Graphics card
A good graphics card with the wrong name, ponders Chris Szewczyk.
Nvidia’s RTX 40-series is almost complete. Apart from a probable RTX 4050 and potential RTX 4090 Ti, this GeForce RTX 4060 is shaping up to be one of the final RTX 40-series offerings. As the de facto mass-market Ada Lovelace GPU, it’s an important piece of the larger PC gaming puzzle. Should the RTX 4060 be a good performer, it has the potential to drive a wave of upgrades – or, conversely, deter them if it is weak.
Nvidia is positioning the RTX 4060 as a capable 1080p card with excellent power efficiency and support for Nvidia’s key technologies, including DLSS 3 with Frame Generation. AMD’s Radeon RX 7600 and Intel’s Arc A750 are the RTX 4060’s logical competitors, but they’re not without their flaws. Previous-generation cards remain perfectly viable, too. GPUs such as the AMD RX 6700 XT and Nvidia’s own RTX 3060 Ti are still capable gaming cards, and they’re available at prices that justifiably keep them in the conversation.
The RTX 4060’s compact size, very low idle and load power consumption, AI features and eighth-gen NVENC with AV1 support will surely appeal to users looking for a video card as much as a graphics card. DisplayPort 2.1 support is missing, although in reality 4K and 8K performance is really beyond it.
Perhaps the biggest question, controversy or triviality, depending on how you look at it, is the inclusion of 8GB of VRAM. As is the case with the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB or the RX 7600 8GB, there’s no doubt that 8GB will eventually become a bottleneck.
Generation game
The RTX 4060 is built around the AD107 GPU. It’s made with a custom TSMC 4N process, which has been tweaked for Nvidia GPUs. The RTX 4060 supports third-generation RT cores with shader execution reordering support, fourth-generation Tensor cores, the eighth-gen NVENC encoder with support for AV1, and, of course, DLSS 3 with Frame Generation capabilities when supported. The card connects to the system via a PCIe 4.0 x8 interface. Again, that’s a step back from th
