official drivers for the 4010. For some reason, AV1 encoding refused to work in Source games such as Half-Life 2, and video recording using the AV1 encoder was only possible via OBS.
Budget-Builds Official claims that if this video card was sold in the rest of the world at the same price as in China, it would be very popular, as today’s budget solutions start at around $250. But given that the RTX 4060 is currently selling for $300 and is the cheapest Nvidia card of the current generation, it is unlikely that the company will release a $100 model, even if it is based on a chip that was released 4 years ago.
However, you can buy the RTX A400 for about $175. It will use Nvidia Studio drivers rather than GeForce drivers, which may affect the gaming experience. At $175, it is more expensive than the RX 6400 and 6500 XT, which are gaming graphics cards that may have higher gaming value.
Source: tomshardware