Wow Nvidia, you know, in a way I'm actually impressed with your sheer lack of concern for any of your mainstream customers. It's kind of an achievement, like you're in a race with Wizards of the Coast to see who can tick off their fan base the fastest, and you're out to prove you'll do anything to win.
I mean, Nvidia has practically admitted they'd rather rely on software tricks than give us faster hardware, and the 40 series is not just overpriced, it's more like hate priced. And the thing is, guys, we know that getting outraged is not going to do anything, and you know it's not going to do anything. The 4060 TI was panned by critics and the community alike and still cost $400 somehow. But if you want us to get mad, then okay, let's get mad because the RTX 4060 is yet another nail in the world's most overpriced coffin.
Nvidia is practically admitted they'd rather rely on software tricks than give us faster hardware
So what are we losing when we downgrade to a feebler metal? Well, for starters, 29 of our Cuda cores. For the main course, 33 fewer Ray tracing and tensor cores. And for dessert, a sweet $100 price cut that makes it, am I reading this correctly, less expensive than the last-gen card it replaces. But it's not all roses. Those core counts aren't just lower than the 4060 TI, they're lower than the last-gen 3060. Also lower than last-gen is the memory bus width, still at a piddly 128 bits. Oh, and don't forget they halved the number of PCIe lanes, which could cause a bottleneck for those still on PCIe gen 3 platforms.
But look, sayeth Nvidia, the clock speeds are up and there was a big bump to L2 cache to make up for the dire lack of memory bandwidth. Spoiler alert: it doesn't. To prove it, we put the 4060 and its competition through a brutal series of tests. 1100 total tests. That's right, the lab is in full swing, baby. We've included a bunch of cards that are still topping the Steam Hardware charts, the best of AMD's bang for the buck lineup, and an Intel Arc A750 for good measure.
And as you've probably already figured out from the specs, this is not a 4K card. So let's get these results out of the way quick. The 4060 only touched 60 average FPS in F1 and was anywhere from meh to barely playable in our other titles. You could have a decent experience in older games or with settings dialed back to medium or low, but if you want to play on high, you'll have to resort to techniques some consider to be unnatural.
Nvidia made it very clear with the 4060 TI that they were not trying to make a card that is significantly more capable than its predecessor, and with the 4060, Nvidia has extended their not-trying streak. In Cyberpunk 2077, the 4060 fails to outpace the 360 TI, which is like the one card you'd hope that this thing at least ties with, right? To add insult to injury, it even falls behind the now $30 to $50 cheaper RX 7600 from Team Red.
Then we see the same story in F122, where the 4060 sits just 10 percent ahead of its last-gen direct counterpart, the 3060. The real star of the show, then again, is the last-gen 6700 XT, which cranks out 42 percent more frames than the 4060 and, at the time of writing, can be purchased for just $10 more.
In The Last of Us Part One, the 4060 at least beats its direct Team Red competitor, RX 6700, but again fails to overcome the 360 TI. And the more tests we ran, the more true our observations became. This thing is so bad that if I didn't know any better, I'd say Nvidia didn't even bother to benchmark to price this thing accordingly.
To be clear, 8 gigabytes is fine for most things today, but that's unlikely to stay true forever. Unlike the pricing on water bottles at lttstore.com, they're the same price no matter what size you like, and mystery bottles are $10 off if you don't care about the color.
But wait, maybe there's a justification for all of this, a master plan. I mean, we're five years into Nvidia's Graphics reinvented Ray Trace future. Can a cheaper 60 series card give mainstream gamers a taste of that technology? As it turns out, cutting so many RT cores negates any generational gain over the 3060 TI, even if there is an improvement over the 3060. At least it still beats any of the AMD cards in its price bracket. But the frame rate hit from turning on Ray tracing, even at 1080p, just might not be worth the bump in visual fidelity for many gamers.
Of course, Nvidia does also have DLSS and FrameGen, and we do have to give credit where it's due here. When set to the Quality preset in most games, DLSS, Nvidia's AI upscaling technique, is near indistinguishable from standard rendering. If you know where to look, you can find visual anomalies, but it's gotten good enough over the last few years that you pretty much need to be looking for them. And the performance gains are very substantial. This is where Nvidia wants to steer the discussion, and for good reason.
Using DLSS at 1440p, we are seeing excellent gains in performance with the 4060 finally convincingly pulling ahead of last generation thanks to one of DLSS's latest tricks, FrameGen. FrameGen smooths animations by creating new frames in between the natively rendered ones. Though it should be noted that FrameGen comes with downsides like higher latency and also just not being magic. For example, with FrameGen, 4K gaming is possible on these cards, but we know from our tests that if you have less than 30 native FPS, it's really not the best playing experience.
Moving on to productivity, a traditional strong point for Nvidia, Blender sees the 4060 look fairly capable for a mainstream card. And the same goes for SpecViewPerf, where it's clear that the 128-bit memory bus is a real problem. Though it's worth noting this benchmark is getting a little long in the tooth. We are also working on getting some results from DaVinci Resolve, but at the time of review, driver issues stood in our way.
Whether gaming or running full boring applications like the rest of the 40 series, the 4060 sips power. F122 brings it all the way up to its rated power, but that's just 115 Watts, a significant drop from its Ti Cloud brother and even less than AMD's 7600. In fact, it's less than a 3050. If the price of power is a concern where you live, then the 4060 actually could offer a decent value. This is probably where the card shines its brightest. And thanks to sipping power, the thermals on these Asus Dual cards we've got for testing are also great, with temps never exceeding 73 degrees on the hot spot.
But we gave this wet fart of a GPU a full review treatment anyway, in hopes that sometime in the future it'll come down in price and make sense to buy. That's just the best we can do, which we know is kind of lame. We said we're gonna get mad today, but we're just out of gas at this point. And I feel like a lot of you must be in the same boat. I mean, at a certain point, Nvidia is going to drive their customers past anger all the way to apathy. And there's one piece of advice that we can give Nvidia: just don't let that happen. You know, at least if someone's angry at me, I still know they care. They're invested in the relationship, they're holding on, hoping it's gonna get better. If they stop giving a crap, that's when I'll know that the end is coming.