GeForce RTX 4060 review: Not thrilling, but a super-efficient $299 workhorse

Nvidia's GeForce 1060, 2060, and 3060 graphics cards are some of the most widely used GPUs in all of PC gaming. Four of Steam's top five GPUs are 60-series cards, and the only one that isn't is an even lower-end GTX 1650. All of this is to say that, despite all the fanfare for high-end products like the RTX 4090, the new GeForce RTX 4060 is Nvidia's most important Ada Lovelace-based GPU. History suggests that it will become a baseline for game developers to aim for and the go-to recommendation for most entry-level-to-mainstream PC gaming builds. The RTX 4060, which launches this week starting at $299, is mostly up to the task. It's faster and considerably more power efficient than the 3060 it replaces, and it doesn't come with the same generation-over-generation price hike as the higher-end Lovelace GPUs. It's also a solid value compared to the 4060 Ti, typically delivering between 80 and 90 percent of the 4060 Ti's performance for 75 percent of the money. That doesn't mean there aren't small things to gripe about. Stepping down from the 3060's 12GB of memory to a stingier 8GB doesn't feel great, especially when poorly optimized PC ports seem to want as much video memory as they can get. It's only a modest speed upgrade over the RTX 3060. And DLSS Frame Generation, the big new 4000-series feature that Nvidia plays up in all of its announcements, is less impressive on midrange cards than it is on high-end ones.

The RTX 4060

The RTX 4060 Ti was an outlier compared to the 3060 Ti, shipping with fewer of Nvidia's CUDA cores and half the memory bandwidth and leaning on boosted clock speeds, additional L2 cache, and other architectural upgrades to close the gap. The result was a card that didn't always feel like much of an upgrade, especially at higher resolutions. The RTX 4060 looks a lot like the 4060 Ti did, narrowing the memory interface a bit compared to the RTX 3060 (from 192-bit to 128-bit) and dropping the number of CUDA cores but adding extra L2 cache and boosting clocks. The 4060 uses Nvidia's AD107 GPU die, the fifth-largest Ada Lovelace die after the AD102 (4090), AD103 (4080), AD104 (4070 series), and AD106 (4060 Ti). There are fewer CUDA cores and less L2 cache here (24MB for the 4060, compared to 32MB for the 4060 Ti), and the card uses eight lanes of PCI Express 4.0 rather than the typical 16. This shouldn't be limiting at all for PCIe 4.0-based systems, but you could see marginal performance impacts if you install the card in an older PCIe 3.0-based system. Less hardware running at lower speeds also means lower power usage, and the 4060's maximum power usage is just 115 W, compared to 160 W for the 4060 Ti, 170 W for the old 3060, and 165 W for AMD's Radeon RX 7600—the 4060's closest competitor in AMD's 7000-series lineup. Like the other 4000-series cards, the 4060 adds support for Nvidia's DLSS 3 upscaling and frame rate-boosting technologies, plus hardware-accelerated encoding support for the AV1 video codec. As far as we can tell, Nvidia isn't making a Founders Edition version of the 4060, leaving the job to its card partners. Our review model is an RTX 4060 8GB Verto provided by PNY, and it's the kind of no-frills card you'd expect to get for $299. It's a reasonably sized card that should fit well in any micro ATX case and most mini ITX cases, its two-fan cooler keeps the GPU running cool and quiet, and it gets all its power from a single 8-pin connector, so you don't need to worry about a bulky 12VHPWR adapter (or finding a new ATX 3.0 power supply). It doesn't have LEDs or a particularly flashy design, but it gets the job done. As with PNY's version of the 4060 Ti, even this relatively modest cooler design hangs a few inches past the end of the actual graphics card; hopefully this will lead to even more-compact designs, though it seems like the GPU makers have spent most of their time and attention on three-fan triple-slot overkill versions of the 4060 Ti.

Performance and power

As with the 4060 Ti and Radeon RX 7600, we tested the RTX 4060 primarily at 1080p and 1440p, the resolutions that you could reasonably expect to hit with a $300 graphics card. It should be possible to hit 60 fps in lighter and older games at 4K, but the 4060's weaker hardware and 8GB bank of RAM will make 4K a no-go for most modern AAA titles. In our 1080p tests, the 4060 performs roughly as expected. In both the 3DMark tests and actual games, whether they're using ray tracing or not, the 4060 is generally between 15 and 20 percent faster than the 3060, though it usually falls a hair short of matching the 3060 Ti. The GPU is capable of average frame rates well above 60 fps at 1080p, at least as long as ray tracing isn't enabled, though even at that resolution, you'll need to lean on DLSS and turned-down settings to play at 60 fps in games like Returnal and Cyberpunk 2077. The best argument against Nvidia here is that the RX 7600 (currently $260 or $270) is usually as fast or faster for a bit less money, at least in games with no ray tracing or upscaling effects turned on—per usual for Radeons, performance does tank with ray-tracing enabled. Intel's Arc A750 ($250-ish) is surprisingly competitive, too, even in ray-traced games, but older DirectX 11 games like Grand Theft Auto V still run worse on Intel's hardware than newer DirectX 12 and Vulkan games. The 4060 costs a bit more than either card, but it does have the benefit of performing consistently well in all kinds of games and consuming very little power while doing it. The RTX 4060 stretches to hit 1440p, averaging around or a little above 60 fps in our slightly older, non-ray-traced games but with dips below 60 fps that can make games stutter a little when things get busy. Comparing it to the RTX 3060, you also see some signs that performance isn't scaling evenly as you increase resolution—performance increases are closer to 15 percent than 20 percent, whether it's because of the narrower memory bus, stepping down from 12GB to 8GB of memory, the reduced CUDA core count, or all three. The RX 7600 continues to run just about even with the RTX 4060 in most non-ray-traced games, with exceptions like Borderlands 3 where it's actually faster; the 4060 maintains a significant lead in ray-traced games, though 1440p at max settings is firmly out of reach for most of them.

The RTX 4060's power consumption is right around where Nvidia said it would be—it drew about 115 W of power on average while running the Borderlands 3 and Hitman III benchmarks at 4K, compared to 160 for the 4060 Ti, 160 to 170 W for the 3060, 140 to 160 W for the RX 7600, and 190 W for the Arc A750. Its performance might not be thrilling, but its power efficiency is seriously impressive.

On DLSS 3 and frame generation (again)

Note: Parts of this section also appeared in our RTX 4060 Ti review. As we've covered in most of our RTX 4000-series GPU reviews, the Ada architecture's DLSS Frame Generation feature promises to "double" your frame rate by creating one AI-interpolated frame for every frame that the GPU renders. DLSS FG works in concert with typical DLSS upscaling—Nvidia says that "seven out of every eight pixels" can be generated by AI when DLSS and DLSS FG are both enabled. The result can be a clean-looking, high-resolution, high-frame-rate image rendered using just a fraction of the GPU performance needed to render the same scene natively. Nvidia has always leaned on DLSS FG in its presentations to make the 4000-series GPUs look like even larger leaps than they were. In the case of the 4060, the company optimistically claims that the card is as much as 70 percent faster than the RTX 3060, rather than the 15 to 20 percent we observed when DLSS FG wasn't involved. DLSS FG did markedly improve both average and 1 percent low frame rates in all the games we tested it in, and it can be a handy way to push past 60 fps in a demanding game if you're trying to enjoy the high-refresh-rate monitor you dropped extra money on. But it's not without consequence; DLSS FG can also create extra input latency that can make fast-paced shooters or action games feel less responsive, particularly with V-sync enabled. One of the games in our test suite, Housemarque and Sony's Returnal, also shows how DLSS FG can impact visuals in a way that DLSS supersampling doesn't. A driving rain falls through the entire benchmark, and between the unpredictable paths that the raindrops take and the way the rain refracts the light that passes through it, DLSS FG can have issues predicting where each drop is going to end up and what it will look like in the interpolated frames it creates. When using the 4060 Ti, we observed that the rain would phase in and out of existence with DLSS FG turned on—it would be totally visible in some frames and totally gone in the next. The problem is similar but slightly exacerbated on the RTX 4060, which has an even lower base frame rate (45 fps with DLSS and FG off, 66 fps with DLSS on and FG off). I noticed the same blinking effect, and even the frames with visible raindrops sometimes showed fewer than they were supposed to. The rest of the scene, at least to my eyes, looked mostly fine, and DLSS FG does boost the average and 1 percent low frame rates. But depending on what you play, you might run into situations where the effect looks subtly wrong or strange in a way that I don't particularly notice or care about with DLSS 2. Add to that the latency issues you can experience and it feels like DLSS FG performance numbers still need an asterisk after them. It's a handy tool when you're experimenting with different settings to make a high-end game playable on a midrange PC, and I would rather have the option than not have it. But I wouldn't say it's a slam-dunk selling point.

The midrange GPU for most people

It's not an exciting upgrade, but if you asked me which GPU I would buy for an $800 to $1,000 gaming PC, the RTX 4060 would be the one I'd point to, especially with so many 3060 cards (as of this writing) still selling for pretty close to the same $300 price. The AMD Radeon RX 7600 and Intel Arc A750 are definitely worth a look if you want to spend less money, but they both come with caveats about what kinds of games do and don't run well that you just don't need to worry about with Nvidia's cards. Add to that the benefits of DLSS (just regular DLSS, not the benefits-with-caveats of DLSS FG), the fact that most professional and AI apps are tuned to use GeForce cards, and the unbeatable power efficiency, and you have a really nice 1080p to 1440p all-rounder without any major weak points. Anyone upgrading from a 1050, 1060, 1650, 1660, or 2060 card will get a nice upgrade; anyone happily using a 3060 doesn't need to worry about missing much.

The good

• No price hike in what has (so far) been a pretty price hike-y GPU generation.
• Modest performance improvement from RTX 3060.
• Dramatically lower power consumption.
• There isn't a genre of game, API, or rendering effect that it handles poorly, unlike AMD with ray-tracing and Intel with DirectX 11 titles.
• Good value-for-money relative to the 4060 Ti.

The bad

• Radeon RX 7600 is sometimes faster for less money, if you don't care about ray-tracing.
• DLSS FG remains less useful for midrange GPUs than high-end ones, which don't stand to benefit as much from technology that boosts frame rates.

The ugly

• 4GB less RAM than last year's card.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that the RTX 4060 has more CUDA cores than the RTX 3060; it actually has fewer. This doesn't affect any of our testing results or conclusions.