In a strange turn of events, Nvidia quietly launched a new GPU, the GT 1010, a card which is based on five-year-old Pascal architecture. This news was discovered by YouTuber Dapz who also confirmed the existence of the GT 1010 via a live chat with an Nvidia representative. The GT 1010 is aimed towards very basic graphical workloads like 2D / 3D acceleration and Home Theaters so don’t expect this card to be in our Best Graphics Cards of 2021 lineup. But the GT 1010 should be replacing the much older Kepler-based GT 710 with a healthy boost to performance. Luckily you should be able to snag a GT 1010 in the future as Nvidia’s GT series GPUs are largely unaffected by the current graphics card shortage.

If you are wondering why Nvidia is resurrecting the Pascal architecture, it’s due to how the GT series of cards operate in Nvidia’s lineup. The GT series is designed around basic tasks like 2D/3D acceleration and providing additional display outputs for systems. Tasks like these can already be done with older architectures like Pascal, so implementing a much newer architecture into a GT card really isn’t necessary.

The GT 1010 features the same GP108 core as the GT 1030 but disables a third of the shader cores to give the GT 1010 a total of 256 shader cores to work with (compared to the GT 1030 with 384 shader cores). 

For memory, the GT 1010 will come with one memory config, 2GB of GDDR5. Unlike the GT 1030 which comes in both GDDR5 and DDR4 variants. 

For power, the GT 1010 has a TDP of just 30Ws with a recommend PSU wattage of 200W, so this GPU should be compatible with almost any modern PC or pre-built that has an open PCI-E slot to spare.

Unfortunately, we still don’t have any information on an MSRP; but our best guess is to expect the GT 1010 to cost similar to that of the GT 710 it’s replacing.