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Come enjoy the Nvidia GT 1010's puny benchmark score

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This budget card wasn't designed to play games or get big scores.

Nvidia 10 series
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia’s puniest GPU released early last year to what could be considered a trumpet trying to hide a fart amount of fanfare. Nvidia’s GeForce GT 1010 is a Pascal based GPU and it looks a lot like what we saw in the GT 1030 budget laptop cards from 2017. 

Presumably they were released as an attempt to have another answer to the great chip shortage for those wanting a super basic card. However, they’re not even really good enough for that and we haven’t seen any real talk about them so how effective this was is questionable. It seems that these budget options to fill the market may have been harder to come by than we thought.

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About a year later we are finally seeing 3rd benchmarks surface for the devices, and they are very cute. Benchleaks on Twitter shared the results (via Tom’s Hardware) of the GT 1010 in action on Geekbench’s CUDA Benchmark. The machine tested was also using Intel’s Core i9-12900K on an Asus ROG Strix Z690-F Gaming Wifi motherboard complete with 64GB of RAM. It was also running on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, as Linux is becoming easier and more prominent as a gaming platform.

Usually someone would have come out of the woodwork much earlier in the game to test a card as underwhelming as this one, just to see what it can do. Of course, no one expects this card to perform well. It’s not designed to and instead boasts a bunch of ports and a cheap price for those who need it.

But for those of us who want to see the tiny numbers and smile to ourselves, the GT 1010 pulled an incredibly adorable 7,730 points for the Geekbench Cuda test. High end cards from the GeForce RTX 3080 and upwards are getting over 200,000 very consistently while the 1010’s score sits somewhere between a GTX 650 Ti and GTX 660 from ten years ago.

Again, this is fine as this GPU isn’t designed to play with the bigger cards. I’m not really sure what or who it’s designed for given it’s pretty niche to sell a discrete card that’s objectively worse than most integrated, but giving us big numbers isn’t it.

Hope Corrigan
Hope Corrigan
Hardware Writer

Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find her fictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcast right here. No, she’s not kidding.