MSI GeForce GT 1030: A $70 Passively-Cooled Graphics Card, Decent With OpenGL/Vulkan/OpenCL/VDPAU

For this latest graphics card benchmarking the MSI GeForce GT 1030 was compared to the below assortment of graphics cards as well as the integrated HD Graphics 630 of the Core i7 7700K processor used on this test bed:

- Radeon R7 260X
- Radeon R7 370
- Radeon RX 460
- Radeon RX 480
- Radeon RX 550
- Radeon RX 560
- Radeon RX 580
- i7-7700K - HD Graphics 630
- GeForce GTX 460
- GeForce GTX 650
- GeForce GTX 750
- GeForce GTX 750 Ti
- GeForce GTX 760
- GeForce GTX 950
- GeForce GTX 960
- GeForce GT 1030
- GeForce GTX 1050
- GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1060
- GeForce GTX 1070
- GeForce GTX 1080

All of the NVIDIA GPUs were tested with the 381.22 binary driver, which was working fine with the GT 1030 and other tested cards. The Radeon and Intel GPUs were tested with the Linux 4.12 Git kernel for the newest DRM drivers as well as using Mesa 17.2-dev Git this week via the Padoka PPA. All tests were done from the i7-7700K box running Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64.

With all the OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks are also performance-per-Watt / AC system power consumption (using a WattsUp Pro) as well as GPU temperature reporting. There are also VDPAU video decode and OpenCL compute benchmarks later on in this article.