According to a tweet by a resident GPU leaker, Mr. 7 copies, The GeForce RTX 4060 (AD106) will reportedly deliver a TimeSpy Extreme score of 7,000 points.To be precise, the GeForce RTX 4060’s performance is RTX3060Ti When RTX3070Kopite7kimi also pointed out that Nvidia’s AD106 and more budget-friendly AD107 dies only have 8 PCIe lanes at their disposal instead of 16.
Nvidia’s RTX 40 Series (Ada Lovelace) GPUs. The AD106 could power his next-gen RTX 4060 and possibly the RTX 4050 Ti (if Nvidia makes it this time).
Kopite7kimi said the new score isn’t as strong, but we’re not. For reference, the current average TimeSpy Extreme graphics score for the RTX 3060 is around 4,500 to 4,800 points. So if Kopite7kimi’s data is accurate and his TimeSpy Extreme score for the RTX 4060 AD106 GPU is around 7,000, the RTX 4060 is effectively 50% faster than his RTX 3060.
The AD106 die, or rather the RTX 4060, could be on par with cards like the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, which isn’t the wrong place. According to TimeSpy Extreme alone, the RTX 4060 looks like a better upgrade than the RTX 3060. But that’s the problem. All we have is purported TimeSpy Extreme scores on GPUs that haven’t been published yet. So, as always, take this data with a grain of salt. However, if history repeats itself, we can say that the RTX 4060 performance estimates look very accurate.
When the RTX 3060 was released, it generally outperformed the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 by a few percentage points. The RTX 4060 does the same thing here, being significantly faster than the RTX 3060 but performing similarly to the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070.
PCIe lane limit
Arguably the most exciting part of the tweet is the claim that the AD106 and AD107 have changed to 8 PCIe lanes instead of the traditional 16 lanes. AMD does the same with his entry-level Radeon RX 5000 and mid-range RX 6000 series product stacks. It looks like Nvidia will also follow suit with his GeForce RTX 40 series.
Given that Nvidia has decided to use PCIe 4.0 instead of PCIe 5.0, I don’t think it will be a problem on their latest platforms. For example, for the RTX 4050 and RTX 4060, a PCIe 4.0 x8 configuration is fine and should provide enough bandwidth for PCIe-intensive applications. After all, PCIe 4.0 x8 has the same bandwidth as PCIe 3.0 x16, and the last GPU to do PCIe 3.0, the RTX 2080 Ti, worked fine with the PCIe 3.0 x16 interface.
The only potential problem with PCIe 4.0 x8 is that older systems are limited to PCIe 3.0 speeds. Then force the PCIe 4.0 x8 GPU to fallback to PCIe 3.0 x8. This is much slower than PCIe 3.0 x16 and PCIe 4.0 x8. As a result, we may see some FPS drops due to PCIe bottlenecks, but we won’t be sure until we get our hands on Nvidia’s RTX 4050 and RTX 4060.
