We recently received an RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition from Nvidia and we have been testing it for the past week by using 11 PC games plus hybrid benchmarks. The Founders Edition will be available at $399 starting tomorrow. Just like, Nvidia launch the RTX 4070 as the GPU to be a great upgrade to the seven-year-old 10 series cards the same is being done here for the RTX 2060 family of cards. While it is true the DLSS 3 and Ada lovelace architecture are incredible, some will find 8GB of VRAM is a really hard pill to swallow.

Thankfully, this is not really an issue for most gamer’s and in reality a fault of bad modern PC ports. According to recent Steam Hardware Surveys, around 77% of users still play on 1080p and older cards so this market will always be huge for both Nvidia and AMD. The thing is – they have to compete with themselves and often we found that if you just look at raw power the 4060Ti is nominally faster than its older siblings when we remove DLSS comparisons.

Our first knock on the new 4060 family is the pricing feels oddly high, especially for 8GB. The RTX 4060 Ti is a welcome upgrade to older cards as it arrives with multiple new features, including DLSS 3, which brings an incredible performance uplift. For this reason alone, this new entry in the 40 series is extremely exciting. This will surely move the needle for most to upgrade if they play the games that support these features. The raw performance uplift is likely much larger in the 16GB version of this same card which is yet to release.

The RTX 4060 Ti comes with Nvidia’s newest RT and Tensor Cores that are more powerful than previous generation GPUs and support new features including Shader Execution Reordering (SER) and Nvidia DLSS 3 technology, all while using less power than the RTX 3060 Ti. The new NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPU Architecture also features a new SM design that runs at dramatically higher clock speeds and significantly increases the capacity of the L2 cache on the RTX 4060 Ti to a whopping 32MB versus the 4MB L2 cache that was available previously on the RTX 3060 Ti. Nvidia frequently mentioned this cache as a powerful tool to help the 8GB of VRAM run more efficiently and powerful.

The RTX 4060 Ti supports AV1 encoding which in and of itself is a good enough reason to upgrade from older generations of cards. 

The RTX 4060 Ti Feature set

The elephant in the room for most any will be being bound by the RTX 4060 Ti’s 8GB of VRAM capacity as modern games skyrocket in their usage. Nvidia cannot wave a wand to fix a bad PC port, but for $399 gamers on a budget may scoff at the lack of future proofing. We suggest waiting for the RTX 4060 Ti’s 16GB benchmarks to arrive if you are at all on the fence.

However, we can confidently say Nvidia has made a leap in games with DLSS 3 that is undeniably incredible and there is enough of an incremental upgrade for those on older generations to think twice. Now we have over 50 games announced with DLSS 3, including the upcoming Diablo IV.

Comparing generation-to-generation there is a giant leap thanks to TGP/power improvements. There is also no price category competition from AMD right at this moment but we know there are rumors of a card coming soon in this range. At the moment, FSR 2.0 is well behind DLSS 3 in performance so the value proposition in comparison to the rest of the rather expensive 40 series is obvious, but the RTX 4060 Ti may not offer the raw GPU power upgrade many want to see in benchmarks.

One key innovation that’s been added to the memory subsystem in Ada GPU’s is its larger L2 cache. This new memory subsystem is a dramatic improvement over the previous generation.

When compared to a 128-bit Ampere GPU, the Ada L2 cache architecture delivers a 16x increase in capacity. In addition, the L2 cache bandwidth in Ada GPUs has been significantly increased versus prior GPUs. This allows more data to be transferred between the cores and the L2 cache as quickly as possible.
Ada’s larger L2 cache results in significantly more L2 cache hits, while also reducing traffic across the memory bus.

This change, per Nvidia, resulted in the performance of the 32MB L2 cache reducing memory bus traffic from 40% to 60% over the performance of a 2MB L2 cache. This translates to massive increases in effective performance. An Ada GPU with 288 GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth is the equivalent of an Ampere GPU that needed 554 GB/Sec.

Couple this improvement with DLSS 3, which has the fastest adoption of any of Nvidia’s technologies to date and you will notice why we do encourage you to take a look at your options if you are on older hardware as this is fantastic upgrade, especially from a 20 series.

GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition Board

The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition graphics card incorporates many of the new design elements that are also found on NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4080, and RTX 4090 Founders Edition boards. The RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition board is crafted with premium materials and components including a die-cast aluminum body and dual axial fans. It looks compact and sleek in our PC case and is perfect for smaller cases.

Our Plan

Nvidia is in an interesting spot with the RTX 4060 Ti, it decided to release the 8GB model first so let’s see how well it performs.

For this review, we are planning to benchmark the RTX 4080, RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4070, RTX 3070, and RTX 3080 within our test build at 1440p and 1080p.

We think comparing the RTX 4060 Ti’s performance against current family and iconic cards from Nvidia’s previous RTX generation of GPUs may be worth it for Turing or Ampere users considering an upgrade to Ada Lovelace.

The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is based on the AD106 GPU and equipped with 4,352 CUDA Cores providing 22 FP32 Shader-TFLOPS of power for rendering traditional rasterized graphics, 136 Fourth Generation Tensor Cores offering 353 FP8 Tensor-TFLOPS (with Sparsity) for AI processing and DLSS, 34 Third Generation Ada RT Cores capable of 51 RT-TFLOPS for powering next generation raytraced graphics, 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and 32MB of L2 cache. Like all GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, the RTX 4060 Ti is packed with Ada innovations including Shader Execution Reordering (SER), the new RT core engines, and DLSS 3.

We want to test if it really can hold up with 8GB of VRAM to deliver a potential amazing value proposition compared to the RTX 3060.

Features & Specifications

The RTX 4060 Ti technological innovations include:

• New Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) – The new SM delivers up to 2x performance and power efficiency
• 4th Generation Tensor Cores and Optical Flow – Enable and accelerate transformative AI
  technologies, including the new frame rate multiplying Nvidia DLSS 3
• 3rd Generation RT Cores – Up to 2x ray tracing performance, delivering incredibly detailed
  virtual worlds like never before
• Shader Execution Reordering (SER) – SER improves ray tracing operations by 2x, boosting FPS up to 44% in Cyberpunk with RT: Overdrive Mode
• DLSS 3 – A revolutionary breakthrough in AI-powered graphics that massively boosts
  performance using AI to generate additional high-quality frames
• Nvidia Studio – Unmatched performance in 3D rendering, video editing, and live streaming
• AV1 Encoders – The 8th generation Nvidia Encoder (NVENC) with AV1 is 40% more efficient than H.264, enabling new possibilities for streamers, broadcasters, and video callers

Key Features from Nvidia

• Dedicated 3rd generation ray tracing cores (46)
• Dedicated 4th generation Tensor cores (184)
• Nvidia DLSS 3 support
• Game Ready and Nvidia Studio drivers
• Nvidia GeForce Experience
• Nvidia Broadcast
• Nvidia G-Sync
• Nvidia GPU Boost
• PCI Express Gen 4
• Microsoft DirectX 12 Ultimate support
• Support for Vulkan RT APIs, Vulkan 1.3, and OpenGL 4.6
• HDCP 2.3 support
• DisplayPort 1.4 support: up to 4K at 240Hz or 8K at 60Hz with DSC, HDR
• HDMI 2.1 support: up to 4K 240Hz, Gaming VRR, HDR

Specifications

Nvidia’s MSRP price for RTX 4060 Ti GPU is $399, a GPU made for 1080p.

Here is the RTX 4060 Ti in GPU-Z:

According to GPU-Z, the RTX 4060 Ti has the default GPU clock of 2310 MHz with a boost of 2525MHz.

Below is the advanced general information on the RTX 4070 FE as reported by the GPU-Z tool.

As you can see from the GPU-Z screenshots, you can even increase both power and temperature limits to some degree, and while there is little room for overclocking, there is some additional potential performance for gamers looking to get more from their builds. RTX 4060 Ti partner boards should be interesting to see based on their cooling methods and pricing.

A Closer Look at the RTX 4060 Ti Founder’s Edition

Packaging

The box cover highlights a sleek approach to the packaging. I am a huge fan of the presentation Nvidia has been providing for its FE line. It offers a very premium unboxing experience. The graphics card image for the recent RTX cards is iconic and that shape is also shown on the box.

Accessories

As we open the box, it folds out beautifully displaying the brand new RTX 4060 Ti FE. Beneath the card are the new standard 16 PIN (12VHPWR) PCIe connector and an installation guide with a QR code to visit Nvidia’s website for more guides and information if needed.

The Card

The RTX 4060 Ti FE is a small dual-fan graphics card with classic RTX aesthetics that are still refined and look great. There is no RGB on the RTX 4060 Ti FE.

The IO panel connectors are 3 DisplayPorts and 1 HDMI connection.

Inside the case

The RTX 4060 Ti looks subtle and classic inside a case. I would personally love to build an SFF PC using this card. It is the perfect size offering a powerful small gaming rig at a reasonable price compared to the sky-high prices we have seen these last few years. We like that it is small and discrete but some may not like the unlit logo

Next is our testing configuration, methodology, and more.

Our Benchmarking PC

We benchmark using FrameView on a recent install of Windows 11 Pro Edition 22H2, at 3440×1440 using an AMD Ryzen 7800x3d with stock clocks and 32GB of DDR5 G.Skill Trident Z 6000MHz memory on an Asrock X670E Pro RS motherboard. All games and benchmarks are the latest versions, and we use the latest GeForce 531.93 press drivers for our testing. The games tested, display driver, settings, and hardware are identical except for the GPUs we compare.

Let’s unbox and take a closer look at this graphics card.

Test Configuration

Benching Methodology

Test Configuration – Hardware

• AMD Ryzen 7800x3d (stock settings)
• Asrock X670E PRO RS motherboard (AMD AM5 chipset, v 1.07 BIOS)
• G.Skill Trident Z 32GB DDR5 (2×16GB, dual-channel at 6000 MHz XMP)
• RTX 4060 Ti 6GB, stock clocks; supplied by Nvidia
• RTX 4070 FE 12GB, stock clocks; supplied by Nvidia
• ASUS TUF GAMING GeForce RTX 4070 Ti OC Edition 12GB, stock clocks; supplied by Nvidia
• RTX 3080 FE 10GB, stock clocks
• RTX 3070 FE, stock clocks
• 1 x TeamGroup 1 TB NVMe M.2 SSD
• 2 x WD Blue 1TB SATA SSD
• Corsair RM850x, 850W 80PLUS Gold power supply unit
• ALIENWARE 34″ CURVED QD-OLED GAMING MONITOR – AW3423DWF

Test Configuration – Software

• NVIDIA GeForce 531.94 game-ready press drivers; ‘Prefer maximum performance’ (on a per-game profile basis); Shader Cache Size ‘Unlimited’ (globally); fixed refresh rate (globally).
• We enable Resizable BAR
• ‘V-Sync application controlled’ in the control panel; V-Sync off in-game.
• We note and specify the main in-game display, graphics, AA, and scaling settings in the performance summary charts.
• Windows 11 64-bit Pro edition, latest updates v22H2, High-performance power plan, HAGS & Game Mode are enabled, Game DVR & Game Bar features off, Control Flow Guard (CFG) off on a per-game basis, Hypervisor and Virtualization-based security are disabled.
• We do not install Asrock tools.
• Latest DirectX
• All games are patched to their latest versions at the time of publication.
• 3DMark suite, the latest version
• RivaTuner Statistics Server (RTSS), the latest version
• FrameView, the latest version
• Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU), the latest version; always uninstall drivers using DDU in safe mode, clean, and restart.
• ISLC (Purge Standby List) before each benchmark.

GeForce Driver Suite-related

• We use DCH Game Ready drivers.
• The display driver is installed.
• We install the latest version of PhysX.

Hybrid & Non-Synthetic Tests-related

• Single run per test.

Game Benchmarks-related

• We use the corresponding built-in or custom benchmark sequence.

Frametimes Capture

• We use FrameView for capturing frame times and analyzing the relevant performance numbers obtained from each recorded built-in or custom benchmark sequence.

Benchmark Suite:

PC Games

DX11 Games

• Total War: Warhammer III (DX11)

DX12 Games

• Chernoblyte (DX12)
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (DX12)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (DX12)
• F1 2022 (DX12)
• Far Cry 6 (DX12)
• Resident Evil 4 (DX12)
• Red Dead Redemption 2(DX12)
• Horizon Zero Dawn (DX12)
• Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition (DX12)
• Dirt 5 (DX 12)

Vulkan Games

• DOOM Eternal (VK)

Hybrid Tests (3DMark)

• DLSS Feature Test
• Fire Strike Extreme
• Fire Strike Ultra
• Time Spy
• Time Spy Extreme

Nvidia Control Panel settings

Here are the global Nvidia Control Panel settings:

Noise, Temperatures, and Power Consumption

Unfortunately, we did not have time to check out the overclocking potential, but temperatures were controlled and the RTX 4060 Ti runs very cool.

The RTX 4060 Ti is quiet, and its fans never spin up at idle, even under a heavy or full load to be irritating or noticeable. When gaming it spins up to full often under very heavy loads – like Metro Exodus with all features turned on. It is as silent as the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti we tested previously.

Nvidia Performance Graphs and information

The biggest selling point for the RTX 4060 Ti FE at $399 has to be DLSS 3. There is a lot going for keeping older generations of card until we see a massive raw performance uplift but we have it as long as you like DLSS as a whole.
This is the gigantic upgrade – while some purists may not like frame generation – the performance increase and quality retention is simply stunning. On our QD-OLED display, we could barely see any image quality differences but performance increased dramatically and beat older generation cards easily.

In our testing, the RTX 4060 Ti FE with DLSS 3 is almost 2.6 times faster than the RTX 2060 Super and it nearly doubles the performance of the RTX 3060 Ti while using less power.

Let’s head to the performance charts to compare the graphics performance of the RTX 4070 FE.

Gaming Performance Charts

Main Performance Gaming Summary Charts

Here are BTR’s summary charts of games, six hybrid, and three non-synthetic tests. We note and specify the main in-game display, graphics, AA, and scaling settings on the performance summary charts below. The benches were run at 2560×1440 and 1920×1080.

FireStrike Graphics Score:
3060: 29501
3070: 17807
4060 Ti: 32678
4070: 42120
Timespy Graphics Score – DX12 1440p:
3060: 8102
3070: 13432
4060 Ti: 13285
4070: 17881
4070Ti: 22467
Timespy Extreme Graphics Score
3060: 3102
4060 Ti: 6345
4070: 8531
Averaged Framerates & Relative GPU Performance

The RTX 4060 Ti is a clear improvement but at a significantly higher buy-in price for not much raw horsepower gain compared to the previous generation. In comparison to the rest of the 40 series lineup, the RTX 4070’s performance is unmatched for budget/value gamers but the RTX 4060 Ti sits in limbo while we wait for the 16GB version and its non-Ti counterpart.

Average Frames
The RTX 4060 Ti is going to be a 1440p capable card but with some tweaks as mentioned, but it mostly shines at 1080p. It is not really outclassing its older generations and loses outright to the RTX 3070. It is around 10% faster than the RTX 3060 Ti and about that much slower than the RTX 3070 in most cases.

Final Thoughts & Verdict

This has been an enjoyable exploration evaluating the new RTX 4060 Ti. Overall, it is the best 40 series value for your money currently available but only if you are completely new to PC gaming and want to build a great 1080p machine right now. Otherwise, we suggest waiting.

Still, we have to remember the RTX 3060 Ti was great for 1440p gaming but the VRAM issues of modern games are likely not going away so it is a major concern that have just 8GB even with the improved L2 cache and DLSS 3 availability.

Nvidia’s technology is incredibly exciting but in 4-5 years this card may not hold up to more modern demands if you expect more than it what it was designed for in games that do not support its most impressive features. More VRAM is just around the corner with the 16GB model so you have to discuss whether that price increase is worth the wait.

Games like RE 4 and MW2 were always either too close for comfort or much beyond the VRAM limit at max graphics and we had to lower some settings to get it to run a simple benchmark. This may have been a driver issue but we are unsure at the moment.

Thankfully, RTX 4060 Ti is compact and amazingly efficient compared to the RTX 30 series and its 40 series brothers. The idle fan stop is huge for us, and support for AV1 encoding is stellar for a lot of streamers at this price.

Not everyone cares about DLSS and its effect on an image. For this, the RTX 4060 Ti performed above the RTX 3060 Ti in most cases but barely at around 10% faster at 1080p. It was also well above the RTX 2060 but loses in almost every game to the RTX 3070 at 1440p.

However, the RTX 4060 Ti user base will see enough significant performance gains on 20 and 10 series cards to be able to make this a worthwhile consideration.

The gap widened significantly with frame generation/DLSS 3 – So much so that this is a no-brainer if titles with that technology available are what you mostly play.

However, this is not a “wow” with the raster performance jump over the previous generation. Instead, the RTX 4060 Ti is more efficient, more compact, and has much better features especially if you are still on a 10-series card. This is a worthy point in time with a card that is finally available at a reasonable price as a poster child for the generational leaps Nvidia is making with its technology and DLSS 3.

For a hundred dollars more you could buy an RTX 4060 Ti 16GB when it releases or a current AMD offering – for now but the rumor mill is swirling with a pending release. This would have been a slam dunk if there was no 8gb version and instead we had a $300-400 RTX 4060 Ti at launch. The lineup of cards would have been perfect and much more appealing to nearly every gamer.

We do implore you to look at our upcoming DLSS 3 comparison of the current generation. This technology is finally allowing Nvidia to realize the dream that has been ray tracing. We can now maintain great performance while having the full suite of RTX features on an mid-level card. Safe to say, we like the RTX 4060 Ti for multi-generational upgrades but we suggest waiting for its own competition and what AMD may offer in this price range. The RTX 4060 Ti 16gb should be very nice and the normal RTX 4060 in July should be interesting to compare!

–Happy gaming!