There's a budget GeForce GPU selling in China that not even Nvidia knew it made — RTX 4010 turns out to be a modified RTX A400 workstation GPU

According to Nvidia, the RTX 4010 doesn’t exist, yet one YouTuber could buy one and use it mostly without issue. The video by Budget-Builds Official shows off the graphics card that purports to be an RTX 4010.

How the YouTuber obtained the card is strange; Budget-Builds Official found the GPU on an online marketplace called the Shenzen Bitland Nvidia RTX 4010. If that wasn’t dubious enough, the seller told Budget-Builds Official that the card came with no warranty and was intended for OEMs rather than end-users.

However, the YouTuber recently worked with this merchant to get a GT 1010 (which is hard to find nowadays), and the seller delivered, so he decided to buy one of these RTX 4010s to see if it was real. The card cost about £80, but since it was imported from China, it cost around £120, or roughly $150.

What Budget-Builds Official received was a single-slot, low-profile GPU with a sleek, black cooler that had the Nvidia logo on it; that kind of design isn’t what you’d typically expect with a weird, China-made graphics card that’s not supposed to exist. The anti-static bag the card came in also had a sticker with PNY’s logo, even though this was supposed to be a card made by Shenzen Bitland.

Once installed in a PC, GPU-Z didn’t recognize the card but said it had 768 shaders, 4GB of GDDR6 memory, a bus width of 64 bits, a memory bandwidth of 96 GB/s, and a PCIe 3.0 x16 connection. For comparison, the RTX 4060 has four times the shaders, double the memory, double the bus width, and nearly three times the bandwidth.

There wasn’t much mystery behind this purported RTX 4010, however. Budget-Builds Official identified the card as an RTX A400, a budget workstation GPU from the Ampere generation launched earlier this year. This card is made directly by Nvidia and then resold by brands like PNY, hence the nice-looking cooler with Nvidia’s branding. The card is supposed to have the RTX A400 directly on the cooler near the Nvidia logo, but it seems the reseller obscured it with a sticker.

However, the RTX 4010 isn’t just a card sold under a different name. It has been modified to work with Nvidia’s Chinese drivers (the same ones you need for the RTX 4090D) and has a frequency 200 MHz higher than the A400. The 4010 apparently fills a hole in the budget segment of the graphics market in China and can be used either as a cheap gaming GPU or a simple video-out card. At a starting price of £80, it’s inexpensive compared to other graphics cards.

The RTX 4010 performed decently in gaming benchmarks, achieving 30 to 60 FPS in most games at 1080p with high to ultra settings. However, it didn’t do very well in ray tracing tests, getting only 56 FPS in Portal RTX with the resolution set to a dismal 480p, which is unsurprising given the card’s few cores.

However, the card wasn’t entirely free of bugs, probably because it was running on drivers for the RTX 4090D, as there are no official 4010 drivers. For some reason, AV1 encoding refused to work on Source engine games like Half-Life 2, and recording video using the AV1 encoder was only possible through OBS.

Budget-Builds Official argues that if this card were sold in the rest of the world for the same price it was going for in China, it would be a very popular card since today’s budget GPUs start at $250 or so. But given that the RTX 4060 currently retails for $300 and is Nvidia’s cheapest current-gen card, it seems unlikely that Nvidia would come out with a $100 GPU even if it’s based on a chip that came out four years ago.

However, you can purchase an RTX A400 for about $175 at the time of writing. It will use Nvidia’s Studio drivers rather than GeForce drivers, which may impact the gaming experience. And at $175, it’s more expensive than the RX 6400 and 6500 XT, which are gaming GPUs that might have better value.