There is a major issue with Nvidia’s latest GPU, that simply doesn’t meet up to the expectations Nvidia has created for its product category, or for the Nvidia brand in general.
That GPU is the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. This, by no means, is supposed to be the most powerful GPU in the market now. However, this particular category under Nvidia’s RTX line is supposed to offer a particular value, given the pricing and features.
First things first, the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti delivers on DLSS 3. At $ 400, it is currently the cheapest way to get a GPU that has DLSS 3.
However, as pointed out by Digital Trends, it has a huge bottleneck when it comes to VRAM. At only 8 GB, it does not meet the minimum for many AAA games released today.
Nvidia tried to make arguments that the card’s higher L2 cache should compensate for the lower VRAM. We don’t need to get into the technical details here; after several reviews from multiple outlets, we know that that just isn’t true for most games.
Now, we need to get into some more context, for the sake of readers who aren’t familiar with GPUs. Nvidia releases a range of GPUs called the GeForce RTX line semi-annually, with this generation named the 4060, 4070, 4080, and 4090. Each of these GPUS grows in price and computational power with each higher number.
The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, lies between the GeForce RTX 4060 and GeForce RTX 4070. It is the second cheapest option, which means it is expected to get some of the most sales within the same batch of GPUs.
Consumers should expect some bare minimums with new GPUs. One of the more obvious ones is that it should perform better than the cards that came before it, but that’s not the case with the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. As you can see in this extensive Eurogamer/Digital Foundry test and review, most of the time the testers found older cards that perform better than this one.
Again, we don’t need to get into the technical details to understand that the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is just not good value. If you’re in the market for a new GPU yourself, you would be better served shopping for Nvidia’s other new GPUs, or maybe buying cards from competitors like AMD, and even Intel.
A major sticking point with this card is that 8 GB VRAM. Nvidia says they will be selling a 16 GB variant of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti which should solve this card’s problems. However, at that price, consumers may be better off scaling up even higher to the GeForce RTX 4070, or possibly better, buying a competitor’s graphics card.
Whatever options you choose, unfortunately, literally anything is better than buying this card itself. You are in most cases even better off keeping an obsolete card than updating to the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, when it won’t be worth the cost of the update.
If you’d like a video explanation of this situation, including the technical details, we will share the video version of Digital Foundry’s review below.
