Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Review: Truly Mainstream at $299

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 drops entry price to $299 for Ada Lovelace architecture and RTX 40-series GPUs. It sits between the previous RTX 3060 and RTX 3050 in pricing, showing a potentially great value proposition, although there are always compromises to make as you move down the price-performance ladder. For those on a tight budget, he could be one of the best graphics cards if the performance is good enough.

There are some legitimate complaints about the AD107 GPU at the heart of this card being limited to a 128-bit memory interface, but the lower price point compared to the RTX 4060 Ti alleviates some of that burden. Still, the previous generation of his RTX 3060 had him with a 192-bit interface and 12 GB of memory, so this represents a clear setback in that area. It’s an important topic, so I’ll go into more detail on the next page.

We will be updating the GPU benchmark hierarchy later today as the embargo has ended. The conclusion is not so surprising. For most games, his new RTX 4060 easily outperforms his RTX 3060 from the previous generation. largely Catch the RTX 3060 Ti. Considering DLSS 3’s frame generation and dramatically improved efficiency, it makes sense to buy the RTX 4060 over the previous generation card. You won’t get new levels of performance, but you’ll get all of his latest Nvidia features and upgrades.

There are two main competitors with AMD.latest generation Radeon RX 7600 cuts Nvidia prices by up to $50 Now, in previous generations RX 6700 XT Pricing Starting at $309The price is basically on par with the RTX 4060 but with 50% more memory and potentially better overall performance. Depending on price and availability, the RTX 3060 Ti (and other 30-series GPUs) could also be an interesting option, but unless you’re willing to buy a used card, such a card won’t last long. I can’t wait.

Let’s take a look at the specs revealed over a month ago with the RTX 4060 Ti announcement. Nvidia is currently allowing reviews of cards with a MSRP of $299, but the more expensive models are barred until tomorrow. I just received the Asus RTX 4060 Dual OC model from Nvidia. It comes with a modest factory overclock, but is still priced at $299.

Scrolling to the right, the table above lists 12 GPUs representing the most useful comparisons for the RTX 4060, but the first column is the most relevant. The new GeForce RTX 4060 will use Nvidia’s AD107 GPU, the same chip that powers the RTX 4060 and 4050 laptop GPUs.

The RTX 4060 uses the entire AD107 chip and features 24 streaming multiprocessors (SMs) with 128 CUDA cores each. This brings the total number of shaders to 3,072. Any astute mathematician will note that this is less than his 3,584 shaders on his RTX 3060 of the previous generation. However, like the rest of the RTX 40 series lineup, the clock speeds are significantly higher at 2460 MHz compared to 1777 MHz on the 3060. As a result, peak compute performance is ultimately 19% higher.

Memory bandwidth is lower in raw throughput at 272 GB/s compared to 360 GB/s on the RTX 3060. However, the L2 cache has been inflated from 3MB on the 3060 to 24MB on the 4060, which Nvidia said has increased the effective bandwidth by 67% to 453 GB/s. The memory subsystem and its implications are detailed on the following pages.

One thing to note is that the RTX 4060 features an x8 PCIe interface, while the RTX 4060 Ti and newer use x16 link widths. It’s similar to the RX 7600 and his RTX 3050 from the previous generation, and cuts out additional PCIe lanes to keep the die size small. This isn’t much of an issue on most modern PCs, but if you plan to upgrade an older PC that only supports PCIe 3.0 to his RTX 4060, you’ll see a slight drop in performance compared to what the benchmarks show. may decline.