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Nvidia recently launched the RTX 4060 for the budget 1080p gaming demographic. The card doesn't offer massive improvements in terms of raw rendering power, unlike the RTX 4080 and the 4090. Instead, the company has focused on efficiency and pricing. Thus, we get a product that's cheaper than its last-gen counterpart, the RTX 3060, albeit with a shorter 8 GB VRAM buffer and a more modest specs list.
The main selling point of the 4060 isn't its rendering prowess. Nvidia is bundling DLSS 3 as a necessary technology that needs to be used in every supported game instead of having it as an add-on feature in case gamers need some extra frames in a game.
This raises a chief question: is it worth upgrading to the new 4060 from the last-gen RTX 3060 Ti, a card that was launched primarily to play video games with the settings cranked all the way up at FHD? We'll look at the two cards and try to answer this question.
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Is the new RTX 4060 worth buying over the last-gen RTX 3060 Ti?
The RTX 4060 brings the best of the Ada Lovelace architecture to the masses: the improved efficiency delivered by the new 7th-gen CUDA cores and 3rd-gen RT cores. The GPUs also have improved 4th gen Tensor cores that help with temporal upscaling performance.
The RTX 3060 Ti, on the other hand, packs slightly less potent hardware. Even to deliver similar framerates, an older Ampere card will need higher core counts that draw more power and ultimately drive the cost of ownership up. The good news, however, is that the 3060 Ti packs high core counts that dwarf the 4060's numbers. This makes for an interesting comparison.
Specs
We can't accurately measure the difference between the 4060 and the 3060 Ti by simply looking at their on-paper specs since the GPUs are based on different architectures. Ada Lovelace is more potent than Ampere, so the list below can be rather deceiving when it comes to real-world performance.
A more accurate comparison between the two graphics cards can be made by pitching the theoretical performance of the components of the two GPUs side-by-side. Such a chart comparing the RTX 4060 and the 3060 Ti is listed below:
As evident from the theoretical performance charts above, the 3060 Ti packs slightly more horsepower in terms of raw rendering performance. However, the improved Tensor and RT cores lend an upper hand to the newer 60-class offering.
Performance differences
This trend continues in video games. The RTX 4060 is slower than the 3060 Ti in most video games until you use DLSS 3 and its technologies (frame generation, more specifically). With upscaling wizardry, the latest 40 series card can beat both the RX 7600 and the last-gen RTX 3060 Ti.
However, relying on upscaling technologies can only prove to be beneficial in non-competitive video games where the extra latency isn't a problem. In addition, the DLSS 3 library isn't wide enough yet. Most competitive titles, like CS: GO, Fortnite, Valorant, and others, don't support the technology at all.
The RTX 3060 Ti is the best option for these games and many more. The GPU still supports DLSS 2, which has the capability of making any game playable (unless you want to run Cyberpunk with path tracing turned on).
The RTX 3060 Ti Nvidia launched a few years ago. The card's price is plummeting by the day, and it's also easy to find the used market. Because of this, it will continue to be a strong contender in the budget 1080p gaming segment, and we believe that it is worth buying over the RTX 4060.
