Nvidia T400 | Nvidia T400 tested in 6 Games

Intro

Hello everyone, and welcome to another article now, this little thing is an Nvidia T400. It is built on the Turing tu117 GPU architecture, and it supports DirectX 12, and best of all, it was in stock with two gigs of GDDR6 memory. It is sort of like a significantly cut down version of the latest GTX 1650, and while that isn't brilliant at playing games, but it can still offer acceptable performance in a lot of AAA releases, but can this? you might have already guessed that the T400 is a professional graphics card designed for use in workstations, though that doesn't mean you can't slap it in your gaming build, and fire up a few of your favourites, course, unlike traditional consumer cards. 

This uses different drivers and you don't get access to certain features that you might find in Geforce Experience like shadow play the in-game recording, for example, but let's see what my 120 pounds bought me in terms of frame rates because I wasn't sure what this card was capable of. I am going to this little GPU in 6 games which are as follows:

1. GTA 3

1. Fallout 4

1. GTA V

1. Red Dead Redemption 2

1. Call of Duty Black Ops

1. Fortnite

GTA 3

I thought I would start easy, but perhaps I was a bit too overcautious because I fired up GTA 3 first of all. if you do, however, want to play GTA 3 with over 700 frames per second then this card will manage that just fine. 

Nvidia T400 | Nvidia T400 tested in 6 Games

I still wasn't sure what to expect from this card because GTA is about two decades old and will, therefore, run on almost anything. 

Fallout 4

The next game I tried then was Fallout 4. Although, I did still, stick to the low settings at 1080p because I wasn't sure what to expect in terms of performance. as I said but it turns out that the card pretty much managed to hit 60 FPS which is the natural cap for this game.

 

Nvidia T400 | Nvidia T400 tested in 6 Games

Almost all of the time there were a few moments now whereby the game did stutter and drop a couple of frames here and there, but for the most part 1080p 60 FPS isn't going to be a problem. You can see that the car doesn't get too hot either, so, for all of your Grand Theft Auto 3 and Fallout 4 are somewhat related in needs, well, this thing should do just fine.

GTA V

Let's just take care of this last ghoul here and then move on to our next title, and there we go again, perhaps, I was leaning toward the side of caution, when it came to GTA 5 because I selected 1080p with the normal settings. Normal settings in GTA 5 is pretty much the equivalent to every other game low settings, and as you can see the frame rates were very respectable indeed over 100 FPS most of the time. 

Nvidia T400 | Nvidia T400 tested in 6 Games

Although, there will still be some drops below that, and on very rare occasions you might see drops into the 80s or 70s as well, which is, of course, no big deal because overall performance is going to be very impressive on this little card. But, then again GTA runs on a wide range of hardware ranging from low end to high end, so, yeah so far nothing has been much of a challenge for this GPU.

 

Red Dead Redemption 2

Now as part of the RTX family of professional GPUs, we have access to Nvidia DLSS from within games that support it. Red Dead Redemption 2 is one such example that allows you to select your chosen preset, be it performance or quality as you can see we can select this option just fine, but just because we can, doesn't mean that we should, because as we move on to the actual Red Dead Redemption 2 gameplay, now you'll see that this is more of a problem than anything else.

 

The technology just isn't there or the support just isn't there for these professional cards, when it comes to utilizing DLSS, the sort of support you might find with a traditional RTX Card, for example. It just isn't available here, and as such you're much better off turning the resolution scale or just resolution down in the first place, as opposed to trying to enable DLSS with a card like this but you can turn it on, for what that's worth. It is just much better to run the game at 66.7 per cent or two thirds of 1080p because that will get you a plus 30 or in fact plus 40 FPS average. 

Nvidia T400 | Nvidia T400 tested in 6 Games

We are limited to pretty much low settings all across the board here. Now, you can, of course, choose specific settings from within the inl file located in your documents, but if you just want to fire up the game and choose settings the traditional way, then you are unfortunately going to be limited to low at least at 1080p because there is still a forced VRAM limitation. From within this game's menu, now It is not just Red Dead Redemption 2 enabling DLSS in any title, it will mean performance dips to be fair.

Call of Duty Black Ops 

Now, here is Call of Duty with no DLSS or just got wiped out, and then when we enable DLSS and choose the performance preset. We lose about 10 to 15 frames, so, as I said the support just isn't there in terms of hardware or software, unfortunately, but if you just want to play something like Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War multiplayer, then you can do so with about to 50 frames per second at native 1080p, that's what I chose to do here. 

But, to be honest, I would recommend choosing either a lower resolution or adjusting the resolution scaling until you're hitting somewhere around 60 FPS, because in first-person titles like this one, especially, competitive ones what on earth was I thinking there you are going to benefit from as many frames as possible. 

Now, you may be wondering, if this supports DLSS, does it support ray tracing? And the answer is no, we cannot enable ray tracing in any games that I tested. When using this card, all we can do is select DLSS which will make gameplay worse. I think even if we could enable ray tracing it would probably be best to leave it off because its performance isn't brilliant now. 

Nvidia T400 | Nvidia T400 tested in 6 Games

There are a couple of other of these T labelled cards, I think, we've got a T-600 and a T-1000 as well, which of course offer far more horsepower, but as you go up in the numbers the prices also go up and then it sort of makes more and or less and less sense to buy one in replacement of a traditional desktop GPU. 

The prices just don't make too much sense this was the cheapest, and I thought for the money, you might be tempted by it. Hence, that is why I decided to check it out for an article. 

Fortnite

It is safe to say that in games like GTA 3, GTA V, Fallout 4, and Fortnite here, well, you are going to have a playable experience. Again Fortnite is one of those DLSS supported titles, but enabling it will cut your frame rate in half. Hence, it is far better to keep it off, just leaving that option disabled here at 1080p native with the low preset. We are seeing over 100 frames per second in Fortnite.

 

Conclusion

Now, there are certainly other cards on the used market that would make far more sense than this one, but this does support all the modern features such as DirectX 12, and should, therefore, be able to on paper run every game that you throw at it. I am not sure how well, but it will run them at least I like to check out these workstation cards because every so, often a new one pops up, and I just can not help but wonder whether or not they are very good for gaming. If you guys come across one of these, as well, you might be wondering the same so hopefully.

 

I have bought this, so, that you do not have to, but if you do want to or you just want a cheapish workstation card then I do not see why this would not make for a good option, but for gaming, It is probably not the best idea, and with that thank you very much for reading. Hopefully, I'll see all of you in the next one.