The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 is an upgrade for anyone looking for best-in-class 1080p functionality while leaving the door open for forged 1440p functionality (with caveats) at an appropriate price. The biggest problem, however, is with its 8GB VRAM, which limits the height of the stack of solutions this card can effectively achieve, even if its most important features are too tied to whether game developers implement them.
Best-in-class 1080p
Less than $300
DLSS 3 with generation
Moderate play in 1440p is possible
The most productive features have developers enforcing DLSS 3
GB VRAM only
Nvidia needs you to know that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 is a card for those still using a GTX 1060 or RTX 2060, and that’s Team Green’s most productive marketing strategy for that card.
To be clear, the Nvidia RTX 4060 is quite a bit better than the Nvidia RTX 3060 it replaces and has a launch MSRP of $299 (around £240/AU$450) less than its predecessor. Its 1080p gaming functionality is what you can find under $300, and its 1440p functionality is pretty solid, especially when it allows DLSS. If you play a game with DLSS 3 and frame generation, even better.
Unfortunately, the card’s 4K functionality suffers due to the limited video memory it works with, which is a minimum of 50% of the 12GB VRAM pool of the first run of the RTX 3060 (although at least it doesn’t fall below the 8GB of the latest version). RTX 3060).
You also get more ray tracing and tensor cores than the Ampere generation, and this adulthood manifests itself in the map’s much more advanced ray tracing and DLSS performance.
There are also some extra bonuses for streamers, as well as AV1 compatibility, but this will be a low-end gamer card, not a streamer, and from what you get for the price, it’s a wonderful card.
The real challenge for this card is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. For more than a year after the RTX 3060 Ti arrived on the scene, it ruled our list of the most productive graphics cards for its dramatic balance between price and performance, outweighing its weight well and even beating the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070.
Since the crypto bubble burst and Nvidia Lovelace cards started hitting shelves, the prices of the latest generation Nvidia Ampere cards have been completely reduced, adding the RTX 3060 Ti. You can now get the RTX 3060 Ti well below the MSRP, and even though the RTX 4060 beats the RTX 3060 by around 20%, it’s still below the RTX 3060 Ti, so if you’re going to get an RTX 3060 Ti for a similar or similar value to the RTX 4060, This might be a better bet. I haven’t noticed the RTX 3060 Ti have yet to drop this low, but it’s entirely possible.
Part of the explanation for why the RTX 3060 Ti is competitive here is that many of the RTX 4060’s features feature other people implementing Nvidia’s DLSS 3 generation in their products. DLSS 3 with Frame Generation is amazing for peak gaming (although there are some latency issues to fix), however, the number of games that implement it is quite small at the moment.
Many newer games will have it, but as noted with the recent controversy over Starfield’s partnership with AMD, one of the biggest PC games of the year may not have DLSS implemented at launch. This is somewhat difficult to sustain compared to the RTX. 4060 as a counterfeit negative, because when the generation is implemented, it works incredibly well. But it is also inevitable that Nvidia’s main promotion point for this generation of graphics cards will be explicitly linked to the cooperation of external game developers.
With anything like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070, DLSS 3 is a great feature, but it doesn’t make or break the card. With the RTX 4060, its appeal is deeply tied to whether or not this generation is available in its games, and it seriously undermines the card when it doesn’t. Its functionality without DLSS is only greater than the RTX 3060 thanks to a popular generation-on-generation upgrade to 1080p, and without DLSS, 1440p gaming is possible, but it will be. Being seriously hampered by the limitation of VRAM. 4K games, meanwhile, would be completely out of the question.
That said, the Nvidia RTX 4060 will still be a great upgrade for anyone coming from a GTX 1060 or RTX 2060, which is where this card is looking to locate its market. little more cash for the RTX 4070 than being worried about the RTX 4060 (and you can probably forget about the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti, honestly).
If you’re looking for Nvidia’s most productive graphics card, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 is probably as smart as it will be for a while, as there have been few if any rumors of an Nvidia RTX 4050 or Nvidia RTX. 4050 Ti will soon reach the budget segment. Whether upgrading an RTX 3060 is worthwhile is debatable, however if cash is tight and you’re looking for an upgrade to the 60-series cards of the Pascal or Turing era, I’d surely love this card.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 will be available on June 29, 2023 for an MSRP of $299 (around £240/AU$450), which is about 10% less than the RTX 3060 when it launches in 2021.
There is a caveat to this value in that there is no Nvidia Founders edition of the RTX 4060, so it can only be obtained from external partners such as Asus, PNY and others. These brands would possibly qualify what they need for the card, so you can expect to see a lot of cards worth more than Nvidia’s MSRP, but there will be some like the Asus RTX 4060 Dual that I tested for this review that will be sold at MSRP.
Although this card is less expensive than most, it is not the cheapest of the existing generation. That would be the AMD Radeon RX 7600, which has an MSRP of $269. 99 (around £215/AU$405), which still offers the most productive price. /functionality of any existing generation card. Still, contemplating the actual point of functionality you get from the RTX 4060, it definitely offers an attractive price compared to its rival cards, even if in the end they are less expensive.
In terms of specifications, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 is a noticeable improvement over the Nvidia RTX 3060 thanks to a smaller 5nm TSMC procedure node than the RTX 3060’s 8nm Samsung node. It also features much faster clock speeds, with a base that’s about 39% faster and a higher clock speed.
You also get a faster memory speed, but a smaller VRAM pool and a smaller memory bus, so you end up with about 25% less memory bandwidth, limiting the solution’s superior performance.
Still, with faster clock speeds, more mature ray tracing and tensor cores, and a lower TGP than its predecessor, it’s one of the toughest and most power-efficient graphics cards in its class.
There’s no reference design for the Nvidia RTX 4060, nor is the Founders edition, so the board design will depend entirely on which edition you get from which manufacturer.
In my case, I won the Asus GeForce RTX 4060 Dual OC edition, which features a dual-fan design and a much smaller size suitable for a mid-range card. Fortunately, the board uses an 8-pin power connector, so I don’t want to worry about 12VHPWR adapter cables.
It comes with all 3 DisplayPort 1. 4 video outputs and an HDMI 2. 1 now popular on this generation of Nvidia cards, so those with one of the USB-C monitors will be out of luck here.
The card is two slots wide, so you shouldn’t have any trouble putting it in a case, and it’s soft enough that you can get away with it without having to use a stand.
Here is the formula we used for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060:
When it comes to 1080p, the Nvidia RTX 4060 offers gaming functionality for under $300.
The AMD RX 7600 gets its money’s worth in terms of natural rasterization performance, and even manages to beat the RTX 4060 on occasion, however, once it starts launching ray tracing, the RTX 4060 surely drifts away from its rivals.
This is especially true when you transfer the transfer to DLSS, which makes 1440p gaming a very feasible option with this card. While it’s definitely not one of the most productive 1440p graphics cards, on some titles with secure settings, be amazed at what it can do.
When it comes to artificial benchmarks, you get the typical hit-for-hit between Nvidia and AMD cards seen in the past, with AMD passing natural rasterization tests like 3DMark Time Spy and Firestrike, while Nvidia is ahead of ray tracer workloads like Port Royal. and Speedway.
The RTX 4060 and RX 7600 are close enough in terms of uncooked functionality that it might as well be an h on average, but it’s worth noting that the RTX 4060 is about 20% larger on average than the RTX 3060. I emphasize this especially to compare it to the RTX 4060 Ti, which on average is only 10-12% larger than the RTX 3060 Ti.
A 20% build-on-generation improvement, on the other hand, is much more respectable and justifies the RTX 4060 as an upgrade even with an RTX 3060 on your rig. It might not make that leap to get 20% extra functionality with this GPU class, however, it’s at least valueArray unlike the RTX 4060 Ti.
Where the RTX 4060 takes off is in gaming performance. Compared to the RX 7600, that’s pretty much even betting on 1080p with max settings with no ray tracing or scaling. In particular, the RTX 4060 underperforms the RX 7600 by about 9% in Cyberpunk 2077 when it’s not employing ray tracing or scaling.
However, Crank ray tracing until Psycho in Cyberpunk 2077, and the price of the RTX 4060 is starting to shine. The RX 7600 surely works when RT is maxed out, but it’s not universal in all areas. In other games, the RX 7600 is competitive, but Cyberpunk 2077 is AMD’s Achilles heel. Meanwhile, the RTX 3060 holds up quite well in some titles, while the RTX 4060 makes great progress in others.
With scaling enabled, the RTX 4060 particularly manages to outperform the RTX 3060 and RX 7600. If you ditch the basic DLSS setup and don’t play with frame generation, the RTX 4060 gets a clear win over Cyberpunk 2077, although it has a lower average. frame rate than the RTX 3060, but with a higher minimum frame rate, it’s a much more solid experience across the board.
However, once it allows frame generation, things change particularly in favor of the RTX 4060. You can even develop the solution on Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p with frame generation allowed and get more fps on average and at least than you would get with the RTX 3060 at 1080p, while the RX 7600 can’t hold up to that level.
Unfortunately, this largely depends on the developers who implemented Nvidia’s new technology. Without DLSS 3 with Frame Generation, you still get respectably greater functionality than the RTX 3060, but it’s not something that’s sure to surprise you.
Meanwhile, the RX 7600 offers a compelling option if you want to save money and don’t mind 1440p or ray tracing.
Still, if you can toggle a setting and get an extra 50fps in a game that’s not easy, there’s no comparison, and only at that point, the RTX 4060 wins by default.
Read the full AMD Radeon RX 7600 review
Read the full Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
I spent a lot of time testing the RTX 4060 for several days, artificial tests like 3DMark and Passmark, while running various games on the board with other settings and resolutions.
I also tested its nearest rival card, as well as the card it replaces in Nvidia’s product stack and inter-card functionality scores to gauge the card’s overall functionality.
I did this with the Nvidia and AMD lacheck drivers in a check bench, the same hardware for each verified card, so I can isolate the graphics card’s contribution to the overall functionality I discovered in the game or in artificial benchmarks.
We pride ourselves on our independence and rigorous proof-of-review process, offering long-term attention to the products we review and making sure our reviews are up to date and maintained, regardless of when a device is released, if you can still buy it, it’s on our radar.
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First review June 2023
John (He/He) is the editor here at TechRadar and is also a programmer, gamer, activist and alumnus of Brooklyn College who lately lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Named by CTA as a media pioneer at CES 2020 for his scientific and generation reporting, John specializes in all fields of computing, aggregating industry news, hardware reviews, PC gaming, as well as general scientific writing and social effects on technology. industry. .
You can do it online at Threads @johnloeffler
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