Nvidia releases RTX 4060 benchmarks, showcasing 20% performance gains over their RTX 3060 without DLSS 3

Nvidia’s RTX 4060 is launching on June 29th, and here are Nvidia’s performance claims

Nvidia has confirmed that their RTX 4060 graphics card will be launching on June 29th with an MSRP of $299, making it the most affordable RTX 40 series graphics card to date and the cheapest GPU to support Nvidia’s DLSS 3 technology and AV1 encoding. 

On the company’s website, Nvidia have released new performance data for their graphics card and have confirmed that this GPU is a lot more power efficient than its predecessors, promising users not just higher levels of system performance, but also lower electric bills. 

When compared to the company’s RTX 3060, RTX 2060 and GTX 1060 graphics cards Nvidia are promising 1.2x, 1.6x and 8x performance gains respectively. These performance gains increase to 1.7x, 2.3x, and 14x when DLSS Frame Generation is enabled. 

Nvidia’s absurd performance claims when compared to their RTX 1060 comes from the fact that this graphics card does not support DLSS or hardware accelerated ray tracing. The graph below ways that DLSS is on for games that support it, and RT is on for games that support it. While the GTX 1060 does not support hardware accelerated ray tracing, it can play games with ray tracing enabled by using GPU compute to do ray tracing calculations (slowly). This inflates Nvidia’s claimed performance gains to an absurd degree, but highlights why hardware accelerated ray tracing is a necessary addition for modern GPUs.  

The graph below showcases the RTX 4060’s performance gains over Nvidia’s RTX 2060 and RTX 3060 in various games. All the games below are tested with DLSS and ray tracing enabled when available, and with DLSS 3 (DLSS Frame Generation) when available. As you can see, without DLSS 3 Nvidia’s performance gains with their RTX 4060 are smaller than the performance leap the RTX 3060 had over the RTX 2060.

In terms of power draw, RTX 4060 users are expected to use around 60W less power than an RTX 3060 while gaming. Over time, this can result in a significant electricity savings, though it is worth noting that it will take years for these savings to add up to a substantial amount of money. 

With their RTX 4060, Nvidia are promising more performance and lower power draw than their last-generation RTX 3060. That said, these power draw savings will take a long time to result in a notable drop in your electric bill, and Nvidia’s performance gains are on the small side when Nvidia’s DLSS Frame Generation technology is not utilised. 

One problem that the RTX 4060 faces is that it features a small 8GB frame buffer, which is significantly smaller than the RTX 3060’s 12GB frame buffer. This will not be an issue for many games, but with the VRAM requirements of new games rising, it is a shame that Nvidia did not give their RTX 4060 the same amount of VRAM as its predecessor. 

You can join the discussion on Nvidia’s RTX 4060 graphics card on the OC3D Forums.