Can the Smallest RTX GPU Still Run the Newest Games?

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Over the years, RTX graphics cards have gotten absolutely [music] massive, with some being bigger than entire consoles.

[00:00:06]So, that got me thinking. Can the smallest RTX GPU ever made still run the [music] newest, most demanding games?

[00:00:12]Well, that's what we're going to find out today. But to answer that question, we of course need to start by finding out what the smallest RTX GPU even is.

[00:00:19]So, I began by searching up what is the smallest RTX GPU on Google. But for some reason, all the results are about the RTX 5060 low profile when it isn't even smaller than this RTX GPU I have in my hand right now, which also isn't the smallest RTX card. On the other hand, Google's AI says the smallest RTX GPUs are the A400 and the A1000. Both super tiny GPUs, but neither of them are still quite the smallest. Cuz after searching around a little bit more, I not only realized why women don't talk to me, but I also found that the actual smallest RTX card is the T400. [music] It's also tied with the T600 and T-1000, which dropped at the same time. But for this video, we'll just focus on the T400 for now. Now, you might be wondering, if the T400 is the smallest RTX GPU, why doesn't the AI overview even mention it at all? Well, the reason for that is that Nvidia just doesn't market this card as an RTX GPU, even though in the official data sheet from Nvidia themselves, it confirms that the T400 is part of the RTX Professional line of GPUs. And this whole thing is kind of like how they purposely left the GTX name off the Titan X Pascal, even though it literally says GeForce GTX on the side of it. Like, I get why they do this type of stuff, but at the same time, I just don't understand it, if you feel what I'm saying. However, because the T400 is so ridiculously small, Nvidia had to make a few compromises with this card compared to all the other bigger RTX GPUs. One, the cooling is ass. Two, it only has a 30W power limit. And three, it only has 4 GB of RAM. Now, all of this is fine for what it was designed for since it's a budget workstation GPU and it'll probably be just fine in most competitive games as well as older AAA games. But for those 2024 to 2026 AAA games, I'm a little bit worried to say the least. But what if I told you none of those compromises are even close to the biggest compromise Nvidia had to make with the T400? We'll worry about that later though because before we can find out how this thing handles modern games, we first need to answer another important question. Where do you even find one of these things? Well, despite being an unpopular workstation GPU, it is actually very easy to find on online marketplaces. And I actually have one inside this $1,500 Lenovo tiny PC.

[00:02:24]Obviously, I didn't buy this thing. I mean, it's $1,500, which is quite literally more than my rent. But for anyone who doesn't know or remember how I got this $1,500 tiny PC, in short, my dad, who works in IT, brought it home from his workplace because they didn't need it anymore. And unless you've seen one of these PCs before, you probably wouldn't expect it to have an entire GPU inside. At least that's what I thought when I first got my hands on this thing.

[00:02:46]I mean, it's only one and a half inches thick. But when you open this thing up, you'll see that it does actually have a whole ass graphics card inside. It might be the smallest RTX GPU, but still pretty insane to me that they could fit an entire graphics card in here. But unlike last time we looked at this PC, we're going to be taking out the GPU for the first time and putting it into my test PC to prevent any type of bottleneck or cooling issues. Now, I'll be honest, the air flow in here is fine, but not ideal, and the CPU won't be an issue most of the time. But the main problem is that it only has CL40 RAM, which is noticeably worse than the RAM in my test PC. And if we're going to be testing the limits of the T400 in the newest games, this will matter more than you might think. However, taking out this GPU for the first time was not quite as simple as any regularsiz gaming PC, and it ended up being a bit more complicated than I initially thought. At first, I just unscrewed a bunch of screws, thinking that I would figure it out as we go. But nothing seemed to move easily. Eventually though, this back portion just popped off randomly. And now that that side is no longer blocked off, all I needed to do was pull this assembly out and of course separate the GPU from this right angle adapter thing, which ended up being a little bit harder than I'd like to admit. These shit's dead ass took me a full minute to separate. I don't know if I'm just weak, stupid, maybe both. But what I do know is that you should subscribe to my YouTube channel. Unless you don't like my videos, then that's okay. you don't need to subscribe, but if you want to subscribe, I'm not going to stop you.

[00:04:05]But either way, it's pretty cool how they were able to get this thing to fit inside this tiny PC. And all there was left to do was put it into my test PC and see how it games. I do want to point out that there is a little bit of GPU sag, but for the sake of the video, it's not really going to matter. I'm just going to keep my camera off of it as much as I can so I don't burn your eyes off. But now, it's finally time to see if Nvidia's smallest RTX GPU can still handle the newest games. Starting with a quick warm-up with Tomb Raider 2013 and then we'll gradually get to the newest 2026 games. With Tomb Raider being 13 years old though, it's not the hardest thing to run at all. So on the high preset at 1080p, the T400 averaged 64 FPS and got a 1% low of 47. Next, I wanted to try a couple of competitive games to see how this GPU does. And the results were solid here as well. In Rocket League, we got an average of 169 FPS using comp settings and 103 average FPS on max settings. Moving on to Fortnite, this game ran pretty well, too, with an average of 178 FPS on this 1v one map. And in Battle Royale, after a full game, or almost a full game, because I got on, we finished with 105 FPS. Now, obviously, if we had a better GPU, this setup can get over 240 FPS in game. But again, for its size, these FPS numbers could definitely be worse. And unfortunately, in Cyberpunk 2077, the FPS numbers got worse as expected. And this was where those huge compromises I was talking about earlier finally started becoming [music] a problem. As I was about to start the benchmark, I noticed that the DLSS option is completely missing. Something that I've never seen with any of the other RTX cards I've used before. Cuz unlike almost every other RTX card, it's missing the core components of what makes an RTX GPU an RTX GPU. So, I think it's time I tell you what the biggest compromises with the T400 actually are.

[00:05:48]First off, it doesn't have any tensor [music] cores, so it can't use DLSS properly. But you might be thinking, >> Electron, you dumb why don't you just use the DLSS enabler mod? Who gives a if you don't have Tensor? I want to see you use DLSS.

[00:06:03]And to that I say, DLSS enabler doesn't actually give you real DLSS. But Electron, why don't you just use the DLSS override in the Nvidia app? No way.

[00:06:12]You didn't know that existed, right?

[00:06:13]Right, Electron? Stupid. And to that, I say DLSS override will also not help us because that only lets you switch between different DLSS models. And [music] to be able to switch models, you have to first turn on DLSS in the game, which we cannot as DLSS is fully grayed out in every game. So that leaves us with only one way to enable DLSS on the T400, and that is with Optiscaler. In [music] simple terms, it's basically a software that lets you translate from one upscaling technology to another. For example, you enable FSR in Cyberpunk, and with Optiscaler, it'll make your GPU use DLSS instead. And unlike DLSS enabler, Optiscaler lets you use real DLSS. The only issue with this is again the GPU doesn't have tensor cores. So even if I decided to go through all those hoops just to get DLSS to work, it would end up just killing my FPS for absolutely no benefit. [music] So I decided to just stick with FSR. And for the final compromise, it doesn't have [music] any ray tracing cores. Even though Nvidia says it is an RTX professional GPU and if you were curious to see if this thing could run ray tracing at all, the game simply does not allow me to turn it on because it knows that we don't have any ray tracing capabilities. Either way, I still wanted to see how good or terribly it would run Cyberpunk. So, I first tried it without any upscaling and at native 1080p, we only got 26 average FPS on the lowest possible settings. [music] It's a pretty terrible site, I have to say. So, I had to enable upscaling. With FSR quality, we managed to get over 30 FPS. I mean, 34 FPS is bearable, but me personally, I would reduce the resolution a bit more to get at least 50 FPS. I feel like that's reasonable. But if Cyberpunk is a demanding game, I really wouldn't know how to describe Blackmith Wukong because as fun as the game is, I'm not sure if they even tried to optimize this because even a 4090 can barely do 60 fps. And that's with ray tracing off.

[00:08:03]Knowing the game is that demanding, I decided to just test it in upscaled 720p, hoping to get at least 30 fps. But we ended up getting quite a bit more.

[00:08:12]Finishing the benchmark with 39 average FPS and an oddly high 1% low of 34. But since the T400 ended up doing better than I expected, I wanted to see if it could still get 30 plus FPS without upscaling. But let's just say I may have been a little bit too optimistic cuz this next benchmark was the worst benchmark I have ever done on this channel. And I don't say that lightly.

[00:08:34]This time the game fully froze, giving us a good look at those beautiful Minecraft looking ass bushes. This was a 25,791.4 millisecond freeze. I have never once seen a frame time this high before. And obviously in those 25,791 milliseconds, I was trying to think of a reason why this would happen. Initially, I thought maybe it's because of thermal throttling, but it was only at 59°.

[00:08:59]Maybe someone in the comments has an idea because it could be a lot of things for sure. Anyways, we still had one last game to test. Resident Evil Reququum.

[00:09:07]Last video I discovered that this game was easier to run than Blackmth Wukong despite being 2 years newer. So, I tested it at 1080p lowest settings. And with FSR balanced, we got an average of 31 FPS. So, can the smallest RTX GPU run the newest games? Kind of, but not really. Anyways, if you enjoyed the video, you'll probably enjoy this video where we find out if the fastest GPU from 2016 can still run the newest games. So, watch this video next.

[00:09:36][music] >> [music]