NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Review Ft. MSI, GALAX & PNY – $249 Would’ve Made This GPU Perfect

Conclusion - Is This Finally The GPU Mainstream Gamers Hoped For?

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 is finally here and it's the most affordable graphics card and it is the most affordable 60-series class since the past two generations. The graphics card even has a lower price than its predecessor, the RTX 3060, but will that be enough to recommend it to gamers who have been waiting to get something?

If you look at the base specifications, the RTX 4060 is a lot like the successor to the GeForce RTX 3050. It features the AD107 GPU which was the same tier of chip used by the 3050 (GA107), it is packed with a 128-bit and 8 GB memory bus but the main changes come with Ada Lovelace that enables two things, higher efficiency, & faster performance with added features.

In our 20+ games that we benchmarked the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 through, the card came out ahead of the RTX 3060 across all titles while even managing to close in on the RTX 3060 Ti. The RTX 4060 is firstly a 1080p card and 1440p can be achieved by reducing image quality and relying on DLSS 2/3. Coupled with NVIDIA Reflex and new G-Sync 1000 Hz technology, eSports gaming on an RTX 40 series card is going to be a superb experience and that's a large market for this card.

Plus, content creators get the power of AV1 encoding which allows for better-streaming quality & performance compared to NVENC and H.265/264 standards. But it doesn't stop there, the tensor cores on the GeForce RTX 4060 make it a very disruptive solution priced at $300 US and offering bleeding-edge AI performance in generative AI workloads such as stable diffusion.

As for the feature set, Ada's faster DLSS and Ray Tracing capabilities do make for a very enticing offer. With DLSS 3, the GeForce RTX 4060 outperforms a 3080 and as I mentioned earlier, the RT-heavy titles bring the card close to the RTX 3060 Ti. On average, you will notice a 20% boost in the standard rasterized titles, a 25% boost in RT heavy titles, and a 50-70% boost with DLSS 3 enabled over the RTX 3060. At the same time, you will see a power draw of around 100W which is simply mind-blowing.

The top-class efficiency and lower power consumption mean that you also don't have to worry about higher temperatures. All the cards I tested ran super cool with most designs even ending below the 60C mark.

Now coming to the main issue of the card, the pricing. You see while the $299 US is a great thing since the card doesn't cost more than its predecessor, the current pricing trend isn't in favor of the RTX 4060. The RTX 3060 Ti is already discounted down to $329.99 US, a $30 US difference but does offer slightly better performance too. The RX 6700 XT is also down to $319.99 US which is an even better deal if the added features of Ada don't interest you.  Even the RX 7600 is currently going for $249 US which further puts pressure on the RTX 4060. If you are really looking for an RTX 4060, then one that sticks to the MSRP is the best to go for since the overclocked and premium variants don't offer that much of an incentive to buy them.

Furthermore, the Intel Arc A770 16 GB graphics cards now look like a much better deal than ever with performance that compares to the RTX 4060 Ti and coming close to the $300-$330 US range.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 is decent, it's better than the 4060 Ti but it could've been even better if the pricing was $249 US. For gamers who haven't upgraded, if you want the best GPU feature set available today on the Ada Lovelace chips, then the RTX 4060 is worth its mainstream pricing and there are a lot of MSRP options to select from. If those features don't interest you, then you are better off sticking to the RTX 3060 or RX 6600/6700 series until the cards get further discounts after launch.

You can find additional information about our hardware review process and ethics policy here.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.