- I, for one,
think we should be grateful to Nvidia
for the 4660 Ti.
I mean, sure,
we've waited over a year for a card
that's only 10% faster in rasterized games,
and sure,
they didn't upgrade the 8GBs of VRAM from last gen,
but at least they didn't downgrade it
like they did with the memory bus.
And besides,
it's just $100 more
if you want the other 8GBs.
That seems totally reasonable
when Nvidia's cost
is somewhere between $20 and $35.
At least you won't have to wait months
for the drivers to get good.
Okay, that last one wasn't sarcasm, though.
There is legitimately
a fair bit to like
about the RTX 4060 Ti.
It supports all of Nvidia's
latest ray tracing and AI upscaling
bells and whistles.
It's much more power efficient
than the card that it replaces,
and it supports AV1 encoding,
which is a huge deal
if you stream to YouTube.
But you also shouldn't pull the trigger
without getting the full story here.
There's been a lot of talk lately
about how 8GBs of VRAM
just isn't enough anymore,
and I've got some bad news.
It's not FHD at max settings,
but only 1080p resolution.
"The Last of Us Remake"
gobbles up a whopping 8.9GBs of video memory,
meaning that with an 8GB card,
some of that is gonna spill out
into your system memory
which significantly harms performance.
Or even worse,
if you have an older system,
and not even that old,
just one that doesn't support resizable bar,
there is no overflow.
You simply will need to turn down
your graphical settings.
And this isn't an isolated problem.
We didn't test "Jedi Survivor"
for our sweep today,
but that's another recent game
that is reportedly using up to 10GBs of VRAM
at 1080p epic settings.
Yikes.
"But Linus," you might say,
"I don't need epic or ultra settings.
They don't even look that much better."
And you are right.
We've even got an entire video
about why it's kind of pointless
to turn the slider all the way to the max.
But here's the thing.
Even if trying to fully futureproof is foolish,
I'm not talking about
some hypothetical future need here.
If your card isn't equipped for ultra today,
how do you think it's gonna fare
in two or three years
when ultra is the new medium?
Not good.
You know what it is good, though?
Our new Sticklocks joystick covers.
Who needs your sticks getting knocked around
when your console or your controller
is in your bag?
Check 'em out @lttstore.com.
With that out of the way,
if we look purely at today's performance
compared to the rest of Nvidia's lineup,
the 4060 Ti looks like a pretty decent buy.
It costs 40% less than the RTX 4070,
while being only about 20% slower,
except in "The Last of Us,"
probably because of that VRAM issue.
With that said,
that might be more to do
with how bad the 4070 is.
If we add some inconvenient truths
to our numbers here,
the picture gets a little less rosy.
AMD has made some very aggressive price cuts
to their last gen,
and the 6700 XT performs nearly as well,
sometimes even beating the 4060 Ti,
all while costing about $50 less,
and while including 12GBs of VRAM
without $100 upcharge.
So if all you care about
is pure rasterized performance per dollar,
you should probably
be making the switch to Team Red.
But with that being said,
there is an efficiency story here
that we're gonna get into later.
First, I wanna talk about
higher resolution gaming.
Because even if Nvidia
isn't talking about it,
because only ray tracing exists for them now,
this is a very solid 1440P
rasterized gaming card.
Most games had 1% lows
that were either close to
or above 60 FPS at ultra settings
with ray racing and DLSS off.
Meaning that on a 60 hertz monitor,
you can expect a consistently smooth
gaming experience.
Want even more frames?
Hey, just enable DLSS,
or turn down your settings
to a more modest preset,
and you're off to the races.
1440P is just such a great middle ground.
It offers a much sharper image
compared to 1080p,
assuming the same screen size,
but without the same major performance hit
that comes with 4K.
And it also comes with this message
from our sponsor.
Pulseway.
Managing IT systems can be a pain,
but with Pulseway's remote monitoring
and management software,
it's a breeze.
You get real-time system monitoring,
instant alerts,
and audio remediation,
all from one platform
at any time using any device.
Start your free trial today
with the link down below.
Speaking of 4K,
you can, but shouldn't.
Some of our results were okay.
And if you've got a nice 4K TV nearby,
or a secondary 4K monitor,
depending on the game and settings,
you could expect anywhere as high
as 68 FPS average in "Forza Horizon 5,"
with even ray tracing staying playable,
to as low as 11 FPS
in cranked out "Cyberpunk."
Games, though,
who needs them, right?
Blender loves Nvidia,
and if we only look
at this productivity benchmark,
the 4060 Ti slots in
exactly where you'd expect,
but if we take a close-lier look
at, say, DaVinci Resolve
with AV1, H.264 and H.265,
well now we're losing
to not only several AMD cards,
but sometimes Intel's Arc A770 and,
this one hurts the most,
even the 3060 Ti.
And the worst part,
is this isn't isolated.
Digging into our SPECviewperf benchmarks,
the 6700 XT and the 3060 Ti
often come out ahead,
or basically on par,
with Nvidia's new hotness.
But why?
Okay, while I often say
that the specs for a GPU don't matter,
what matters is the performance,
sometimes the performance makes no sense
and we've gotta dig into the specs
to find out why.
The 4060 Ti is based on an AD106 Die
that boosts up to 2.5 gigahertz
with 4352 CUDA cores,
136 4th gen tensor cores,
and 34 3rd gen ray tracing cores.
All of which sounds sufficiently next gen.
What doesn't,
is that the 8GBs of VRAM,
that we've talked about so much already,
is on a 128-bit bus.
Compared to the 3060 Ti,
which had double that,
that is a major cost cutting measure
that seems to have significantly
harmed the 4060 Ti
in memory intensive applications.
For context, guys,
back in the 600 series days,
you had to go all the way down to the 650 Ti,
which cost $150,
to find such a budget-conscious memory interface.
But, to Nvidia's credit,
cheap bastards that they are,
you can't ignore how well it kept up
the majority of the time.
And according to Nvidia,
this is largely thanks
to the 4060 Ti's massively upgraded cache.
They claim,
and our numbers do bear this out,
that it improves performance,
reduces latency,
and increases power efficiency.
So yeah, a narrow bus
does limit data transfer speeds to VRAM,
and in a perfect world,
we wouldn't have to give that up,
but the more we can store in the cache
instead of VRAM,
the better.
Now, I'm not a GPU architect,
so I can't say this for certain,
but it seems like this trade-off
might be contributing to better performance
in hybrid applications,
like gaming
while also taking advantage of the 4060 Ti's
ray tracing cores and its AI engine.
I mean, looking at performance
in games with ray tracing,
it's clear that this isn't some
feature that's tacked on now.
It's actually usable.
And unless you have $600 to blow on a 4070,
this is the best next next-gen gaming experience
on the block.
And the same goes
for when we turn on DLSS AI upscaling,
which, in general,
turns playable into smooth
and smooth into smooth-lier.
It isn't perfect.
There are still some visual anomalies
from time to time,
and we did find outliers
where performance did not improve.
For example, using DLSS 3 in "Returnal"
resulted in a degraded experience,
whether we had frame generation enabled or not.
Super bizarre.
But it has improved to the point
where some games
not only look the same and perform better,
but will even look better with DLSS.
It's definitely a nice-to-have.
And what makes it even better,
is that the 4060 Ti
draws significantly less power
than its predecessor,
sometimes staying within 140 watts,
depending on the game or workload.
That is really impressive,
and could even be the difference
between needing to upgrade your power supply
or not needing to upgrade your power supply.
This part's anecdotal,
we're still waiting on our sound chamber,
but in terms of acoustics while gaming,
it's no louder than really any other card,
which is good, I guess,
considering that it only reaches
66 degrees on average
during our "F1 22" loop
with a max temp of 79 on the hotspot.
We're gonna have way more concrete testing
on GPU noise and thermals down the line,
so make sure you stay tuned
for more Labs updates.
So, then.
At $400,
is it a good product at a good price?
Let me put it this way.
When Nvidia CEO, Jensen,
told all of his Pascal gamer friends
that it's safe to upgrade now,
it wasn't.
3060s and 3060 Ti's might as well
have been made of unobtainium,
but now, honestly,
yeah, I agree.
The only question,
is whether it's safe to upgrade to Nvidia.
The 40 series is already a mixed bag,
and now the 4060 family
looks like it's gonna be similarly
all over the map.
At $300, the non-Ti version could make sense,
but then,
if these specs are anything to go by,
you're gonna be leaving
a lot of performance on the table.
Then at $400, we've got good performance,
but do you really wanna hamstring yourself
with only 8GBs of RAM?
And then $500, I mean, gee,
that's an awful lot of money
to spend on an entry-class
cheapo 128-bit GPU
that's masquerading
as a performance tier card.
It seems like Nvidia
has just completely decoupled
their manufacturing cost
from their retail price here.
Look no further than the $100 upcharge
for 20 bucks of memory.
So, if I was a cynic,
and I am,
I would say that the pricing structure here
is just a way of manufacturing FOMO
so that you'll upsell yourself
to spend more than maybe you should.
Thankfully, though,
we do still have some competition in the space.
If power consumption,
ray tracing and DLSS
aren't major concerns for you,
the 6700 XT from AMD
is a compelling option,
with more rumored to be coming.
And, this one was a big shocker,
ARC actually put up
a pretty decent fight today,
especially if you consider the $350 price.
And especially-er if you consider our sponsor.
Gorgias.
Gorgias Help Desk
is a customer support platform
that aims to revolutionize the way
that businesses interact with their customers.
Their single, unified dashboard
makes staying organized simpler than ever.
We've even utilized Gorgias
on lttstore.com
to help with our customer support,
which is a big part
of why it's a lot better lately.
A big part of that decision
was how easy it is
to integrate Gorgias with platforms
like Shopify and Facebook.
As a business grows,
so does their need
for efficient and effective customer support.
And Gorgias can come in clutch
with their automated systems,
as well as their insight
and analytics tools.
And since everything is centralized,
you can respond to customer inquiries
via email, chat,
and social media messages
without drowning in a sea of Chrome tabs.
Our switch to Gorgias Help Desk
was simple, pain-free,
and it fit our customer support needs.
It's certainly been easier
to provide customers with fast
and personalized support.
So see if they can help you, too,
by checking out Gorgias at the link down below.
If you guys liked this video,
make sure to check out our 4090 coverage.
It's super expensive,
but it's a really impressive card.