A YouTube modder and Redditor has successfully attached a CPU cooler to an Nvidia GTX 960 using a 3D-printed bracket, bringing temperatures compared to the stock cooler down by 10 degrees and breaking a 3DMark Fire Strike benchmark record in the process.

The daring tinkerer, whose modest YouTube channel trades under the name TrashBench, took to the platform to reveal how they used a CPU cooler, some zip ties, and eventually a 3D-printed bracket to create one of the most novel yet surprisingly effective GPU cooling solutions we've ever seen.

"Had a spare CPU cooler and figured I’d chuck it on my 960 for a laugh," they revealed on Reddit. The first solution? Remove the GTX 960's stock cooler and simply strap the CPU to the card using some zip ties. The video reveals a precariously poised Cooler Master heatsink bound by some luminous yellow cable ties, a hilariously rudimentary first attempt.

"It looked dumb, ran hot, and nearly rattled itself apart," TrashBench reveals. A second run of 3D Mark's Fire Strike test yielded temperature increases of more than 10 degrees, likely caused by poor contact with the GPU's heatsink.

Undeterred, TrashBench fired up the 3D printer and "whipped up a proper bracket." The third run with the 3D-printed mount finally showcased the awesome power of the CPU cooler when properly in contact with the GPU, delivering a 13-degree improvement over the GTX 960's stock cooler and a 20-degree improvement on the cable tie attempt.

What's more, the monstrous combination even broke the 3DMark Fire Strike record for GTX 960 and Intel Core i5-12600KF processors, with a new top overall score of 7642, beating out the previous record of 7458. Not only that, the CPU cooler solution runs quieter than the GTX 960's stock cooler, but TrashBench puts this down to the "trash" fan running at low speed.

While the hardware combination is something of an eyesore, the actual physics behind the performance makes perfect sense. GPU coolers, by nature, have a much lower profile than CPU air coolers, which are equipped with fins and can measure upwards of 15 centimeters in height. TrashBench confirmed the CPU cooler in play weighed 470 grams, compared to the 270-gram factory cooler taken from the GTX 960, a battle of physics with only one winner when it comes to shifting heat.

And TrashBench isn't done. "I think I'll have to try it on a 4080 next," they quipped at the end of the video. Engaging further on Reddit, TrashBench also agreed that a GPU with a more sophisticated cooling system (the 960 is from 2015, after all) might not yield such a drastic improvement, promising to try a more potent cooler on a 2070 Super. In fact, TrashBench is even considering more thorough benchmarking to weigh stock GPU coolers, comparing them directly with similar-sized CPU coolers for fairer testing, a project that might even give our GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy a run for its money!

You can watch the full two-minute video below.

Bargain shoppers on Newegg may be excited to find the deal of a lifetime, a GTX 1080 Ti going for only $1.63. Unfortunately, the refurbished 1080 Ti will come with a hefty $400 shipping cost, making it barely competitive with other refurbished 1080 Ti's on Newegg. At least the card itself can be split into four easy payments of $0.41.

Update (June 10, 14:22 ET): A Newegg Spokesperson responded to our request for comment by saying that the listing in question violates their policies and will be taken down. It took a few hours but the card is now gone.

Ozi from OzTalksHW was the first to spot the "bargain," posting it on Twitter this morning. The listing doesn't give any details on the card itself, beyond that it is a 1080 Ti with 11GB of VRAM. The photos show an MSI GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio, a 2.5 slot card with 5 output ports, three fans, and an original MSRP of $799 when it was released 7 years ago — remember when $800 got you the highest end of consumer graphics cards?

Looking deeper into the reseller, Creator Store, offers some context. The graphics card is promised to be "80% new - 90% new," while also being described as "well used," with a promise of complete 100% testing before shipping. Going from the product page to the seller's own Newegg store is even more illustrative. Creator is a Shanghai-based "young fashion" brand that sells a smattering of PC components. Creator carries a 3.7 buyer score, a not-terrible / not-great score which at least indicates it is not 100% a scam seller.

Other products listed on its Newegg store with a $400 shipping cost include an awfully cute gaming PC, a Vive Pro VR headset, and some PCIe expansion cards. No other product listed follows the 1080 Ti's $1 item plus $400 shipping scheme, but prices still seem inputted at random; a 2TB Samsung SSD is sold for only $80 listed next to a $500 Transformers action figure. But the 1080 Ti notably is not listed or searchable on the Creator Store; the cheapest items Creator lists on its Newegg store are laptop fans and photovoltaic fuses, hiding the $1.63 card from view.

Those hoping for cheaper shipping via local pickup would be out of luck. The $1.63 1080 Ti can only be found for shipping to the United States, sad news for bargain-minded UK readers. Creator Store does offer free 30-day returns, but its return policy seems to be overly complex, with a few easy ways to avoid having to process the return. And if you did happen to buy such an item and then asked for a refund, what would happen to the $400 in shipping?

We've reached out to Newegg for comment on this and other similar low-cost, high-shipping sales. We'll update the story when we hear back. If you're looking for good graphics card deals, we'd advise avoiding too-good-to-be-true offers from Newegg resellers and sticking to reputable sources; our list of the best GPU deals today is a great starting point. 

Steam has released the latest results of its hardware survey for June of 2023. This is a voluntary survey that users can opt into, with data published on a regular basis giving insights into the hardware stats of average users. Last month, some adjustments were made to correct a data collection issue that resulted in the RTX 3060 dropping out of the number one slot for graphics cards and landing in 3rd place. 

It’s worth noting that because this survey is conducted on a voluntary basis, some fluctuation of data is expected. However, this is still one of the best opportunities we have to look at data from real users on a consistent basis. It’s common to see changes in hardware results that vary depending on real-world events and market evolution. After last month's adjustment, we’ve seen some minor changes in GPU popularity and expect more changes as prices lower over time.

While the RTX 3060 was knocked down to third place last month, it’s managed to creep up to a second-place slot in the latest results. The RTX 3060 Laptop GPU, however, has lowered from third place to fourth, getting replaced by GTX 1060. For the second month in a row, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 has managed to reign supreme as the most popular GPU this month.

The GPU market is highly competitive yet dominated by NVidia hardware. As far as processors go, however, Intel has maintained a lead over AMD for months. Most users using an Intel CPU operate within speeds between 2.3GHz and 2.69GHz. On the other hand, the majority of AMD users report an average range of 3.3GHz to 3.69GHz.

Overall the changes this month have been minor compared to May’s results. Some areas haven’t changed much at all, like the number of cores used by each OS. Most Windows users are using processors with 6 cores, OSX tops out with 8 cores, and Linux rests around 4. If you want to get a closer look at the latest hardware survey results, you can do so over at the official Steam website.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 drops the entry price for the Ada Lovelace architecture and RTX 40-series GPUs to $299. It lands between the former RTX 3060 and RTX 3050 in pricing, and while there are always compromises as you move down the price and performance ladder, it represents a potentially great value proposition. For those on a budget, it could be one of the best graphics cards, assuming performance is up to snuff.

There are deserved complaints about limiting the AD107 GPU at the heart of this card to a 128-bit memory interface, though the lower price compared to the RTX 4060 Ti takes out some of the sting. Still, the previous generation RTX 3060 came with a 192-bit interface and 12GB of memory, so this represents a clear step back in that area. We'll discuss this more on the next page, as it's an important topic.

We'll update the GPU benchmarks hierarchy later today, now that the embargo is over. The bottom line shouldn't be too surprising: In the vast majority of games, the new the RTX 4060 easily outperforms the previous generation RTX 3060, and it almost catches the RTX 3060 Ti. Toss in DLSS 3's Frame Generation and the dramatically improved efficiency and you can make a reasonable case for buying an RTX 4060 over a previous gen card. You won't tap into new levels of performance, but you'll get all the latest Nvidia features and upgrades.

The chief competition from AMD comes from two places. The latest generation Radeon RX 7600 undercuts Nvidia's price by up to $50 now, while the previous generation RX 6700 XT starts at $309, basically matching the RTX 4060 on price but providing 50% more memory and potentially better overall performance. Depending on pricing and availability, the RTX 3060 Ti (and other 30-series GPUs) may also be an interesting option, but we don't expect such cards to stick around for long, unless you're willing to purchase a used card.

Let's check the specifications, which were revealed over a month ago with the RTX 4060 Ti announcement. Nvidia allows reviews of the $299 MSRP cards today, while more expensive models are under embargo until tomorrow. We received an Asus RTX 4060 Dual OC model from Nvidia, which comes with a modest factory overclock, but it's still priced at $299.

There are twelve GPUs listed in the above table if you scroll to the right, representing the most useful comparisons for the RTX 4060, but the first column is the most pertinent. The new GeForce RTX 4060 uses Nvidia's AD107 GPU, which is also the same chip found in the RTX 4060 and 4050 Laptop GPUs.

The RTX 4060 uses the full AD107 chip, with 24 streaming multiprocessors (SMs), each with 128 CUDA cores. That gives the total shader count of 3,072. Astute mathematicians will note that this is less than the previous generation RTX 3060's 3,584 shaders. However, as with the rest of the RTX 40-series lineup, clock speeds are significantly higher at 2460 MHz, compared to 1777 MHz on the 3060. The result is that peak compute performance ends up being 19% higher.

Memory bandwidth is lower for raw throughput, at 272 GB/s compared to the RTX 3060's 360 GB/s. But the L2 cache has ballooned from 3MB on the 3060 to 24MB on the 4060, and Nvidia says that improves the effective bandwidth by 67% — to 453 GB/s. We'll discuss the memory subsystem and its ramifications more on the next page.

One thing to note is that the RTX 4060 comes with an x8 PCIe interface, just like the RTX 4060 Ti, where the RTX 4070 and above use an x16 link width. This is similar to the RX 7600 and previous generation RTX 3050, where cutting the additional PCIe lanes helps to keep the die size smaller. This shouldn't matter much with most modern PCs, but if you're planning to upgrade an older PC that only supports PCIe 3.0 with an RTX 4060, you may lose a bit of performance compared to what we'll show in our benchmarks.

Looking at the competition based on relatively similar pricing, we have a lot of options. AMD has the new RX 7600 8GB card, along with the previous generation RX 6700 XT 12GB and RX 6700 10GB. From Intel, there's the Arc A770 8GB and Arc A750. Then Nvidia also has to contend with existing cards like the RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti, and RTX 3070. It's a safe bet that Nvidia can match or exceed cards from AMD and Intel when it comes to ray tracing performance and AI workloads, but it will likely lose out to the 3060 Ti and above in those same tasks. Rasterization performance should prove to be a tougher battle for the newcomer.

We'll also include results from the RTX 2060, which launched in early 2019. Many gamers skip a generation or two on hardware, and Nvidia (like AMD and the RX 7600) is pitching the RTX 4060 as a great upgrade path for people still using cards like the GTX 1060, RTX 2060, or RX 570/580/590. For all the complaining about the RTX 40-series and its higher generational pricing, it's also nice to see Nvidia match or beat the pricing on the two previous generation GPUs. The RTX 2060 launched at $349 and later dropped to $299, while the RTX 3060 launched at $329 but rarely saw that price until the last few months.

The block diagram for the RTX 4060 / AD107 shows just how much Nvidia has trimmed things down in order to hit mainstream pricing. Most of the other Ada chips have multiple NVDEC / NVENC blocks, but AD107 has just one of each. As noted above, there are also just 24 total SMs, spread among three GPCs (Graphics Processing Clusters). Finally, Nvidia provides up to 8MB of L2 cache per 32-bit memory channel, but the RTX 4060 only has 6MB enabled for a total of 24MB. (The mobile RTX 4060 gets the full 32MB, if you're wondering.)

As with other Ada Lovelace chips, the RTX 4060 includes Nvidia's 4th-gen Tensor cores, 3rd-gen RT cores, new and improved NVENC/NVDEC units for video encoding and decoding with AV1 support, and a significantly more powerful Optical Flow Accelerator (OFA). The latter is used for DLSS 3, and all indications are that Nvidia has no intention of trying to enable Frame Generation on Ampere and earlier RTX GPUs.

The tensor cores now support FP8 with sparsity. It's not clear how useful that is for various workloads, but AI and deep learning have certainly leveraged lower precision number formats to boost performance without significantly altering the quality of the results — at least in some cases. It will ultimately depend on the work being done, and figuring out just what uses FP8 versus FP16, plus sparsity, can be tricky.

Of course, running AI models on a budget mainstream card like the RTX 4060 isn't really the primary goal. Yes, Stable Diffusion will work, and we'll show test results later. Other AI models that can fit in the 8GB VRAM will run as well. However, anyone that's serious about AI and machine learning will almost certainly want a GPU with more processing muscle and more VRAM.

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Is 8GB of VRAM Insufficient?

One of the biggest complaints you're sure to hear about the RTX 4060 is that it only has 8GB of VRAM. You may also hear complaints about the 128-bit memory interface, which is related but also a separate consideration. Dropping down to a 128-bit bus on the 4060 definitely represents a compromise, but there are many factors in play.

First, we need to remember that the significantly larger L2 cache really does help a lot in terms of effective memory bandwidth. Every memory access fulfilled by the L2 cache means that the 128-bit interface didn't even come into play. Nvidia says that the hit rate of the larger 24MB L2 cache on the RTX 4060, compared to what the hit rate would have been with an Ampere-sized 2MB L2, is 67% higher. Nvidia isn't lying, and real-world performance metrics will prove this point — AMD also lists effective bandwidth on many of its RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPUs, for the same reason.

At the same time, there are edge cases where the larger L2 cache doesn't help as much. Running at 4K or even 1440p will reduce the cache hit rates, but certain applications simply hit memory in a different way that can also reduce hit rates. We've heard that emulation is one such case, and hashing algorithms (i.e. cryptocurrency mining, may it rest in peace) are another. But for typical PC gaming, the 8X larger L2 cache (relative to the 3060) will help a lot in reducing GDDR6 memory accesses.

The other side of the coin is that a 128-bit interface inherently limits how much VRAM a GPU can have. If you use 1GB chips, you max out at 4GB (e.g. the GTX 1650). The RTX 4060 uses 2GB chips, which gets it up to 8GB. Nvidia could have also put chips on both sides of the PCB (which used to be quite common), but that increases complexity and it would bump the total VRAM all the way up to 16GB. That's arguably overkill for a $300 graphics card, even in 2023.

Here's the thing: You don't actually need more than 8GB of VRAM for most games, when running at appropriate settings. We've explained why 4K requires so much VRAM previously, and that's part of the story. The other part is that many of the changes between "high" and "ultra" settings — whatever they might be called — are often of the placebo variety. Maxed out settings will often drop performance 20% or more, but image quality will look nearly the same as high settings.

Look at the above gallery from The Last of Us, Part 1 as an example. This is a game that can easily exceed 8GB of VRAM with maxed out settings. The most recent patch improved performance, however, and 8GB cards run much better now — almost like the initial port was poorly done and unoptimized! Anyway, we've captured the five presets, and if you look, there aren't really any significant differences between Ultra and High, and you could further reduce the differences by only turning down texture quality from ultra to high.

The placebo effect is especially true of HD texture packs, which can weigh in at 40GB or more but rarely change the visuals much. If you're running at 1080p or 1440p, most surfaces in a game will use 1024x1024 texture resolutions or lower, because the surface doesn't cover more than a thousand pixels. In fact, most surfaces will likely opt for 256x256 or 128x128 textures, and only those that are closest to the viewport will need 512x512 or 1024x1024 textures.

What about the 2048x2048 textures in the HD texture pack? Depending on the game, they may still get loaded into VRAM, even if the mipmapping algorithm never references them. So you can hurt performance and cause texture popping for literally zero improvement in visuals.

Related to this is texture streaming, where a game engine will load in low resolution textures for everything, and then pull higher resolution textures into VRAM as needed. You can see this happening in some games right as a level loads: Everything looks a bit blurry and then higher quality textures "pop" in.

If the texture streaming algorithm still tries to load higher resolution textures when they're not needed, it may evict other textures from VRAM. That can lead to a situation where the engine and GPU will have to shuttle data over the PCIe interface repeatedly, as one texture gets loaded and kicks a different texture out of VRAM, but then that other texture is needed and has to get pulled back into VRAM.

Fundamentally, how all of this plays out is up to the game developers. Some games (Red Dead Redemption 2, as an example) will strictly enforce VRAM requirements and won't let you choose settings that exceed your GPU's VRAM capacity — you can try to work around this, but the results are potentially problematic. Others, particularly Unreal Engine games, will use texture streaming, sometimes with the option to disable it (e.g. Lord of the Rings: Gollum). This can lead to the aforementioned texture popping.

If you're seeing a lot of texture popping, or getting a lot of PCI Express traffic, our recommendation is to turn the texture quality setting down one notch. We've done numerous tests to look at image quality, and particularly at 1080p and 1440p, it can be very difficult to see any difference between the maximum and high texture settings in modern games.

For better or worse, the RTX 4060 is the GPU that Nvidia has created for this generation. Many of the design decisions were probably made two years ago. Walking back from 12GB on the 3060 to 8GB on the 4060 is still a head scratcher, unfortunately.

The bottom line is this. If you're the type of gamer that needs to have every graphics option turned on, we're now at the point where a lot of games will exceed 8GB of VRAM use, even at 1080p. Most games won't have issues if you drop texture quality (and possibly shadow quality) down one notch, but it still varies by game. So if the thought of turning down any settings triggers your FOMO reflex, the RTX 4060 isn't the GPU for you.

Asus GeForce RTX 4060 Dual OC

Nvidia won't be making any RTX 4060 Founders Edition cards, leaving it up to the AIC (Add-In Card) partners to come up with appropriate designs. Obviously, with a base 115W TGP (Total Graphics Power), we shouldn't need any extreme designs to deal with the heat. Except, we'll probably still get them.

Case in point: The Asus RTX 4060 Dual OC that Nvidia sent us for the launch review. It's not a massive card, but it does occupy 2.5-slots of width, which effectively means you can't use the two adjacent slots. Not that it matters to most people, as these days graphics cards are one of the few expansion cards that are still in regular use. Additional M.2 slot adapters and USB 3.2 adapters are another possible use, along with video capture cards, but even those aren't particularly common.

The lack of an RTX 4060 Founders Edition means we're probably not going to see any cards using 16-pin power connectors, which is just fine by us. The Asus card has a single 8-pin connector, which on its own can provide 150W of power, never mind the 75W from the PCIe x16 slot. Even with a modest factory overclock, the Asus 4060 won't come anywhere near hitting those potential power limits.

There's not much to say about the packaging for the Asus card, other than that there's a lot of empty space. It's the same box dimensions as we've seen with substantially larger triple-fan Asus cards, but there's probably a benefit to doing a "one size fits all" box.

Besides the card, you get a little cardboard punchout card holder and a small manual... and that's it. Not that we expected anything extra here.

The Asus RTX 4060 Dual OC measures 229x124x48 mm (our measurements), which is moderately compact even if it's a 2.5-slot width. It's also a rather light card, weighing in at 639g, so you shouldn't have issues with the card sagging. You can likely fit the card into many mini-ITX cases, provided they can accommodate the wider girth.

Asus uses two custom 89mm fans with an integrated rim, which should easily handle any cooling requirements when combined with the heatsink. The heatsink features four heatpipes, and in a nice change of pace, the fins are horizontally oriented so that air will flow out the IO bracket as well as the rear of the card, rather than out of the top and bottom of the card. That means it should dump less heat into the interior of your PC case.

For a base model RTX 4060, there's a lot to like with the Asus design. The aesthetics are subdued, with no RGB lighting, so if you're trying to put together a "stealth-build" PC, it would be a good fit. You do get a few extras as well, which aren't normally seen with base model GPUs.

On the top, there's a switch to toggle between "quiet" and "performance" modes. It's in performance mode by default, which is where we left it. The quiet mode likely just alters the fan speed curve slightly to favor lower RPMs over lower temperatures.

Video outputs consist of the typical triple DisplayPort 1.4a and single HDMI 2.1 outputs — nothing new there. All four ports are capable of driving up to a 4K 240Hz display, using Display Stream Compression, which is what our Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 supports.

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Asus RTX 4060 Overclocking 

Our overclocking process doesn't aim to fully redline the hardware, but instead looks to find "reasonably stable and safe" overclocks. We start by maxing out the power limit (using MSI Afterburner), which is 120% for the Asus RTX 4060 Dual OC — that will vary by card manufacturer and model. We also set a fan speed curve that starts at 30% at 30C and ramps up to 100% at 80C. This is probably more than the GPU needs, but for overclocking it's usually a good idea to keep temperatures lower if possible.

Next, we look for the maximum stable GPU core overclock. We were able to hit up to +225 MHz on the RTX 4060 with our initial testing, and backed off slightly to a +200 MHz overclock after additional tuning. Note that as usual, there's no way to increase the GPU voltage short of doing a voltage mod, which is often a limiting factor for RTX 40-series cards. We saw boost clocks very close to 3GHz with our overclocked testing.

The RTX 4060 comes with GDDR6 clocked at 17 Gbps, which isn't a "normal" speed — most chips are rated for 14, 16, 18, or 20 Gbps. That should give us a decent amount of headroom, and sure enough, we were able to hit a stable +1750 MHz (20.5 Gbps effective). Nvidia has error detect and retry for its memory, so even if a card appears stable, you may not get better performance with a maximum VRAM overclock. We backed off to +1500 MHz (20 Gbps) for our testing.

Our overclocks represent a theoretical 8.1% boost to GPU performance and a 17.6% increase to memory bandwidth. That means the best we should see from the OC is about 15% higher performance, and many games will end up limited by the GPU compute, yielding gains closer to 8–10 percent.

The above image shows the results of our overclocked settings, as well as a limited view of power, clocks, and temperatures (via Afterburner's line charts). The AD106 GPU ran quite cool, as did the GDDR6 memory. You can also see that GPU clocks were hitting around 3000 MHz while running games.

As is always the case with overclocking, there's trial and error. Our results aren't super aggressive, but they still may exceed what you can achieve with a different card. Our focus is first on stability (any crash means we drop clocks and try again until we don't get any problems), with maximum performance being a secondary concern.

We'll include the manually overclocked results at 1080p ultra and 1440p ultra in the charts. Overall, performance improved by around 10% compared to factory stock settings. Needless to say, no amount of overclocking is likely to close the gap between the RTX 4060 and the 4060 Ti, as the latter has more L2 cache and 25% more GPU cores.

Nvidia RTX 4060 Test Setup

We updated our GPU test PC at the end of last year with a Core i9-13900K, though we continue to also test reference GPUs on our 2022 system that includes a Core i9-12900K for our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. (We'll be updating that later today, once the embargo has passed.) Our RTX 4060 review will use the 13900K results for gaming tests, which ensures, as much as possible, that we're not CPU limited. We also use the 2022 PC for AI tests and the professional workloads.

Multiple games have been updated over the past few months. We retested most of the cards for the RTX 4070, 4060 Ti, and RX 7600 reviews, and we've rechecked some cards to verify nothing significant has changed in the intervening month.

For this review, we're running Nvidia preview 536.20 drivers for the RTX 4060, while other Nvidia cards were tested with 531.41–531.93 drivers. For AMD, the GPUs used 23.2.1–23.5.2 drivers. Intel's Arc A770 cards were (re)tested with the latest 4514 drivers, plus we've finally managed to get Minecraft to run properly.

Our current test suite consists of 15 games. Of these, nine support DirectX Raytracing (DXR), but we only enable the DXR features in six of the games. At the time of testing, 12 of the games support DLSS 2, five support DLSS 3, and five support FSR 2. We'll cover DLSS performance in a separate section on upscaling.

We tested the RTX 4060 at 1080p (medium and ultra), 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra — ultra being the highest supported preset if there is one, and in some cases maxing out all the other settings for good measure (except for MSAA or super sampling). The 4K results are mostly just for those who are interested in seeing how performance can collapse at that resolution with maxed out settings, because the 4060 definitely doesn't target 4K gamers.

Our PC is hooked up to a Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32, one of the best gaming monitors around, allowing us to fully experience some of the higher frame rates that might be available. G-Sync and FreeSync were enabled, as appropriate. As you can imagine, getting anywhere close to the 240 Hz limit of the monitor proved difficult, as we don't have any esports games in our test suite.

When we assembled the new test PC, we installed all of the then-latest Windows 11 updates. We're running Windows 11 22H2, but we've used InControl to lock our test PC to that major release for the foreseeable future (critical security updates still get installed each month).

Our new test PC includes Nvidia's PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll cover those results in our page on power use.

Finally, because GPUs aren't purely for gaming these days, we've run some professional application tests, and we also ran some Stable Diffusion benchmarks to see how AI workloads scale on the various GPUs.

• MORE: Best Graphics Cards
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The Nvidia RTX 4060 starts at $299, targeting "mainstream gamers" who don't tend to upgrade every generation of GPUs and may not have the latest and greatest hardware. Nvidia and AMD have both talked about this market, highlighting how many people are still using cards like the GTX 1060 and RTX 2060, and noting that the Steam Hardware Survey indicates 64% of surveyed PCs still run a 1080p resolution (though a lot of those are probably laptops as well, which tend to top out at 1080p outside of the more expensive offerings).

Our new test regimen gives us a global view of performance using the geometric mean all 15 games, including both the ray tracing and rasterization test suites. Then we've got separate charts for only the rasterization and ray tracing suites, plus charts for the individual games. If you don't like the "overall performance" chart, the other two are the same view that we've previously presented.

Our test suite is intentionally heavier on ray tracing games than what you might normally encounter. That's largely because ray tracing games tend to be the most demanding options, so if a new card can handle ray tracing reasonably well, it should do just fine with less demanding games. Ray tracing also feels increasingly like something we can expect to run well, when optimized properly, and Nvidia's hardware proves what's possible. We're now two generations on from Nvidia's RTX 20-series, and as we'll see shortly, the new $300 RTX 4060 basically matches the $700–$800 RTX 2080 that launched in mid-2018.

We have two charts, 1080p ultra and 1080p medium. Ultra settings may in some cases push the RTX 4060 a bit too hard, particularly in demanding DXR games, while the medium settings might not push hard enough. You can interpolate between the two to get a reasonable estimate of where 1080p high settings should land, which is arguably the sweet spot for cards like the RTX 4060.

In terms of overall performance, at 1080p medium the RTX 4060 lands right between the RX 6700 XT and RX 6750 XT — and that was already a pretty narrow gap. It's also 16% faster than the newer RX 7600, 22% faster than the RTX 3060, and 51% faster than the two generations old RTX 2060. For 1080p ultra, the RTX 4060 still sits between the 6750 XT and 6700 XT, and is 22% faster than the RTX 3060 and RX 7600, and beats the RTX 2060 by 58%.

Most people aren't going to be thinking about upgrading from the RTX 3060 to the 4060, and that's for the best. Even though performance is higher, you have less VRAM and it's not that big of a performance jump. But if you're still holding on to an RTX 2060 or older GPU, you can get a pretty sizeable upgrade.

While we don't have the GTX 1060 6GB and GTX 1660 Super in these charts (because we're only including GPUs that support the DirectX 12 Ultimate API), we still use our older test suite for the GPU benchmarks hierarchy. Looking just at rasterization performance, the RTX 4060 delivers about 150% higher framerates than the GTX 1060 6GB, and nearly double (95% higher) the performance of the GTX 1660 Super.

You can certainly make the argument that a $300 GPU isn't really intended for native DXR gaming, so here's our look at just the nine rasterization games in our test suite. Overall, the RTX 4060 ends up basically tied with the AMD RX 7600 at 1080p medium, with a 4.4% lead at 1080p ultra. It's not a clear win for either GPU, however.

The RX 7600 takes a clear lead in Borderlands 3 for example, delivering 6% more performance at 1080p medium and 23% higher performance at 1080p ultra. AMD also has a 4% lead in A Plague Tale: Requiem and Flight Simulator, a 7% lead in Watch Dogs Legion, and a 9% lead in Far Cry 6 — but all of those are only at 1080p medium. Performance is basically tied or slightly favors the RTX 4060 at 1080p ultra in those same games.

As for Nvidia, in our rasterization suite, Forza Horizon 5 and Total War: Warhammer 3 both give the RTX 4060 commanding leads. The 4060 is only 4% faster at 1080p high in Forza, but then it's 37% faster at 1080p extreme. Warhammer meanwhile gives the 4060 a 30% lead at 1080p medium and a 23% lead at 1080p ultra.

Looking at other GPUs, the RTX 4060 outperforms the RTX 3060 by 22%, which would be a noticeable upgrade but probably not worth doing on its own. It's around 50% faster than the RTX 2060, a much more worthwhile upgrade. It's also tied with the RX 6700 10GB, but 10–11 percent slower than the RX 6700 XT and RTX 3060 Ti.

In our ray tracing (DXR) test suite, the RTX 4060 does much better against AMD. That's not too surprising, since Nvidia is now on its third generation RT hardware and has been pushing the API far more than AMD. Keep in mind that none of the games we're currently testing utilize the new Ada Lovelace architectural features like SER (Shader Execution Reordering), OMM (Opacity Micro-Maps), or DMM (Displacement Micro-Meshes).

Compared with the RTX 3060, the 4060 improves overall DXR performance by 21–22 percent in our DXR test suite at 1080p medium and ultra settings. The range of improvement varies a bit, from 15% faster in Control to 30% faster in Metro Exodus Enhanced and Bright Memory Infinite Benchmark, but it's a pretty consistent gain. Similarly, it's 56% faster than the RTX 2060 at 1080p medium and 63% faster at 1080p ultra.

It's not all good news, though, as the RTX 3060 Ti still wins by about 10% overall. And let's be clear that a generational 20% improvement from Nvidia really isn't that big. It's a relatively minor step up compared to the previous generation, rather than the 50–75 percent improvement we saw in the prior generations (e.g. GTX 1060 versus GTX 960, or RTX 2060 versus GTX 1060).

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Stepping up to higher resolutions can be a bit of an issue with the RTX 4060. The 8GB VRAM is certainly part of the equation, but a big part is simply the lack of raw horsepower. If you're playing games from several years back, stuff that came out around the time of the RTX 20-series launch, it does okay, but more demanding titles are another matter. The 24MB L2 cache also isn't large enough to effectively handle the various buffers and texture accesses at higher resolutions — it still helps, but hit rates aren't as high. Let's start with the 1440p results.

The RTX 4060 still beats the RTX 3060, but the margin has dropped to 18%, down from 22%. It's not a huge difference, but overall performance is also hit and miss at 1440p, as we'll see in the individual game results. Most of the games are playable, meaning they run at 30 fps or more, but the overall 45 fps average means there are games in our test suite that will drop well below that mark.

For 1440p, you'd be better off with high settings, and enabling DLSS Quality upscaling where available. DLSS incidentally got every game in our test suite over the 30 fps mark, even at ultra settings. Frame Generation (DLSS 3) isn't as widely supported, but it typically improved frames to screen by another 40–50 percent. Except in Forza Horizon 5 where the latest patch apparently broke Frame Generation. Oops.

The RTX 4060 also leads the RX 7600, this time by 27% overall. The margins in DXR games are much bigger than at 1080p, but Borderlands 3 is the only game where AMD's latest mainstream card can clearly beat the RTX 4060. And if you have an RTX 2060, the gains are also quite good with nearly 60% better 1440p performance overall.

Our rasterization suite shows that most of these games are still very playable, with many breaking 60 fps. A Plague Tale: Requiem is by far and away the worst performing of the group, averaging 38 fps, but DLSS and Frame Generation can push that up to 76 fps.

The lead over AMD's RX 7600 is only 8%, while the previous generation RX 6700 XT leads the 4060 by 15% — only Total War: Warhammer 3 gives the 4060 a slight lead over AMD's similarly priced previous generation GPU. If you're primarily interested in rasterization performance, it's still an easy pick over the newcomer, at least if you're only looking at pure performance and not accounting for power use.

Ray tracing at 1440p without upscaling pushes the RTX 4060 hard. Cyberpunk 2077 and the Bright Memory Infinite Benchmark barely clear 20 fps, while the other games are all in the low to mid 30s. But all six of these games support DLSS upscaling, which can get you 40 fps or more using Quality mode. DLSS 3 Frame Generation in Cyberpunk 2077 and Spider-Man: Miles Morales can even break the 60 fps mark in those tow games.

Whether or not you think Frame Generation and DLSS upscaling are useful is another matter. I personally don't have any real issues with DLSS upscaling — in some cases, the AI upscaling and anti-aliasing can actually look better than native rendering, at least in games where the TAA anti-aliasing tends to be overly blurry and aggressive. Frame Generation is a different matter.

It's fine, but as we've noted in the past, the relatively large 40–50 percent performance gains (compared to just upscaling) don't really represent the real-world feel of the games. Cyberpunk 2077 might send 62 frames to the monitor every second, but half of those are "generated," which means the base input rate is only equal to 31 fps. In other words, the game will feel like it's running at half the Frame Gen rate, and if that's 30 fps or lower, it can feel very sluggish.

Looking at other GPUs, the competing AMD cards as usual tend to fall well behind in ray tracing performance. Where the RX 6700 XT is 15% faster in rasterization performance, with DXR it's 16% slower overall, and the more demanding the ray tracing rendering, the further behind it falls — so it's still tied in Metro Exodus Enhanced, holds a slight lead in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, but trails by 28% in Cyberpunk 2077 and by 38% in Minecraft. And that's without factoring DLSS.

Interestingly, with it's 256-bit memory interface and 16GB of GDDR6 memory, the Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition can also surpass the RTX 4060 in overall native ray tracing performance at 1440p ultra. And yes, that card currently costs about the same as the RTX 4060 (plus a little bit more), though it's typically slower in 1080p performance.

Nvidia RTX 4060: 4K Gaming Performance

As you can already guess, the RTX 4060 really struggles at 4K in our relatively demanding test suite. Ray tracing at 4K in particular doesn't come anywhere near playable levels, and you'd need DLSS Performance mode upscaling and potentially Frame Generation to hit reasonable framerates.

The 8GB VRAM also definitely affects performance at 4K, more than at lower resolutions. Again, see our article on why 4K requires so much VRAM for further details on the situation. But we like to be complete in our testing, so we're including these results for the curious. We won't bother with additional commentary on the charts.

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Nvidia RTX 4060 AI Performance

GPUs are also used with professional applications, AI training and inferencing, and more. Along with our usual professional tests, we've added Stable Diffusion benchmarks on the various GPUs. AI is a fast-moving sector, and it seems like 95% or more of the publicly available projects are designed for Nvidia GPUs. Those Tensor cores aren't just for DLSS, in other words. Let's start with our AI testing and then hit the professional apps.

We're using Automatic1111's Stable Diffusion version for the Nvidia cards, while for AMD we're using Nod.ai's Shark variant — we used the automatic build version 20230521.737 for these results, which is now a month out of date, launched with "--iree_vulkan_target_triple=rdna3-7900-windows" as recommended by AMD, or "rdna2-unknown-windows" for the RX 6000-series (that's the default).

For Intel GPUs, we used a tweaked version of Stable Diffusion OpenVINO. That hasn't been updated in a few months, and we couldn't get 768x768 image generation working, so we'll revisit the Arc results at some point in the future. (When we do, we'll update our main Stable Diffusion benchmarks page... which is also currently outdated.)

Tensor and matrix cores in modern GPUs were created specifically for this type of workload, so it's no surprise that Nvidia and Intel GPUs do quite a bit better than their AMD counterparts. The RTX 4060 can't quite match the RX 7900 XT and XTX at 512x512 image generation (those aren't shown here), but it's quite a bit faster than any other current AMD GPUs, and the (untuned on AMD) 768x768 results favor Nvidia even more.

There are some other interesting things to note. Raw memory bandwidth appears to be a bigger factor here as well, and the 4060 only leads the previous generation 3060 by 6% at 512x512, and 9% for 768x768 images. Along with having less memory, the RTX 4060 clearly isn't going to be an AI powerhouse. It's okay for basic stuff, but that's about it.

Intel's Arc GPUs seem to do decently as well, and perhaps a different library could further narrow the gap. The A770 16GB and A750 both deliver higher output rates than the RX 7600 and RX 6700 XT, for example.

There are other AI workloads, particularly those that use LLMs (Large Language Models) where VRAM capacity can be more important that computational performance. Running a local chatbot as an example required 10GB or even 24GB of VRAM for some of the models, and there are even larger GPT-3 based models for Nvidia's A100/H100 data center GPUs and DGX servers.

Nvidia RTX 4060 Professional Workloads

Most true professional graphics cards cost a lot more than the RTX 4060. They come with drivers that are better tuned for professional applications, at least in some cases, as well as improved support for those applications. Still, you can get by with a consumer GPU like the RTX 4060 in a pinch. Also note that some of our professional tests only run on Nvidia GPUs, so those charts won't have the AMD or Intel cards.

SPECviewperf 2020 consists of eight different benchmarks, and we use the geometric mean from those to generate an aggregate "overall" score. Note that this is not an official score, but it gives equal weight to the individual tests and provides a nice high-level overview of performance. Few professionals use all of these programs, however, so it's typically more important to look at the results for the application(s) you plan to use.

Nvidia's RTX 4060 as expected takes up its now traditional spot behind the RTX 3060 Ti but ahead of the RTX 3060. It manages to (barely) beat the 3060 Ti in one test, energy-03, but overall it's 21% faster than the 3060 and 8% slower than the 3060 Ti.

AMD's RX 7600 — and AMD GPUs in general — do much better in SPECviewperf than the Nvidia consumer GPUs, mostly thanks to the snx-04 test where they're about an order of magnitude faster than their Nvidia counterparts. Intel's Arc GPUs incidentally do okay in a couple of the tests, but generally rank near the bottom of the charts.

For 3D rendering, Blender is a popular open-source rendering application, and we're using the latest Blender Benchmark, which uses Blender 3.50 and three tests. Blender 3.50 includes the Cycles X engine that leverages ray tracing hardware on AMD, Nvidia, and even Intel Arc GPUs. It does so via AMD's HIP interface (Heterogeneous-computing Interface for Portability), Nvidia's OptiX API, and Intel's OneAPI — which means Nvidia GPUs have some performance advantages due to the OptiX API.

This time, the RTX 4060 actually ranks ahead of the RTX 3060 Ti in overall performance. It falls behind in the Junkshop scene, but performs quite a bit better in the Monster and Classroom scenes. AMD GPUs aren't as fast in Blender, or really in any heavy ray tracing apps, and even the RTX 3050 manages to deliver better overall performance.

Our final two professional applications only have ray tracing hardware support for Nvidia's GPUs. OctaneBench puts the RTX 4060 just being the 3060 Ti again, while V-ray has the 4060 nearly tied in CUDA mode, and slightly ahead when using OptiX rendering. The RTX 3060 trails by a decent margin in either case.

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We've been working on this for a while, retesting all the GPUs on our new test PC using an Nvidia PCAT v2 device, and we've finally made the switch from the Powenetics hardware and software we've previously used. The benefit is that we're now using data from our full gaming suite, rather than just a couple of specific tests. The charts are the geometric mean across all 15 games, though we'll also have full tables showing the individual results — some games are more taxing than others, as you'd expect.

Our new testing approach also provides data on GPU clock speeds and temperatures (but not fan speeds), and we'll have separate charts for 1080p medium, 1080p ultra, 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra. Besides the power testing, we also check noise levels using an SPL meter. This is done at a distance of 10cm from in order to minimize noise pollution from other sources (like the CPU cooler).

Starting with power consumption, the RTX 4060 has a nominal TGP (Total Graphics Power) of 115W. However, the Asus RTX 4060 Dual OC appears to have a slightly higher power limit of around 130W, based on our testing. On average, at 1080p ultra the Asus card consumed 125W. The other resolutions and settings don't change that too much, with average power use of 126–127 watts.

The result is a good overall efficiency score of 0.537 FPS/W at 1080p ultra, but that's not as good as the RTX 4060 Ti's 0.597 FPS/W. AMD's RX 7600 meanwhile lands at 0.361 FPS/W, while the RX 6700 XT only achieves 0.320 FPS/W. Overclocking doesn't change the efficiency too much either, with the 4060 OC still getting 0.525 FPS/W. Anyway, depending on where you live and how much you pay for power, these metrics can be an important factor.

Consider a moderate 15 hours per week of gaming (an hour or two on weekdays and then some longer sessions on the weekend). AMD's RX 6700 XT might be generally faster, but it consumes 80W more power. Over time, that adds up to 62 kWh per year. If you're lucky and only pay $0.10 per kWh, that's only $6, but some places like California can pay up to $0.30 per kWh, or $18 per year, and various places in Europe are in the $0.50 per kWh range — $30 per year.

Sure, that's spread out over twelve months, but it's something to think about. You could potentially buy a more efficient GPU and end up paying less in power costs. If you play a lot of games, which we know some people do, the difference in electricity costs could be even wider. It's food for thought, anyway.

GPU clocks aren't super meaningful, in and of themselves, but the Asus RTX 4060 averages about 2750 MHz across our test suite. That's roughly 200 MHz higher than the rated boost clock, which is typical of what we've seen with Nvidia's RTX 40-series GPUs. Our +200 MHz overclock, with a 120% power limit, boosts average GPU clocks to just under 3GHz, a rather impressive result.

It's nice to finally see Nvidia GPUs breaking the 2GHz barrier with ease. Higher clocks can reduce overall efficiency in some cases, but the combination of the Ada Lovelace architecture and TSMC's 4N process node proves potent. You have to wonder if we could start seeing 3GHz and even 4GHz GPUs with the next generation parts.

Temperatures are very good on the Asus RTX 4060 Dual OC. We expected as much, considering the relatively large heatsink, quality fans, and low TGP. On average across our test suite, the Asus card landed just under 60C, with the worst result being 61C in Control.

Overclocking didn't make things worse, thanks to our aggressive fan speed curve, with temperatures still staying under 60C. But temperatures don't exist in a vacuum; we also have to look at noise levels.

With an average power draw of 125W, the Asus card shouldn't have to work too hard to keep temperatures in check. For our noise testing, we run Metro Exodus for over 15 minutes and let things setting down. It's typically one of the most demanding games in our test suite, as far as GPU power draw goes, which means this should be a worst-case scenario for fan speed and noise.

We use an SPL (sound pressure level) meter placed 10cm from the card, with the mic aimed at the center of the right fan on the Asus card. This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources like the fans on the CPU cooler. The noise floor of our test environment and equipment is around 31–32 dB(A).

The Asus RTX 4060 Dual OC settled in at a fan speed of 47% after a few minutes. As expected, it doesn't make too much noise, registering 42.1 dB(A) on our meter. It's not the quietest card around, and we do have to wonder if some company might be daring enough to try a passively cooled RTX 4060. We've seen such cards in the past, and a 125W TGP ought to be manageable, assuming you have a bit of airflow from case fans.

We also tested with a static fan speed of 75%, and the Asus RTX 4060 generated 51.6 dB(A) of noise. The card shouldn't need to hit such a high fan speed under normal use, or even with overclocking, but it does give you some idea of what you can expect in warmer environments.

Here's the full rundown of all of our test results, including performance per watt and performance per dollar columns. We've covered most of this information elsewhere, though the value aspect isn't something we've addressed directly.

As you'd expect, lower priced cards like the RTX 4060 rank higher on the value scale than more expensive cards, though that's only looking at the cost of the GPU and not the full system. Based on current online prices, it's the best value Nvidia GPU, just edging out the RTX 4060 Ti... and the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3060. Those last two are basically on clearance now, though, and any sales are unlikely to last long.

That doesn't mean the RTX 4060 is the best value overall, however. AMD's RX 6600, 6600 XT, and 6650 XT all have slightly better value rankings, and the RX 6700 XT is only a hair behind the 4060. Prices on previous generation graphics cards have also been fluctuating quite a bit, so a good sale could easily push some other card to the top for a bit. Still, the 4060 does offer a good combination of features, price, and efficiency.

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The Nvidia RTX 4060 brings Ada Lovelace down to a truly mainstream price point of $299. That's the same as the launch price of the GTX 1060 6GB Founders Edition back in 2016, $50 cheaper than the RTX 2060 Founders Edition, and $30 cheaper than the RTX 3060 launch price. That's great for mainstream gamers, particularly those who might have a graphics card from several generations back that are looking to upgrade. However, the RTX 4060 definitely makes some compromises, chief among them being the 128-bit memory interface and 8GB of VRAM. Let's put that in perspective.

Last generation's RTX 3060 had a 192-bit interface and 12GB of memory. Prior to that, Nvidia used 192-bit interfaces with 6GB or even 3GB of memory for several generations. The RTX 2060 was a 192-bit interface with 6GB (and later 12GB, though those models came late in the cycle and were rarely seen). GTX 1660-series GPUs were also 192-bit with 6GB of memory. The GTX 1060 had a 192-bit interface, with either 3GB or 6GB. In fact, you have to go all the way back to the GTX 960 from 2015 before you can find an xx60-class Nvidia card that used less than a 192-bit interface.

Viewed in that light, Nvidia has rolled back the clock eight years. Yes, the large L2 cache helps mitigate the memory bandwidth associated with the 128-bit interface, but it really, really sucks that we even need to have this conversation. When Nvidia designed the various Ada Lovelace GPUs, it skimped on memory interface width and thus memory capacity on virtually every model, other than the top-tier RTX 4090. After the RTX 3060 moved to 12GB, it's a slap in the face to go back to 8GB on the mainstream model.

Is it the end of the world? No. Many games will still run fine with 8GB. All games that are coded in an intelligent fashion should have an option for texture settings that won't exceed 8GB at 1440p or 1080p, at least for the next several years. But there will invariably be games that push beyond 8GB, and it's definitely a step back from the 3060's 12GB. We thought we were done with 8GB on cards priced above $300 after the previous generation, but Nvidia giveth, and Nvidia taketh away.

Like the RTX 4060 Ti, we'd feel so much better about the RTX 4060 if it had 12GB of memory and a 192-bit memory interface. We also need to look at generational improvements to see how much Nvidia is counting on "neural rendering" and specifically DLSS 3 Frame Generation to try and tell a story about improved performance.

Based on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy testing, the RTX 2060 delivered 75% higher performance than the prior generation GTX 1060 6GB. There was also the GTX 1660 Super that dropped the ray tracing and DLSS aspects of the Turing architecture and got the price down to $229, while still delivering 40% higher performance than the 1060 6GB. Last generation's RTX 3060 meanwhile was about 30% faster than the RTX 2060 — not a huge improvement in performance, but still pretty reasonable, especially since it came with twice as much VRAM.

The new RTX 4060? It's 22% faster than the RTX 3060 on average, at 1080p, but it also comes with 33% less memory. It's one of the smallest generational improvements we've seen from Nvidia for an xx60-class GPU going back to at least the Maxwell era, and probably further than that.

Nvidia will trot out performance charts like the above showing performance with DLSS upscaling and frame generation to make things look better. If you buy into the marketing, with frame generation (aka, neural rendering), the RTX 4060 offers up to a 70% generational improvement over the RTX 3060. That's a seriously skewed view of how Frame Generation works and how it feels, unfortunately.

In practice, we'd credit Frame Generation with maybe a 15% boost to the overall performance you get from the RTX 4060 and other RTX 40-series GPUs. It's not bad in and of itself, but it's also not ideal. You're trading off lower latency and increased responsiveness for smoother framerates. It's definitely something I can feel when playing games.

There are other concerns as well. For one, DLSS 3 support is far more limited than DLSS 2 support right now. It's in something like 38 games at present, compared to over 300 games with DLSS support in general. But another issue is that we've encountered several DLSS 3 titles where the feature basically broke because of a patch.

When we tested Diablo IV, we found that enabling Frame Generation reduced performance on all of the RTX 40-series GPUs. We haven't confirmed whether the latest game updates have fixed the problem, but even so, it wasn't really needed. For this review, Frame Generation also broke in Forza Horizon 5, though Nvidia's own numbers suggest that it would only have improved performance by about 25% — the reviewer's guide for the 4060 listed 136 fps at 1080p, compared to the 116 fps that we measured.

But again, half of those frames are interpolated, so the base fps — the rate at which user input is sampled — would be 78 compared to the DLSS upscaled without Frame Generation result of 108 fps. Does a real 108 fps feel better than an interpolated 136 fps? Yes, we think it does. Does it look better to the eyes? That's a bit more debatable, though Frame Generation does at least allow people to make better use of high refresh rate monitors.

The RTX 4060 isn't a terrible card by any means. Some people will probably say it is, but across our benchmark suite, it was universally faster than the previous generation RTX 3060 at every setting that mattered (meaning, not counting 4K ultra performance, where neither card delivered acceptable performance). There will be edge cases where it falls behind, like Spider-Man: Miles Morales running 1440p ultra, where minimum fps was clearly worse than on the 3060. But overall? Yes, it's faster than the previous generation, and it even cuts the price by $30 — not that the RTX 3060 was available for $329 during most of its shelf life.

There are other benefits, like the power efficiency. The RTX 3060 consumes about 35W more power than the Asus RTX 4060, for example. Better performance while using less power is a good thing. Other architectural benefits include the AV1 encoding support, and features like Shader Execution Reordering, Opacity Micro-Maps, and Displaced Micro-Meshes might prove beneficial in the future — we wouldn't bet heavily on those, however, as they're all exclusive to the RTX 40-series GPUs right now and require the use of API extensions.

The saving grace for the RTX 4060 is undoubtedly its price tag. AMD already has cards that deliver generally similar performance at the same price, but there are a lot of gamers that stick with Nvidia, regardless of what other GPU vendors might have to offer. Now you can get a latest generation RTX 4060 for $299, with better performance and features than the RTX 3060. Just don't expect it to behave like an RTX 4070 that costs twice as much.

A more benevolent Nvidia, flush with the cryptocurrency and AI profits of the past two years, would have made this an RTX 3050 replacement. With the same $249 price, it would have been an awesome generational improvement, as it's 66% faster than the 3050. That's basically what Nvidia did with the RTX 4090, which is up to 60% faster than the RTX 3090 for nearly the same price. But every step down the RTX 40-series has been a tough pill to swallow.

The RTX 4080 is about 50% faster than the 3080, yet it costs 70% more. The 4070 is 30% faster than the 3070 and costs 20% more. The 4060 Ti has the same launch price as the 3060 Ti, but it's only 12% faster. Now we have the RTX 4060 that undercuts the price of the 3060 by 10% while delivering 20% better performance. That's better than most of its siblings, and maybe there's still hope for an RTX 4050... but probably not.

As with the last several graphics card launches, including the Radeon RX 7600, GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, and GeForce RTX 4070, we end up with similar feelings. It's good that the generational pricing didn't go up with the RTX 4060. For anyone running a GPU that's two or more generations old, the RTX 4060 represents a good upgrade option. But we're still disappointed that Nvidia chose to use a 128-bit interface and 8GB of VRAM for this generation's xx60-class models.

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The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti brings true mainstream pricing to the Ada Lovelace architecture and RTX 40-series GPUs, starting at $399 for the Founders Edition and reference-clocked models. Unfortunately, it also brings a lot of potential compromises into play, chief among them being the 128-bit memory interface and 8GB of VRAM. Nvidia has a potential solution for the capacity problem with a 16GB model planned for release in July, but it won't address any concerns with the memory interface.

Is the RTX 4060 Ti one of the best graphics cards? That largely depends on how many games you play support DLSS 3 and whether you're willing to trade latency for AI-interpolated FPS. Looking at native performance in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy (which will be updated later today), the RTX 4060 Ti comes in just ahead of the RTX 3070 at 1080p, but falls behind the RTX 3060 Ti at 1440p and 4K.

So the good news is that the RTX 4060 Ti is generally faster than the previous generation RTX 3060 Ti at the same price while using less power. It also supports new Ada features like DLSS 3 Frame Generation, SER, DMM, and OMM. The bad news is that it barely surpasses its predecessor overall, and design decisions made years ago are certainly at play.

Let's dive into the spec sheet to see what the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti offers.

That's a crowded table, but the first column is the most pertinent. The RTX 4060 Ti uses Nvidia's new AD106 GPU — the same chip found in the RTX 4070 Laptop GPU, incidentally. You can also see the block diagram for the AD106 chip and the 4060 Ti below, which we'll get to in a moment.

The result is fewer GPU cores than the RTX 3060 Ti, but Nvidia makes up for that with significantly higher core clocks — 2535 MHz boost versus 1665 MHz. As usual, real-world clocks will exceed those values, but in terms of theoretical compute from the shaders and tensor cores, the 4060 Ti delivers 22.1 teraflops versus 16.2 teraflops for FP32, and 177 teraflops versus 130 teraflops for FP16 (with sparsity). The 4060 Ti also supports FP8 mode on its tensor cores, so if/when AI applications add support for that, it can deliver a potential 353 teraflops.

Looking at the competition based on relatively similar pricing, we have AMD's RX 6750 XT with 12GB and Intel's Arc A770 16GB. It's a safe bet that Nvidia can match or exceed those cards when it comes to ray tracing performance and AI workloads — winning the latter by default since it's often the only GPU option supported. On the other hand, rasterization performance will be a lot closer and a more interesting comparison point.

Memory capacity and bandwidth are going to be major factors in performance. 8GB of VRAM shouldn't be a problem for most games running at 1080p, but 1440p and especially 4K could prove problematic. We talked recently about why 4K gaming requires so much more VRAM, and that applies here. Nvidia isn't marketing the RTX 4060 Ti as a 1440p or 4K gaming solution, probably precisely due to its lack of VRAM capacity and bandwidth. That's interesting, as the 3060 Ti and 3070 two years ago were both targeting 1440p.

Fundamentally, Nvidia had a design decision to make several years back when the Ada Lovelace architecture and chips were in the planning phase. There were plenty of other factors to consider, but the ones we're talking about here are simply this: How wide should the memory interface be, and how much L2 cache should there be?

For the RTX 30-series, Nvidia had up to a 384-bit width on GA102 (RTX 3090 Ti down to RTX 3080), up to 256-bit on GA104 (RTX 3070 Ti down to RTX 3060 Ti), up to 192-bit on GA106 (RTX 3060 and 3050), and up to 128-bit on GA107 (mobile RTX 3050 / 3050 Ti and later a desktop 3050) — all with a 1MB L2 cache per 64-bits of interface width. For the RTX 40-series, rather than sticking with similar widths, Nvidia opted for 384-bit on AD102, 256-bit on AD103, 192-bit on AD104, and 128-bit on AD106 and AD107. The L2 cache meanwhile received a big upgrade, up to 16MB per 64 bits of interface width.

The bigger caches certainly pay off in effective bandwidth. There's no question about that. AMD proved that larger caches were a viable tradeoff with the RDNA 2 architecture and Infinity Cache, and Nvidia is doing something similar with Ada. But bigger caches only alleviate the memory bandwidth issue. There's still a capacity constraint with using a narrower interface, and while using "clamshell" memory on both sides of the PCB can at least partly overcome that, it's a more costly approach and doesn't address the raw bandwidth aspect.

Let's be blunt: Nvidia made a cost-saving architectural design decision, and I think many gamers and enthusiasts fundamentally disagree with Nvidia's choices on everything except perhaps AD102 and AD107. If the RTX 4080 had come with a 320-bit interface and 20GB, then 256-bit and 16GB for AD104 and the RTX 4070 Ti/4070, we'd be looking at a 192-bit interface and 12GB on AD106 and the RTX 4060 Ti. And looking at prices right now, we can't even argue that the added cost of more VRAM and a wider memory interface would have been too high.

All indications are that the RTX 40-series GPUs aren't selling particularly well. Part of that comes from the changing economic environment, and part of it certainly comes from the end of GPU mining. But it's also fair to say that a big factor for many gamers and even AI researchers is the lack of tangible performance increases at various tiers, coupled with limited memory options and higher prices. Yes, there's an RTX 4060 Ti 16GB card coming in July. It will still have a 128-bit interface and it will cost $100 extra.

AMD hasn't been doing much better, but the 7900 XTX comes with 24GB, and the 7900 XT offers 20GB. Presumably, we'll see a 16GB 7800 XT and a 12GB 7700 XT at some point in the future. That will be more palatable on some levels than Nvidia's offerings, but then you'll lose out on AI performance and support and ray tracing performance. As the market leader, Nvidia can and really should have done better than this. We had GTX 1070 with 8GB for $379 back in 2016 — 12GB for a $399 graphics card should be the bare minimum we can expect in 2023.

Here are the block diagrams for the RTX 4060 Ti, the full AD106 chip, and the upcoming RTX 4060 / AD107. RTX 4060 Ti is nearly the fully enabled chip, with the only disabled portions being one NVDEC (Nvidia Decoder) block and two SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors). In addition, there's up to 8MB of L2 cache per 32-bit memory channel, for a total of 32MB on the 128-bit interface.

As with other Ada Lovelace chips, AD106 includes Nvidia's 4th-gen Tensor cores, 3rd-gen RT cores, new and improved NVENC/NVDEC units for video encoding and decoding (now with AV1 support), and a significantly more powerful Optical Flow Accelerator (OFA). The latter is used for DLSS 3, and while it's "theoretically" possible to do Frame Generation with the Ampere OFA (or using some other alternative), so far, only RTX 40-series cards can provide that feature. Given the marketing hype around Frame Generation, we also suspect we will never see it on previous-generation GPUs — it's one of the few selling points for the 4060 Ti.

As noted already, the tensor cores now support FP8 with sparsity. It's not clear how useful that is in all workloads, but AI and deep learning have certainly leveraged lower precision number formats to boost performance without significantly altering the quality of the results — at least in some workloads. It will ultimately depend on the work being done, and figuring out just what uses FP8 versus FP16, plus sparsity, can be tricky.

But the VRAM capacity comes up again with AI workloads. Many large language models (LLMs) benefit from lots of memory, and 8GB isn't enough for even some "medium" sized models. So the 4060 Ti 16GB will probably find some uptake by AI researchers just because of its memory capacity — the same as the RTX 4080, for less than half the price.

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Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition Design

In case you missed it, Nvidia is making an RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition with 8GB, but there won't be a 4060 Ti 16GB Founders Edition, nor will there be a vanilla RTX 4060 Founders Edition. It's a curious departure from the previous two generations, where there were FE models for the RTX 2060 and up, and then the RTX 3060 Ti and up. Maybe EVGA's closing up shop (for the GPU division) helped encourage Nvidia not to compete with its AIB partners on every model. Whatever the case, we have the RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition for this review.

If you check out the RTX 4070 Founders Edition photos, you'll notice that there are only a couple of difference. First, the shroud surrounding the cooler on the RTX 4070 is more of a gunmetal gray, while the RTX 4060 Ti is more silver. Second, the (wholly unnecessary) 16-pin adapter for the 4060 Ti only has a single 8-pin connector on the other end. Yes, Nvidia is hellbent on having every Founders Edition card use a 16-pin connector, just like the 30-series FE cards all used a 12-pin connector. Even if that connector means that, once you get the card ready for installation, it's going to look like this:

That five-inch adapter cable doesn't just look dumb, it also gets in the way if you want to install the card in just about any reasonably sized PC case. And the cable is relatively stiff, meaning if your side panel only gives you one or two inches of clearance, that's going to be a tight bend that will put quite a bit of strain on the cable. What could possibly go wrong? Certainly not melting adapters!

Hopefully that won't occur, and the fact that the whole card only has a 160W TGP means that even with a less secure connection, you'll probably be okay. Still, it's an extra piece of kit in the package that serves no useful purpose that we can come up with. Yes, if you have an ATX 3.0 PSU, you could use a direct connection and run software on you PC to monitor the four sense pins. Is that actually useful, particularly on a relatively low power device? We'd argue that no, it is not.

The RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition comes in the same large clamshell box as the other 40-series Founders Editions. Again, that's extra cost that could have gone to something far more beneficial... like a 192-bit memory interface and 12GB VRAM. It could even have been used to add RGB lighting instead. But we digress.

The full dimensions of the RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition are 244x111x40 mm, which again is the same as the RTX 4070 FE. However, the actual PCB (Printed Circuit Board) under the cooler is different, since it's designed for AD106 rather than AD104. That combined with two fewer memory chips means the weight ought to end up being a bit lower, but perhaps there's extra glue or something else to make up the difference. The 4060 Ti weighs 1026g, compared to the 4070's 1021g.

Other than the change in shroud color, you get the same design language as the other 40-series Founders Editions. There are dual fans, measuring 91mm in diameter. One is near the "rear" of the card and sucks air through the radiator, and the other is at the "front" (by the video ports) and pushes air into the radiator and out the IO shield. One benefit of such a design is that it helps to minimize fan noise — you can't have both fans in direct proximity to a noise meter. How much that helps in a typical case is a bit more nebulous, of course.

It's a pretty compact design, and a good fit for mini-ITX cases. Well, except for the protruding 16-pin adapter cable that's likely to get in the way.

The Founders Edition cards look good overall, particularly if you're not a fan of RGB bling. For a lower TGP card like the RTX 4060 Ti, cooling isn't going to be a problem at all, and the design is probably even overkill. That just means less noise, though, which is nice. Note also that the 18Gbps GDDR6 memory probably runs cooler than the GDDR6X used on higher end 40-series cards.

Video outputs consist of the usual triple DisplayPort 1.4a and single HDMI 2.1 outputs. DisplayPort 1.4a has a maximum data bandwidth of 25.92 Gbps, compared to HDMI 2.1's 42 Gbps (after subtracting encoding overhead). With uncompressed signals, that means a maximum of 4K and 98Hz for the DP connection and 8-bit RGB. With DSC (Display Stream Compression), however, you can drive a 4K 240Hz display like the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 we use for testing.

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 Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition Overclocking 

Our overclocking process doesn't aim to fully redline the hardware, but instead looks to find "reasonably stable and safe" overclocks. We start by maxing out the power limit (using MSI Afterburner), which is 109% for the 4060 Ti Founders Edition — and that varies by card manufacturer and model.

Next, we look for the maximum stable GPU core overclock. We were able to hit up to +250 MHz on the RTX 4060 Ti with our initial testing, and backed off slightly to a +225 MHz overclock after additional tuning. Note that there's no way to increase the GPU voltage short of doing a voltage mod, which is often a limiting factor for RTX 40-series cards.

The switch to GDDR6 memory from GDDR6X memory means a drop of about 3 Gbps in general, though we weren't sure how far we'd be able to push the 4060 Ti. It ended up being about the same as many of the GDDR6X cards. We were able to reach +1250 MHz before crashing at +1500 MHz (21 Gbps effective). Because Nvidia has error detection and retry for the VRAM, you don't want to fully max out the memory speed, so we backed off to +1000 MHz (20 Gbps). We're not certain what memory chips are used, so perhaps they're rated for 20 Gbps.

With both the GPU and VRAM overclocks and a fan curve set to ramp from 30% at 30C up to 100% at 80C, we were able to run our full suite of gaming tests at 1080p and 1440p ultra without any issues. We'll include those results in the charts.

The above image shows the results of our overclocked settings, as well as a limited view of power, clocks, and temperatures (via Afterburner's line charts). The AD106 GPU ran quite cool, as did the GDDR6 memory. You can also see that GPU clocks were hitting around 3000 MHz while running games.

As is always the case with overclocking, there's trial and error. Our results aren't particularly aggressive, but they still may not represent what you can achieve with a different card — even other RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition cards may show slightly different results. Our focus is first on stability (any crash means we drop clocks and try again until we don't get any problems), with maximum performance being a secondary concern.

Across our test suite, the above overclock improved performance by 7% on average at 1080p ultra, and 8% at 1440p ultra. Bright Memory Infinite Benchmark showed the largest change at up to 13% higher performance, while many other games only showed a 5–7 percent increase in performance.

Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti Test Setup

We updated our GPU test PC at the end of last year with a Core i9-13900K, though we continue to also test reference GPUs on our 2022 system that includes a Core i9-12900K for our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. (We'll be updating that later today, once the embargo has passed.) Our RTX 4060 Ti review will use the 13900K results for gaming tests, which ensures, as much as possible, that we're not CPU limited. We also use the 2022 PC for AI tests and the professional workloads.

Multiple games have been updated over the past few months. We retested most of the cards for the RTX 4070 review, and we've retested additional midrange cards for this review. We're running Nvidia preview 531.93 drivers for the 4060 Ti, while other Nvidia cards were tested with 531.41–531.79 drivers. For AMD, the GPUs used 23.2.1–23.4.2 drivers. Intel's Arc A770 cards were (re)tested with the latest 4369 drivers.

Our current test suite consists of 15 games. Of these, nine support DirectX Raytracing (DXR), but we only enable the DXR features in six of the games. At the time of testing, 12 of the games support DLSS 2, five support DLSS 3, and five support FSR 2. We'll cover DLSS performance in a separate section on upscaling.

We tested the 4060 Ti at 1080p (medium and ultra), 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra — ultra being the highest supported preset if there is one, and in some cases maxing out all the other settings for good measure (except for MSAA or super sampling). We'll only have limited commentary on the 4K results, as the 4060 Ti generally isn't intended to work well at that resolution (at least not in more demanding games).

Our PC is hooked up to a Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32, one of the best gaming monitors around, allowing us to fully experience some of the higher frame rates that might be available. G-Sync and FreeSync were enabled, as appropriate. As you can imagine, getting anywhere close to the 240 Hz limit of the monitor proved difficult, as we don't have any esports games in our test suite.

When we assembled the new test PC, we installed all of the then-latest Windows 11 updates. We're running Windows 11 22H2, but we've used InControl to lock our test PC to that major release for the foreseeable future (critical security updates still get installed each month).

Our new test PC includes Nvidia's PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll cover those results in our page on power use.

Finally, because GPUs aren't purely for gaming these days, we've run some professional application tests, and we also ran some Stable Diffusion benchmarks to see how AI workloads scale on the various GPUs.

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With a starting price of $399, the RTX 4060 Ti lands firmly in mainstream GPU territory. Sure, the GTX 970 back in 2014 was a "high-end" GPU with a price of $329, but things have changed quite a bit over the ensuing nine years. Nvidia says the RTX 4060 Ti is intended primarily for 1080p gamers, and points to the Steam Hardware Survey where 65% of surveyed PCs still have 1080p as their primary monitor's resolution.

Of course, the Steam survey also includes a lot of laptops, which by their very nature will often be limited to 1080p — and probably 99% of the 1366x768 results are from laptops as well. The RTX 3060 Ti meanwhile launched as a 1440p solution and still generally works fine as a 1080p solution. But whatever you might think, 1080p monitors remain very popular. We'll cover 1440p, 4K, and upscaling performance on the next three pages, though, because those are still important.

Our new test regimen gives us a global view of performance using the geometric mean all 15 games, including both the ray tracing and rasterization test suites. Then we've got separate charts for only the rasterization and ray tracing suites, plus charts for the individual games. If you don't like the "overall performance" chart, the other two are the same view that we've previously presented.

Our test suite is intentionally heavier on ray tracing games than what you might normally encounter. That's largely because ray tracing games tend to be the most demanding options, so if a new card can handle ray tracing reasonably well, it should do just fine with less demanding games. Ray tracing also feels increasingly like something we can expect to run well, when optimized properly, and Nvidia's hardware proves what's possible. We're at the stage now where mainstream GPUs need to be better than the previous generation RTX 3060, across all APIs. That's my take at least.

We have two charts, 1080p ultra and 1080p medium. Ultra settings feels like a better option for a $399 graphics card than 1080p medium, so we'll focus on that — the medium results aren't radically different, though. Right out of the gates we get some interesting results. The RTX 4060 Ti ranks ahead of the RTX 3070, barely, and also outpaces AMD's RX 6800.

That's because of the ray tracing games, though we'd argue that support for DLSS would make the big picture pretty close to this even if you discount ray tracing — and then you could discount DLSS as well. Anyway, we'll have the pure rasterization results momentarily.

Being faster than the RTX 3070 is at least something, but the lead is very slim, and the RTX 3060 Ti isn't far behind either. Gen on gen, we're looking at native performance that's only 13% faster with the RTX 4060 Ti.

Overall, the RTX 4060 Ti averages 83 fps at 1080p ultra, easily clearing the 60 fps threshold. However, the most demanding games — or more specifically, half of the ray tracing games — come up short of that mark. Less demanding titles meanwhile can push into the triple digits.

At 1080p medium, average fps jumps to 129, and now everything breaks the 60 fps mark... except Cyberpunk 2077, which will need upscaling or Frame Generation to get there.

AMD's GPUs move up the charts when we leave out ray tracing, but the 4060 Ti still comes in just ahead of the RTX 3070. It also leads the RX 6700 XT, though that's now a less expensive card by $50 or so. Compared to its predecessor, the RTX 3060 Ti, the margin of victory remains mostly the same at 13% for 1080p ultra, and a slightly lower 11% for 1080p medium.

It's technically a win for the new graphics card, but not a resounding victory by any stretch. As we mentioned in the intro, new mainstream cards don't really deliver new levels of performance. What they do is bring higher performance at lower prices, but in this case it's only an incremental increase.

We normally say a 20% improvement is the minimum you'd need to really feel the difference. Compared to the RTX 3060 Ti, at least without enabling DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, the 4060 Ti mostly fails to reach that level of performance. That's unfortunate, and it probably also helps explain why Nvidia isn't increasing the generational pricing by $100 or more like it did with the RTX 4070 and higher GPUs.

Across the nine rasterization games, at 1080p ultra the 4060 Ti leads the previous generation 3060 Ti by anywhere from 6% (Horizon Zero Dawn) to 17% (Flight Simulator). At 1080p medium, the range is from 1% (HZD) to 15% (Far Cry 6).

In our ray tracing test suite, we'd expect slightly improved results from the RTX 4060 Ti. After all, Nvidia says it improved the RT hardware units compared to the Ampere version — though none of the games we're currently testing utilize SER (Shader Execution Reordering), OMM (Opacity Micro-Maps), or DMM (Displacement Micro-Meshes). It's not a massive change, but there are a few cases where the 4060 Ti increases its lead over the 3060 Ti.

Overall, it's still 13% faster at 1080p ultra, but it's also 16% faster at 1080p medium. The range of improvement is 9% to 17% for ultra settings, and 4% to 24% for medium. The biggest improvements were in the medium test in Bright Memory Infinite Benchmark and Metro Exodus Enhanced.

AMD's RX 6800 meanwhile falls below the 3060 Ti, and in fact the 4060 Ti basically matches the overall ray tracing performance (in our test suite, at least) of the RX 6900 XT... while using half as much power.

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Stepping up to 1440p causes some issues at times with the RTX 4060 Ti. Part of that is the 8GB of VRAM, but just as critical is the 32MB L2 cache and 128-bit memory interface. Those are generally sufficient for 1080p but start to hinder performance at higher resolutions, as we'll see here.

The RTX 4060 Ti was slightly faster overall compared to the RTX 3070 at 1080p, but now it trails slightly. The RX 6800 also pulls ahead, and the lead over the 3060 Ti shrinks to just over 10%.

The good news is that the RTX 4060 Ti can still handle 1440p gaming, especially if the games you want play support DLSS. The overall average of 57 fps may fall below the 'magical' 60 fps mark, but eight of the games still exceed 60 fps. As you might expect, none of those eight are heavy ray tracing games.

Rasterization performance is pretty good, at least if you're just looking at the fps rather than the competition. With 75 fps in aggregate and only one game (A Plague Tale: Requiem) failing to break 60 fps, 1440p will definitely be playable for a lot of games.

The gap between the 4060 Ti and 3060 Ti remains about 10% overall, but that's enough to give Nvidia a clear lead over the 6700 XT. We don't have full results for the 6750 XT, but it's typically only about 5% faster than the earlier card, meaning Nvidia should still maintain a slight lead there as well.

Ray tracing at 1440p without upscaling will be a bit too demanding for many games. Control and Metro Exodus Enhanced are right around the 30 fps minimum for what we would deem "playable," while Spider-Man: Miles Morales manages 40 fps. The other three ray tracing games on the other hand deliver 20 fps or less and aren't really a good experience without higher upscaling ratios.

The 4060 Ti still leads AMD's RX 6700 XT by a sizeable margin for ray tracing — by 54% overall. A big part of that is Minecraft, where Nvidia is over twice as fast, but the closest result for AMD is in Spider-Man, and Nvidia still has a 17% lead there. If you want a faster solution from AMD for ray tracing games, you'd still need an RX 6800 XT to match the 4060 Ti at 1440p ultra.

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The RTX 4060 Ti isn't really designed for 4K gaming, unless you're only playing lighter esports fare. It's still fast enough to break 30 fps in a lot of games, but the limited VRAM and memory interface are definitely a concern. Less demanding games may run perfectly fine, but our demanding test suite will put the hurt on modest GPUs.

We're including these results just to give you an idea of how the 4060 Ti manages with 4K gaming, but we're not going to say much else. We didn't test every card at 4K, for what should hopefully be obvious reasons. Anyway, enjoy the charts!

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GeForce RTX 4060 Ti: DLSS Upscaling and Frame Generation

We've elected to put all the upscaling and frame generation results into separate charts, since this gives us a chance to better explain what you'll see. Our test suite has DLSS 2 support in 12 games, and DLSS 3 in five games — FSR 2 is also in five games, but we didn't test that after seeing how it fared in the RTX 4070 review. (Short summary: generally similar performance to DLSS 2 with slightly worse image quality, so if you have an RTX card you should just use DLSS.) None of the games in our test suite are FSR 2 exclusive, though there certainly are games that fall into that category.

DLSS 3 and particularly Frame Generation require a bit more explanation of the results. Upscaling provides a boost to performance and in turn results in lower latencies. Image fidelity might drop a bit, depending on the setting, but from the performance side it's usually a clear win. Frame Generation on the other hand introduces latency — we'll show just how much in some tables below. One of the best things about DLSS 3 support is that it requires the games to also support Nvidia Reflex, plus it's "backward compatible" with DLSS 2 upscaling.

If you don't have an RTX 40-series card, a game with DLSS 3 support should still let you enable DLSS 2 upscaling and Reflex low latency, or you can leave off Frame Generation on a 40-series card. That could potentially make Frame Generation look bad, and we've notice at least one or two games with DLSS 3 integration where you can't enable Reflex separately from Frame Generation. (Forza Horizon 5 is like this, and I'm pretty sure Hogwarts Legacy restricts the use of Reflex as well.)

This is irritating, and we're not sure if it's Nvidia encouraging this, or just game developers that aren't fully versed in the technologies. So let's make it simple: If you're a game dev reading this, don't lock Reflex behind having Frame Generation turned on. It's that simple. And if you're a gamer, don't forget to enable Reflex on RTX GPUs if it's available — and remember that sometimes it's under the video settings rather than with the graphics settings. (Reflex+Boost can further reduce latency, but potentially at the cost of average FPS, so we test with that off.)

Shenanigans aside, DLSS 3 and Frame Generation aren't inherently bad. Games look a bit smoother, and for non-twitch gamers like myself, that's enough for me to enable them when I'm just playing games. However, Nvidia's marketing behind DLSS 3 still raises some warning flags. The biggest problem we have is that FPS charts make Frame Generation look a lot better than it feels in our experience.

Charts like the above comparing DLSS 3 performance (upscaling plus Reflex plus Frame Generation) against DLSS 2 (upscaling along) are at best overstating the performance gains. 50% higher fps thanks to Frame Generation usually feels more like 10–20 percent higher "real" performance. Maybe. Lop off about two thirds of the 4060 Ti's light green bar advantage over the 3060 Ti's white bar and you'd have a more realistic representation of what games feel like. Except you can't really capture that via benchmarking, and Nvidia is more than happy to use these results because they make the 40-series look far better.

You need to consider both FPS and latency, which is something Nvidia does talk about. The problem is that raw charts don't adequately convey things for most people. It's easy enough to see 100ms or higher latency and know that's bad, but at what point does it stop mattering? For some, maybe it's 30–40 ms; for others, maybe 20ms. It also depends on the type of game, so a fast-paced shooter will benefit more from reduced latency than a game like Cyberpunk 2077.

Okay, enough preamble. Let's get to the upscaling and Frame Generation results. We've labeled games that use DLSS 2 upscaling (and possibly Reflex) with "DLSS," while games using DLSS 3 upscaling, Frame Generation, and Reflex are marked with "FG." We've tested with "Quality" mode upscaling in all cases, except for Minecraft where the game uses Quality upscaling (2X) for 1080p and Balanced upscaling (3X) for 1440p, with no way to change that.

Here are the results, one game at a time, with 1080p medium/ultra and 1440p ultra results in each game. Note also that Flight Simulator doesn't let you enable Frame Generation without turning on DX12 rendering, which actually hurts performance for native and DLSS modes. We used DX12 for all three tests, which is why the numbers for native are slightly lower than those on the previous pages. The RTX 4070 is included as a point of reference for how upscaling can often more than make up for the difference between a GPU and the next higher tier of GPU (plus my charting tool needs at least three results in a chart to function properly).

We'll dispense with the commentary, and all of the galleries have 1440p ultra, then 1080p ultra, and finally 1080p medium as that's how we'd rate the priority of upscaling algorithms.

RTX 4060 Ti Upscaling, the Bottom Line

Upscaling technologies can be very beneficial, particularly on mainstream hardware that otherwise might struggle to handle higher quality settings and resolutions. Outside of games that are completely CPU limited, like Flight Simulator, DLSS 2 upscaling in Quality mode improved performance by 10–35 percent in rasterization workloads. Not too shabby for cutting the number of fully rendered pixels in half.

But the gains in ray tracing are even more impressive. While 1080p medium still has a few games that improved by 20% or less, at 1080p ultra the DXR test suite overall was 55% faster, and at 1440p ultra that increased to 69%. It was also enough of a boost to push several games past 60 fps at 1440p.

DLSS 3's Frame Generation provides the potential to boost performance even more, though our results were a bit hit and miss. Cyberpunk 2077 fps improved by 150–170 percent, A Plague Tale: Requiem fps increased by up to 98% at 1440p, and both Spider-Man and Flight Simulator saw gains of up to 90%. Only Forza Horizon 5 showed a mediocre result. with 20–30 percent higher fps.

But as noted above, a big increase in fps (or in this case, unique frames shown on the screen) doesn't always feel a lot faster. Forza Horizon 5 felt about the same to me. Cyberpunk definitely looked and felt smoother, but still probably only 20% faster (compared to DLSS 2 upscaling).

Looking forward, we expect even more games will start to adopt DLSS and/or FSR2. The whole process is relatively streamlined now, and once you add one upscaling solution, it should be pretty simple to add others. And besides, having choice is good.

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Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti AI Performance

GPUs are also used with professional applications, AI training and inferencing, and more. Along with our usual professional tests, we've added Stable Diffusion benchmarks on the various GPUs. AI is a fast-moving sector, and it seems like 95% or more of the publicly available projects are designed for Nvidia GPUs. Those Tensor cores aren't just for DLSS, in other words. Let's start with our AI testing and then hit the professional apps.

We're using Automatic1111's Stable Diffusion version for the Nvidia cards, while for AMD we're using Nod.ai's Shark variant — we used the automatic build version 20230521.737 for testing, launched with "--iree_vulkan_target_triple=rdna3-7900-windows" as recommended by AMD, or "rdna2-unknown-windows" for the RX 6000-series (that's the default). The Nvidia GPUs were tested after replacing the default CUDA DLL files with newer versions, as recommended by Nvidia.

This particular sort of workload is ideally suited to the tensor cores in Nvidia's RTX GPUs. The RTX 3060 more than doubles the Stable Diffusion throughput of the RX 6800 for 512x512 images, and triples the 768x768 performance. We do need to mention that Nod.ai doesn't have "tuned" performance for 768x768, at least with the version of Shark Stable Diffusion that we used, and that's likely a factor. Still, we've been waiting to see improved 768x768 throughput for several months now.

The RTX 4060 Ti takes up its standard position in the charts otherwise, with performance just a bit below the RTX 3070 but also a bit ahead of the RTX 3060 Ti. Like many other workloads, Stable Diffusion is perfectly fine with using the larger L2 cache to overcome the reduction in memory bandwidth.

There are other AI workloads, particularly those that use LLMs (Large Language Models) where VRAM capacity can be more important that computational performance. For example, when we last poked around with running a local chatbot, some of the models required 10GB or even 24GB of VRAM just to run — and there are even larger models for Nvidia's A100/H100 data center GPUs and DGX servers.

Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti Professional Workloads

SPECviewperf 2020 consists of eight different benchmarks, and we use the geometric mean from those to generate an aggregate "overall" score. Note that this is not an official score, but it gives equal weight to the individual tests and provides a nice high-level overview of performance. Few professionals use all of these programs, however, so it's typically more important to look at the results for the application(s) you plan to use.

Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti does battle with the RTX 3060 Ti here, winning in some tests and losing in others. Overall, it lands between the 3060 Ti and 3070 once again, but 3D Studio Max as an example either prefers the higher raw memory bandwidth of the 3060 Ti, or else it's simply better tuned for the Ampere architecture.

For its part, AMD released drivers that provided a substantial boost to SPECviewperf scores last year. AMD GPUs score particularly well in snx-04 (or if you prefer, Nvidia's consumer RTX cards do very poorly). AMD also tends to score higher in catia-06, creo-03, energy-03, and medical-03, while Nvidia GPUs do better in 3dsmax-07 — with maya-06 and solidworks-07 being more neutral.

To match the RX 6000-series GPUs in some workloads, you'd need one of Nvidia's professional cards. (Also: No, I'm not sure why the RX 6600 performed so well. I tested it alongside the RX 6600 XT and RX 6650 XT within the past 24 hours, and it simply performed better for some reason.) Anyway, if you use any of these applications on a regular basis, that could be enough to sway your GPU purchasing decision.

Moving on to 3D rendering, Blender is a popular open-source rendering application, and we're using the latest Blender Benchmark, which uses Blender 3.50 and three tests. Blender 3.50 includes the Cycles X engine that leverages ray tracing hardware on AMD, Nvidia, and even Intel Arc GPUs. It does so via AMD's HIP interface (Heterogeneous-computing Interface for Portability), Nvidia's CUDA or OptiX APIs, and Intel's OneAPI — which means Nvidia GPUs have some performance advantages due to the OptiX API.

The RTX 4060 Ti falls just behind the RTX 3060 in the Junkshop scene, but then it performs better than the RTX 3070 Ti in Monster and Classroom. AMD GPUs don't do nearly as well, and even the RTX 3060 comes out ahead of the RX 6750 XT and RX 6800. (And again, we have a case where one of AMD's GPUs seems to underperform, as normally the RX 6800 should be a bit faster.) Overall, Blender performance ends up being a strong point for the RTX 40-series GPUs.

Our final two professional applications only have ray tracing hardware support for Nvidia's GPUs. OctaneBench puts the RTX 4060 Ti roughly on par with the RTX 3070 (slightly ahead overall), while V-ray has the 4060 Ti trailing by just a hair. The RTX 4070 meanwhile delivers substantially higher performance than the 4060 Ti in these tests.

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We've been working on this for a while, retesting all the GPUs on our new test PC using an Nvidia PCAT v2 device, and we're finally making the switch from the Powenetics hardware and software we've previously used. The benefit is that we're now using data from our full gaming suite, rather than just a couple of specific tests. The charts are the geometric mean across all 15 games, though we'll also have full tables showing the individual results — some games are more taxing than others, as you'd expect.

Our new testing approach also provides data on GPU clock speeds and temperatures (but not fan speeds), and we'll have separate charts for 1080p ultra, 1080p medium, 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra. Besides the power testing, we also check noise levels using an SPL meter. This is done at a distance of 10cm from in order to minimize noise pollution from other sources (like the CPU cooler).

Let's start with power consumption, with the RTX 4060 Ti having a rated 160W TGP (Total Graphics Power). On average, at 1080p ultra the Founders Edition consumed 139W. Dropping to medium settings while still at 1080p reduced the average power use a bit more, to 136W. Meanwhile, going up to 1440p and 4K ultra bumps the power use to 144W.

While the overall performance from the RTX 4060 Ti might not excite, the power efficiency is excellent. It's the lowest power draw of any of the GPUs that we included in our tests, and the only cards that use less power will be slower options like the RX 6600, 6500 XT, and 6400. Nvidia's GTX 16-series cards also use less power, but of course those are several years old and lack any of the modern RTX features, plus they're quite a bit slower than the 4060 Ti.

As you'll see below, average power use in the various games at our test settings ranged from a low of 104W (Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K, where it basically choked due to a lack of VRAM) to a high of 164W (quite a few games landed around that level, at 1440p and 4K).

Next up are the GPU clocks, and once again the RTX 4060 Ti sits at the top of the charts. While the official boost clock is 2535 MHz, in testing the card averaged close to 2.8 GHz — 2795/2793 MHz at 1080p medium/ultra, 2785 MHz at 1440p ultra, and 2780 MHz at 4K ultra.

Of course we're aggregating all of the results into a single number for these charts, but you can see the individual results further down the page. There's really not that wide of a range in our testing. Across all 60 tests, the highest GPU clock was 2820 MHz (Far Cry 6 at 1080p medium), while the lowest GPU clock was 2721 MHz (A Plague Take: Requiem at 4K ultra). If we drop the 1080p medium and 4K ultra results from the list, the clock range shrinks a bit to 2732–2805 MHz.

The overclocking results are also fun, with average clocks of over 3.0 GHz. That's pretty impressive for stock cooling!

Finally, temperatures also look really good on the RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition. Worst-case, we saw a maximum of 65C in our tests, while less demanding games wer in the 48–52 degrees Celsius range. That's hardly surprising, as the RTX 4070 FE already did quite well, so having a lower TGP means the fans don't need to work as hard and temperatures still end up a bit lower.

The RTX 4060 Ti doesn't take the top spot in every chart — RX 6600 XT pulls ahead at 1080p/1440p ultra — but it's always in first or second place. Note also that the RX 6600 XT isn't a reference card; it's an ASRock Phantom Gaming triple-fan solution. That's pretty much overkill for a GPU that only uses around 150W, and the card's dimensions are substantially larger than the 4060 Ti FE.

Given what we saw in the power and temperature charts, you'd expect the RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition to be pretty quiet. Still, it's good to have confirmation. We use a stress test running Metro Exodus for our noise testing, as it's one of the more power hungry games.

We check noise levels using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter placed 10cm from the card, with the mic aimed right at the center of one fan: the center fan if there are three fans, or the the right fan for two fans — or the only fan facing to the left of the card in the case of the RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition. This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources like the fans on the CPU cooler. The noise floor of our test environment and equipment is around 31–32 dB(A).

After leaving Metro Exodus running for over 15 minutes, the RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition had a fan speed of just 30% — the minimum before the fan just gets shut off — with a noise level of 38.8 dB(A). That's a bit quieter than the RTX 4070 FE, but basically within margin of error.

We also tested with a static fan speed of 75%, which caused the RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition to generate 58.9 dB(A) of noise. Strangely, that's significantly louder than the RTX 4070 FE, so there are some differences, even if the cards otherwise look identical. Regardless, we don't expect the card would normally ever hit that level without overclocking, but it does give you some idea of what you can expect in warmer environments.

Here's the full rundown of all of our test results, including performance per watt and performance per dollar columns. We won't dig into the details much here, as we've already covered most of this information elsewhere. Still, the RTX 4060 Ti does quite well in the value and efficiency metrics. Note that we used the lowest priced card we could find online for the tables — for a reputable model from a reputable online site. You could find used cards on eBay for a lot less money in some cases, but buying a used graphics card has more associated risks.

Among Nvidia RTX GPUs, the RTX 4060 Ti currently represents the best overall value. That's hardly surprising, since it's faster than the previous generation at roughly the same price. AMD's RX 6600- and 6700-class GPUs do beat the 4060 Ti in FPS/$ in some cases, but it's relatively close. Of course, if you only look at the rasterization results, AMD does even better, while the ray tracing results favor the 4060 Ti. Same old story, in other words.

Another potentially good value is the Intel Arc A750, which can now be picked up for just $199.99 — half the price of the RTX 4060 Ti. It's not as efficient, and there are still occasional driver hiccups, but the price is hard to beat.

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Nvidia's RTX 40-series has been controversial for a variety of reasons, and the RTX 4060 Ti will continue that trend. It's not that this is a bad card, as the efficiency shows significant improvements over the previous generation. The price of entry, relative to the RTX 3060 Ti, also remains unchanged. The problem is that Nvidia's trimming of memory channels and capacity is very much felt here, and we can only look forward to similar concerns on the future RTX 4060 and RTX 4050.

The performance ends up being a bit of a mix, with native rendering showing only relatively minor improvements compared to the prior RTX 3060 Ti. There are even some instances where the new card falls behind — specifically, any situation where the 8GB VRAM and reduced bandwidth come into play.

Nvidia seems to be counting on DLSS 3 support as a major selling point for the RTX 40-series yet again. It's not that we actively dislike DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, but there are compromises, and Frame Generation performance charts can be somewhat misleading when it comes to the actual feel of games. Anyone who's highly sensitive to input lag will probably want to leave it toggled off.

Mainstream graphics cards are never the sexiest offerings around. In this case, we've had similar levels of performance from the RTX 3070 and 3070 Ti since late-2020 and mid-2021, respectively. Granted, those were both nearly impossible to find at anything approaching a reasonable price until mid-2022, so getting a replacement that's hopefully readily available will certainly attract some buyers. Just don't go upgrading from an RTX 3060 Ti, or you'll be very disappointed in the lack of tangible performance improvements.

As we mentioned earlier, we'd feel a lot better about the RTX 4060 Ti if it had 12GB of memory and a 192-bit memory interface. Nvidia likely decided to go with a 128-bit bus and 8GB of VRAM around the time the RTX 30-series was shipping, but we still feel it wasn't the ideal choice. At least there will be a 16GB 4060 Ti in July, but the extra $100 puts you that much closer to getting an even better card like the RTX 4070. Or maybe AMD will have a new generation RX 7700/7800-series card priced at $500 or less by then.

Anyone using a graphics card at least two generations old will find a bit more to like about the RTX 4060 Ti. It's not a huge boost in performance over the 3060 Ti, but it does come with some useful new extras, like AV1 encoding support. It's also a more compact card than a 3060 Ti, so it can fit in a smaller case, and it ran cool and quiet in our testing.

It might be the best $400 card on the market right now, but that doesn't make it the best card overall. AMD's RX 6700-class GPUs may not have all the extras that Nvidia offers, but they do have 12GB (or at least 10GB) of memory, and you can practically pick them up for a song. The RX 6700 10GB starts at $269 on Amazon, while the base model RX 6700 XT costs $319 on Newegg. There's also the Arc A750 for $199 to consider. Is the RTX 4060 Ti worth twice the admission price? For some people, yes.

Retail availability of the RTX 4060 Ti is set for May 24, with both custom and reference clocked cards ready to hit the store shelves. AMD is rumored to be shipping the RX 7600, but we'll have to wait to see how that stacks up.

The bottom line is that you could certainly do worse than an RTX 4060 Ti. You could also do a lot better, if by "better" you mean "faster." Its just likely to cost you a whole lot extra to move up to the next faster Nvidia graphics card.

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One of Nvidia's Best graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 3060, has dropped from first place in the latest Steam Hardware Survey, falling to third place in just one month. Well, sort of. There was some very unusual data in last month's Steam Hardware Survey, which caused several Nvidia GPUs to spike extraordinarily high in adoption rates. Things have apparently been corrected, with the affected GPUs returning to normal.

The adoption rates, particularly for the RTX 3060 (desktop and laptop variants), GTX 1060, RTX 2060, and GTX 1650 changed drastically in Steam's Hardware Survey during the month of April (which reports on GPU market share in March). The RTX 3060 (desktop) sat at the top, replacing the GTX 1650 as the most popular GPU among Steam gamers and garnering a whopping 6.31% increase in "market share" in just a single month's time.

The second place position was also shaken up with the RTX 2060 replacing the GTX 1060, garnering an impressive (and highly unlikely) 3.42% uptick in popularity among Steam gamers, with the GTX 1060 falling to third place as a result. But the GTX 1060 also saw an unusually high 2.57% uptick in adoption rates as well. Filling out the rest of the top five GPUs in April were the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti, which both had outlier increases of 2.52% and 2.14%, respectively. Meanwhile, users with RTX 3060 Laptop GPUs saw a big drop to eighth place, where previously (before April) it was in third place.

This was all quite unusual, as the month-to-month GPU changes typically vary by less than 0.5% in the Steam Hardware Survey. Increases and decreases of several percent obviously indicated something went very wrong with Steam's data collection. With that issue fixed, we're greeted by similarly large changes in the opposite direction for May's results.

Steam Survey Results for May 2023

The Steam Hardware Survey for May (which looks at GPU market share for April) has reshuffled all the affected GPUs back to their normal hierarchy from before April. That means the GTX 1650 is once more in first place, with the GTX 1060 in second. There are a few other changes since we last reported on the Steam Hardware Survey in February.

The RTX 3060 desktop card now sits in third place, with the RTX 3060 Laptop GPU right below it, and the RTX 2060 takes the fifth spot. Before (in February), the RTX 3060 desktop card wasn't even in the top 5 list, with the RTX 3060 laptop GPU sitting in third place, RTX 2060 in fourth, and the GTX 1050 Ti in fifth.

However, those rankings can vary by GPU generation, as Steam lumps certain mobile and desktop GPUs together (e.g. GTX 1650 includes laptops and desktops), while newer models are broken apart (e.g. RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Laptop GPU). Combining all results for a particular model number (so all RTX 3060 SKUs including desktop, mobile, non-Ti, and Ti parts), the RTX 3060 series is by far the most popular with a market share of 13.44%. Second place goes to the GTX 1650 series at 8.83%, then GTX 1660 series at 6.93%, GTX 2060 series at 6.34%, and RTX 3070 series at 6.12%.

In terms of generational popularity, the RTX graphics cards continue to hold a massive lead over the competition, with the 30-series coming in with 29% market share and the RTX 20-series with 11% market share. Unsurprisingly, RTX 40-series meanwhile sits at just 1.61% total, which itself is double last month's figure. AMD's various GPUs aren't doing nearly as well, with 2.97% among all RX 6000-series cards, 1.42% for all RX 5000-series parts, and 3.38% for the RX 500-series. All Vega-series GPUs (which includes integrated parts) account for 2.03%. AMD's latest RX 7000-series remains MIA, as far as the Steam Hardware Survey is concerned.

Here's the top 20 GPUs from the past month, according to Steam. We're using adjusted data from the API page, where we sum up the entire column of results and then divide each GPU by the total sum. That's because, for reasons unknown, the columns don't sum to 100% — April's total for DX12 systems is 91.53%, for example. We figure anything that isn't a DX12-capable GPU and thus isn't in the table... shouldn't count!

We've also broken down the totals by GPU family, though the Vega group includes both desktop Vega 64/Vega 56 cards as well as mobile Vega GPUs that are of an entirely different performance class.

Zhihui Microelectronics, a China-based developer of graphics processors, has introduced its first GPU. The graphics chip targets a performance level to that of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1650 while promising a higher energy efficiency. 

Zhihui's IDM929 graphics processor is based on the company's proprietary IDMV architecture, but the company does not disclose its feature set. The only things we know is that the GPU has a pixel fill rate of 19.2 GPixels/s, a texture fill rate of 76.8 GTexel/s and compute performance of 2.5 TFLOPS (presumably FP32), which is comparable to that of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1650 (which was released in mid-2020). The graphics processor also supports video decoding in H.264, MPEG2, MPEG4, VC-1, DivX, and VP6 formats. Meanwhile, the unit has four display engines and supports DVI, HDMI, and D-Sub/VGA interfaces. 

The GPU is made using a 14nm-class process technology, which could possibly mean that it is made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC). It has a clock frequency of up to 1.2 GHz, which is a relatively low frequency for a chip made on a 14nm node. It is possible that at 1.2 GHz, the chip has a very low power consumption.  

From a performance point of view, it is unlikely that the IDM 929 will join the ranks of the best graphics cards for gaming, but since this is the first GPU from Zhihui, it was unlikely to compete against top graphics boards from AMD and Nvidia. Still, performance of GeForce GTX 1650 is enough for office PCs and even for basic home theater PCs. 

Zhihui Microelectronics is a new name in the rapidly developing Chinese GPU industry, but its main investor Hangzhou Guoxin Technology is a relatively well-known developer of embedded system-on-chips for applications like TVs. That said, it is possible that Zhihui will target primarily embedded applications, at least initially. Meanwhile, Zhihui and Guoxin intend to offer a platform consisting of a CPU and GPU, though it is not directly said whether it will be aimed at PCs or embedded applications.

China's Moore Treads MTT S80 graphics card has been tested in a suite of games by TechTuber BullsLab Jay. They say these GPUs only come up for sale occasionally in small batches, so they were fortunate to be able to grab one.

In brief, the 12nm, 4096 core GPU with 16GB of GDDR6 and a TGP of 250W is disappointing in gaming, as it was consistently outgunned by the GT 1030 2GB with a 30W TGP. Moreover, the card seemed to be restricted to DX9 gaming at the time of review (it is advertised as DX11-capable) and its AV1 codec acceleration was also lacking. Last but not least, BullsLab Jay’s investigation shows that the MTT S80 relies on a PowerVR-based GPU architecture – so its mysterious Chunxaio GPU with MUSA cores has now been unmasked.

In the BullsLab Jay video, you can see the Moore Threads graphics card unboxed, tested and disassembled. If you open the link you can watch it with closed-captioned in English, but we have embedded the benchmarks-only video from the TechTuber’s ENG channel below. So you can check out some of the benchmarking action without any fiddling with caption controls.

The 250W MTT S80 has a bulky triple fan cooler, but once removed you can see the PCB is only about two fans in length. Contrast this design with the 30W GT 1030 which can run with a passive heatsink. The other card in the tests, a 120W GTX 1060, offered stratospheric gaming performance compared to the MTT S80, but it's also usually manufactured in single- or two-fan versions.

Getting to the benchmarks, the titles under comparative tests were limited to DX9 games, as that is all that worked on the Moore Threads review card / driver. The architecture is claimed to support DX11, so it looks like some driver updates will be required. In the video's summary charts, the MTT S80 is often half as fast as the aging low-power GT 1030. Only an outlier or two indicates the MTT S80 has some potential.

Speaking of unfulfilled potential, the touted AV1 video codec support claims are also ringing hollow right now. Several tests showed AV1 decoding was tackled by the CPU, however the card was seen to shove VP9 Codec video processing to the GPU in YouTube testing.

BullsLab Jay dug through old Moore Threads China presentations and concluded that the MTT S80 uses Imagination Technologies' PowerVR architecture. Moore Threads have not been very upfront about this, and some had hoped that it was taking a different tack to the Innosilicon Fantasy (Fenghua) line, which also uses PowerVR IP. (And again, it wasn’t very up-front in letting people know about the underlying architecture).

The Moore Threads MTT S80 graphics card sells for the equivalent of approximately $430 in China, bundled with an Asus TUF B660M motherboard. If we take away the cost of the board, the graphics card is roughly $260. Perhaps it will start to show more of its FP32 potential as drivers mature and these PowerVR cards for PCs will become more effective challengers.

Right now, with demonstrably faster GT 1030 selling for $80 or less, the MTT S80 isn't exactly making a good case for itself at more than three times that price. It's possible that performance will improve substantially with driver updates, just as we saw with Intel over the past several months. But of course, that will depend on how much time and effort the company plans to spend on driver improvements, as well as the limitations of the architecture. 

The GeForce RTX 4090 continues to reign as the fastest of the best graphics cards currently available, and even better: prices seem to finally be dropping below $2,000. Take the PNY RTX 4090 XLR8 RGB, which you can pick up on Amazon — and there's the non-RGB variant for about $50 less. We're still hundreds of dollars above Nvidia's $1,599 starting MSRP, but we're getting closer. Maybe by the time the 40-series refresh cards start to show up we'll actually see acceptable prices (but don't count on it).

A big part of the problem with the RTX 4090 is the exceptional performance. It's up to 50% faster than the previous generation RTX 3090 Ti in gaming performance, without using DLSS 3. It's also significantly faster in many professional workloads as well as AI tasks. And the next step down, the RTX 4080, is still expensive and noticeably slower, so those with deep pockets are simply opting for the top product.

Three months on, after the newness has faded a bit and things are starting to settle down, how does the RTX 4090 look? We're looking at PNY's reference clocked RTX 4090 XLR8 Gaming Verto Epic-X RGB to find out — and kudos for that adjective laden product name, which we'll just truncate to "XLR8 RGB" for the rest of this review. 

It's a bit strange to have a second reference clocked card, as most companies tend to send us overclocked models. Obviously, that means identical specs to the RTX 4090 Founders Edition, and potentially lower performance than competing cards — but even heavily overclocked cards only add a few percent to framerates, often with higher power draw. So if you want reasonable power consumption and don't care about the final 3–5 percent increase in performance, this could be just what you're after.

More likely is that people will be interested in PNY's card if they can find one in stock for close to MSRP. All other areas being roughly equal, saving a few hundred dollars is always appreciated, even for extreme performance graphics cards.

As for the competition, AMD basically stops at the RTX 4080 level with its new RX 7900 XTX and XT GPUs. There's a relatively large gap between the 4090 and the next step down, whether you're looking at Nvidia or AMD cards. Despite the lack of Titan branding and certain Titan features (like unlocked drivers in a few professional applications), we effectively have a Titan replacement — at least until the actual future Titan RTX arrives (assuming it ever ships). 

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PNY RTX 4090 XLR8 RGB Design

PNY has been around for decades as an Nvidia partner, and for a long time it only provided branded versions of the reference designs. That started changing around the GTX 10-series, when PNY created the XLR8 brand and started selling its own custom consumer models. Still, for most computer enthusiasts, PNY doesn't rank among the bigger names like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI (and formerly EVGA, RIP).

The packaging for the PNY 4090 box is fine, a bit more compact than other brands, but more than sufficient. The card itself is actually quite large, considering the box volume. However, the included support bracket is… weird. It's supposed to take the place of two of the motherboard screw mounts, but even if you can make that work, it only supports the back of the graphics card closest to the motherboard. GPU sag often occurs at the other side of the card, which hangs out in space, and this stand doesn't help fix that.

There's also the matter of branding. PNY's website refers to the card model as the "4090 XLR8 Gaming Verto Epic-X RGB," but the actual box omits any mention of "Verto" and the "Epic-X RGB" part of the name is a small logo. It's a small thing, but with three different PNY 4090 models shipping, it would be good to have the boxes clearly indicate which model is inside. But let's get to the card itself.

The PNY card measures 332 x 137 x 69 mm and weighs 1915g — not including the 4x 8-pin to 16-pin adapter. Of the five other 4090 cards we've looked at (Asus ROG Strix 4090, Colorful 4090 Vulcan, Gigabyte 4090 XLR8 RGB OC, MSI 4090 Suprim Liquid-X, and of course the 4090 Founders Edition), the only card that's physically smaller is the Founders Edition, and the PNY card weighs 75g less than the next closest Gigabyte card.

There's a full triple-slot IO bracket, which we appreciate as it provides a of extra stability. The card is technically a 3.5-slot design — so really it occupies four slots of space — which means you'll need a case with plenty of room. So far, there's not much to differentiate PNY's offering from other 4090 cards.

PNY uses a triple-fan setup with custom 98mm fans. There's an integrated rim and the blades appear slightly wider than we generally see on other cards. All three spin counterclockwise, but that's not a problem, as noise levels were very good.

Display outputs are the usual single HDMI 2.1 and triple DisplayPort 1.4a. While on paper the newer DP2.1 standard would be superior, in practice it doesn't matter much right now as DP2.1-capable monitors are practically non-existent. We're now using a Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32 for our test system, which has 4K 240 Hz support that works fine with DP1.4, thanks to Display Stream Compression.

Power delivery comes via the usual 16-pin adapter that Nvidia supplies to all its partners. The uproar over melting adapters has died off now, which suggests Nvidia's claims that it was due to users not fully inserting the connector were correct. Whether the 16-pin connector is actually a good design is a different story, but it appears we'll be stuck with it now. 

PNY RTX 4090 XLR8 RGB Teardown 

There's not much reason for most users to take apart a graphics card, short of replacing fans or perhaps thermal pads if the default pads don't seem to be sufficient, but we like to get shots of the PCB to see if there's anything unusual. The disassembly process on the PNY card is pretty straightforward, though the components on the PCB are a bit interesting.

The first step is to remove the ten Phillips head screws securing the backplate. It can then be pulled off the card to expose the back of the PCB. Next, there are two more Phillips head screws under the backplate that secure the PCB to the cooler, plus the four screws (one with a sticker) that hold the GPU bracket in place.

You'll also need to remove the four Phillips screws that secure the IO bracket, as the bracket overlaps the PCB. That's 20 screws in total, which is about the norm for graphics cards of this size. Once those are out of the way, you can carefully pry the PCB, GPU, GDDR6X, etc. away from the cooler. But before you go too far, disconnect the three cables (two for fans, one for RGB lighting).

The cooler has a reinforcing frame that's secured by another four screws, but I didn't go any further. If you ever need to replace the fans, you'll want to focus on that part of the card and it shouldn't be too difficult — though finding the correct fans might be a different story.

As for the PCB, we've seen 4090 cards with anywhere from 20 to 26 phases for the GPU, plus another four phases for the GDDR6X. PNY's design only has 17 large black VRMs that are labeled LR22, plus three more for the GDDR6X. However, there are two additional L2R2 VRMs that may also be for the memory. So, this looks like a 17+3 phase design, but possibly 17+5 phases. That's less than other 4090 cards, but also this isn't an overclocked model and it's the first such card we've looked at.

The GPU is the expected AD102-300-A1 chip that's been used on all 4090 cards so far. It's possible Nvidia will have a revised chip at some point down the road, but this is a card from the 4090 launch. It just had to wait for the deluge of other GPUs before we could find time to finish the review.

Finally, the memory chips show "D8BZC," which corresponds to 16Gb chips rated for 21 Gbps. All of the 4090 cards have used memory with the same model, but half of the cards seem to have "downbinned" 24 Gbps chips that run cooler and can overclock to 24 Gbps or higher, while the other half typically max out at around 23 Gbps. Your results can and likely will vary based on your particular card, in other words. 

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PNY RTX 4090 XLR8 RGB Overclocking 

Overclocking the PNY RTX 4090 was somewhat limited as the card is basically locked to a maximum of 450W. That's the theory, at least, but in practice, we were still able to increase the GPU core clock by +180 MHz and the memory reached a stable +1600 MHz (24.2 Gbps effective speed).

The good news is that average power use across our test suite only increased by about 3W, while performance at 4K was still 6.4% higher. That's a slightly lower gain than what we've seen on some of the other 4090 cards, but being able to do that without killing efficiency is a definite plus.

That brings up another point: If you're concerned about losing out on some performance by purchasing a reference card, manual overclocking can easily make up the difference. Yes, the fastest cards can also overclock and generally still end up a bit faster, but again with substantially higher power consumption. With the same power limit enforced, all the 4090 cards end up falling within a narrow range. 

PNY RTX 4090 Test Setup

We've recently updated our GPU test PC and gaming suite in late 2022, shifting from a 12900K and DDR4 memory to a 13900K with DDR5 memory, plus changing out one game and adding two new titles. The impetus for the change was that, with the RTX 40-series launch, we found more and more games were becoming CPU limited at anything below 4K.

The 13900K ranks as the fastest gaming CPU around (technically the 13900KS now slightly outperforms it), and we're still bumping into CPU limits at 1440p and especially at 1080p. But for third-party cards like this PNY 4090, we're skipping the 1080p testing.

Unfortunately, the five previous RTX 4090 cards were all tested on the old 12900K system, so we don't have comparable results for this review. We've retested the 4090 Founders Edition and it will stand in for the other GPUs. Note also that in our prior reviews, the fastest 4090 we've tested — the Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix — was 1.2% faster overall in our rasterization tests and 2.1% faster overall in our ray tracing benchmarks. That's at 4K, and the benefit starts to drop off at 1440p. Anyway, keep those gains in mind as we dig into the PNY 4090 performance.

Along with the PNY card, we have results from the RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4080, RX 7900 XTX/XT, and the previous generation RTX 3090 Ti and RX 6950 XT. We used the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers available at the time of testing: 22.12.2 for the 7900 series, 22.11.2 for older AMD GPUs; 527.62 for most of the Nvidia GPUs, and 528.02 for the PNY 4090. 

AMD and Nvidia both recommend either the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X or Intel Core i9-13900K to get the most out of their new graphics cards, and for the third party cards, we're going to stick with the 13900K. (The Ryzen 9 7950X provided similar performance on the reference 7900 cards.) MSI provided the Z790 DDR5 motherboard, G.Skill got the nod on memory, and Sabrent was good enough to send over a beefy 4TB SSD — which we promptly filled to about half its total capacity. The be quiet! 1500W PSU is ATX 3.0 compliant and 80 Plus Titanium certified.

We also have Nvidia PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware that allows us to capture the real-time power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll have the results on the power testing page.

For all of our testing, we've run the latest Windows 11 updates. Our gaming tests now consist of a standard suite of nine games without ray tracing enabled (even if the game supports it), and a separate ray tracing suite of six games that all use multiple RT effects.

We've tested all the GPUs at 4K and 1440p, using "ultra" settings — basically the highest supported preset if there is one, and in some cases maxing out all the other settings for good measure (except for MSAA or super sampling). We've also hooked our test PCs up to the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32, one of the best gaming monitors around, so we could fully experience some of the higher frame rates that might be available — with G-Sync enabled.

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The RTX 4090 ranks as the fastest GPU currently available in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, so we'll start with the 4K performance results.

Overall, the PNY card matches the Founders Edition, but with slightly different drivers we'd need to retest the FE to fully verify the results. Looking at the individual charts, PNY's card is about 2% slower in A Plague Tale: Requiem and Red Dead Redemption 2, while in Forza Horizon 5 it's 13% faster. Minimum FPS was also massively improved in Total War: Warhammer 3, which is interesting.

We suspect the latest 528.02 drivers corrected things in Forza and Warhammer, meaning in general performance probably ends up fractionally slower than the Founders Edition — not something you'd notice in normal use.

Overclocking is the usual story of modest gains, across the test suite. Overall performance was 4.7% higher, while in the individual games it was anywhere from 2.3% (Flight Simulator) to 7.8% (Warhammer 3) faster. Basically, the OC gains track with whether a game tends to be CPU limited, GPU limited, or GPU bandwidth limited, with Warhammer being an example of the latter.

Considering these gains come without increasing the power limit, at least overclocking in this fashion is a reasonable approach. We do appear to have "better" GDDR6X chips on this board, however, as we've noticed with half of the 4090 cards that they'll do over +1,500 MHz while the others will only do around +1,000 MHz, so these OC gains may not apply to every PNY board.

The ray tracing results are more in line with what we'd expect from the PNY card. PNY seems to have taken a somewhat more cautious approach with the VBIOS on this card, so it tries its best to avoid power spikes, even if that costs a bit of performance.

Overall, the PNY card is 2.9% slower than the Founders Edition, with individual results ranging from 0.3% slower (tied, in Spider-Man) to as much as 5% slower (Cyberpunk 2077 and Metro Exodus). Those last two dovetail nicely with the conjecture that power limits are keeping performance in check, as those are typically two of the most power hungry games we test.

Overclocking shows larger gains this time, to the tune of 8.2% overall, with a range of +2% (Spider-Man) to as much as 11% (Control and Metro).

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Dropping the resolution to 1440p improves overall performance by 37%. That might seem like a lot, but it's also another indication that we're starting to bump into CPU limits — which is certainly the case with Flight Simulator. But consider the 3090 Ti, which sees a 57% increase in FPS by dropping the resolution, or the 6950 XT, which improves by 74%. In other words, the slower the GPU is, the less CPU bottlenecks come into play at 1440p.

PNY still ends up about 1% faster than the Founders Edition, but again that's likely drivers rather than actual performance differences — Forza Horizon 5 shows a 15% advantage for PNY now. We'll see about retesting the Founders Edition with the new drivers in Forza and Warhammer to see if that fixes things — and then we'll have to retest a few other RTX cards with the new drivers as well, most likely. It's a never-ending process.

Since ray tracing hits the GPU so hard, even at 1440p we still remain almost entirely GPU limited. We mentioned above that going from 4K to 1440p improved performance by just 37% on the PNY card in rasterization games, but in our DXR suite, the same resolution drop increased FPS by nearly 80%. The 3090 Ti improves by 89% and the 6950 by 104%, but at least in AMD's case it's probably more a case of the Infinity Cache hit rates dropping more at 4K.

The gap between the 4090 PNY and Founders Edition cards remains about 3% in DXR at 1440p, with minor differences across the test suite. PNY has taken a more conservative approach than even the reference card, which is somewhat unusual, but then the 4090 Founders Edition isn't really the typical reference design — if anything, it's overbuilt compared to previous generation reference cards.

We measure real-world power consumption using Powenetics testing hardware and software. We capture in-line GPU power consumption by collecting data while looping Metro Exodus (the original, not the enhanced version) and while running the FurMark stress test. We also check noise levels using an SPL meter. Our PC for these tests remains the same old Core i9-9900K as we've used previously, to keep results consistent.

We also test on our newer 13900K PC using PCAT v2 hardware in all of our gaming benchmarks, which gives a wider view of power use and efficiency. We'll start with the gallery of our PCAT results — note that FPS/$ uses the official MSRPs for the RX 7000- and RTX 40-series cards, while FPS/W (ie, efficiency) uses the measured power consumption.

We have results for our 1440p and 4K testing, along with the manually overclocked 4K testing (except on the RTX 4080 and 4090 Founders Edition cards, where we didn't retest overclocked results). We'll stick to just the latest generation GPUs for these tables.

The other GPUs are included mostly as a reference point, and our focus will be on the two 4090 cards. Interestingly, across our test suite, the PNY card ends up using slightly more power than the Founders Edition, at least for the overall geometric mean. There are some outliers in the results, though.

Look at Flight Simulator, where the Founders Edition only used 161W at 1440p while the PNY uses 381W — more than double the power use. Performance is basically unchanged, so it's possible that a driver update is to blame, or else just different VBIOS settings. But even omitting Flight Simulator, the PNY card consistently uses a bit more power at both 1440p and 4K, which likely comes down to differences in the board level components (capacitors, inductors, etc.)

The net result is that PNY's card ends up slightly less efficient overall, but it's not a big enough change to warrant further discussion. Overclocking meanwhile only increases power use by about 1% on average, as the power limit didn't change. A few games might use up to 2% more power, but the interesting bit is that clock speeds improve by 6% so overall efficiency also gets better.

Our previous power testing results are still valid, though they're limited to two scenarios: FurMark and Metro Exodus. Both test scenarios last about 10 minutes, though Metro does have a "break" between loops that allows the GPU to recover slightly.

As we've seen elsewhere, PNY's 4090 uses about the same amount of power as the Founders Edition card, coming in about 4W higher on average in Metro Exodus at the 4K extreme setting. In FurMark, the cards are basically tied on power use — no surprise since both exceed the official 450W TBP rating.

Clock speeds tell a similar story, with the Founders Edition averaging just slightly higher clocks in FurMark and Metro. But the real differences are in the temperatures and fan speeds.

PNY average 65C in Metro on the GPU, and 66C in FurMark. That's not a lot lower than the Founders Edition's 67C and 71C, but it's clearly better. That's especially true when you factor in fan speeds.

The 4090 Founders Edition already showed a good fan speed result of just 1409 RPM in Metro and 1505 RPM in FurMark, but PNY beats it in both cases. With FurMark, fan speed averaged 1359 RPM while Metro dropped to just 1228 RPM. That's about 37% fan speed, with plenty of room to go higher if needed — which is what we did with our overclocking tests, where fan speeds were in the 70% range.

Lower fan speeds mean less noise, and we test noise levels using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter placed 10cm from the card, with the mic aimed right at the center fan. This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources like the fans on the CPU cooler. The noise floor of our test environment and equipment is around 32 dB(A) with the PC powered on (the CPU cooler fans create a small amount of noise).

After running Metro for over 15 minutes, the PNY RTX 4090 settled in at a fan speed of 37% and a noise level of 38.2 dB(A). That's substantially better than the Founders Edition, which measured 45.0 dB(A) in the same test.

We also tested with a static fan speed of 75%, where the PNY generated 57.3 dB(A) of noise, but without overclocking or changing the fan speed curve, it's unlikely you'd ever see such levels. In fact, PNY seems to have tuned the card to stay below 50% fan speed based on our testing. 

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Officially, the PNY 4090 XLR8 RGB is supposed to sell for $1,599, the same as Nvidia's Founders Edition. In practice, it's either out of stock or being sold by third-party resellers on places like Amazon and Newegg at $1,900 or more — just like the Founders Edition. It may be slightly less expensive than competing cards, so check around and see what's available if you're shopping for a 4090.

And that's really the major story here. If you're still trying to find an RTX 4090 card and you don't want to pay over $2,000, we've seen a few cards drop down as low as $1,700 — briefly — but supply still hasn't caught up with demand. And that demand isn't just from gamers, we'd wager.

The RTX 4090 might be the fastest card around for games, particularly if you want to play ray tracing games and you enable DLSS and/or DLSS 3. However, it's also equally performant in non-gaming workloads. In our initial review, the RTX 4090 in professional applications was around 80% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti in 3D rendering workloads.

That makes it a prime candidate for the "time is money" crowd, potentially cutting render times almost in half compared to the previous generation. The 4080 and 4070 Ti have since filled in some of the gap, but again, if you're waiting for 3D renders to complete and are willing to spend more money to get them done faster, the 4090 certainly fills that role as a prosumer card.

Sadly, even though GPU cryptocurrency mining is basically dead, it still feels like we're living in the world of 2021–2022 GPU prices. The new generation cards all cost more than their outgoing counterparts, and the cheapest RTX 40-series part right now, the 4070 Ti, costs more (in theory, anyway) than the old RTX 3080. Yes, it's 30% faster in our ray tracing suite, but MSRPs have gone up about 30% as well.

If you want the best graphics card, you'll need to decide what that means and how much you're willing to spend. For gamers, plunking down $1,600 for just the GPU feels outrageous, never mind spending $2,000 or more. Some people undoubtedly have that sort of pocket change available, but most gamers should look at the overall value instead.

And the best values are in the $300–$400 range, as usual. An RTX 3060 or RX 6700 XT might not win any bragging rights competitions, but you get over one-third the performance of the RTX 4090 for one-fifth the cost — that's according to our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. And if you're not aiming for 60+ fps at 4K, maybe you don't even need such an extreme GPU.

PNY doesn't break the mold when it comes to features and performance, but it does offer a solid product that runs cool and quiet — perfect for use in professional environments like an office space. It will also handle games basically as well as any other 4090, if that's your intent, and still keep noise levels down.

But as a value proposition? The RTX 4090 ranks dead last among modern GPUs right now. It would still be near the bottom of the stack even if you could buy it at MSRP, but at 25% over MSRP it's even worse. Maybe that will change in the future, but we wouldn't count on it.

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Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti may rank as the worst kept "secret" of the past few decades of graphics cards. Originally revealed back in October as the RTX 4080 12GB that was later "unlaunched," the core specs and hardware didn't change — only the price and name are new. Following in the footsteps of the more potent RTX 4090 and RTX 4080, the cards officially go on sale tomorrow, January 5, 2023. Except reviews can go up a day early, so potential buyers at least get some advice before taking the plunge.

Will the RTX 4070 Ti rank among the best graphics cards? That's a tough call, which we'll get into more during this review. What we can say is that, based on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy testing, it's faster than most of the 30-series offerings and basically ties the RTX 3090, at a lower price point. That's the good news. The bad news is that this is by far the most expensive xx70-class graphics card Nvidia has ever released. We've gone from $329 on a GTX 970 to $379 on the GTX 1070, then $499 for the RTX 2070 and 2070 Super, $499 for the RTX 3070 as well with $599 for the 3070 Ti, and now we're looking at $799 for an RTX 4070 Ti.

Put that way, what we're really talking about feels a lot more like a replacement for the RTX 3080 12GB. Nvidia never gave that an official MSRP, but we briefly saw prices dip into the $700–$800 range before supply apparently dried up. Absent the cryptocurrency boom of 2020–2022, the 3080 12GB and 3080 Ti probably would have landed in the $800–$900 range. Now Ethereum has gone proof of stake and cryptocurrency mining profits are in the toilet, but it seems we're still looking at mining-inflated graphics card prices.

There are alternative ways of looking at things as well. We don't have hard numbers on how many cards have been sold, but all of the RTX 4090 cards at retail are still selling for over $2,000. RTX 4080 cards meanwhile seem to be relatively available at close to their base $1,200 price, but none of them are actually selling at or below that price point. The same goes for AMD's new RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, the latter of which can be found for $899 while the former is mostly sold out and often costs $1,200 or more.

In other words, there's clearly enough demand from people with deep pockets that newer, faster graphics cards at lower prices is a fantasy we're not going to experience. We've heard some speculation that RTX 4090 prices in particular are greatly inflated due to demand from the professional sector — if all you want is a number crunching monster for AI research, the 4090 at $2,000 is actually a great deal compared to $5,000–$10,000 for actual professional cards that may not even be as fast! But how far down the stack will that go before such professionals simply opt for a faster card?

Hopefully not down to the $800 range, and equally hopefully we won't get scalpers trying to buy up every card and then resell them on eBay. But we probably need a lot more than hope for either of those to be likely.

We've previously covered Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture, so the only real question now is how performance scales down to the AD104 GPU with fewer shaders, less memory, less cache, a narrower memory interface, etc. Leaked details from the rebadged RTX 4080 12GB suggest it will be around 20–25 percent slower than the RTX 4080… which puts it in RTX 3090 territory. Here's a look at the specifications for the new and previous generation Nvidia cards, alongside AMD's new RX 7900 offerings. 

We've mentioned before that Nvidia appears to be attempting to stretch out the range of performance offered with the RTX 40-series, and the same thing happened with the RTX 30-series. From the fastest to slowest RTX 20-series GPU, the RTX 2080 Ti was about double the performance of the RTX 2060. Meanwhile, last generation's RTX 3090 Ti was three times as fast as the RTX 3050. At present, we don't even have a vanilla RTX 4070, never mind a future RTX 4050, and we're already looking at potentially double the performance from the bigger and more expensive RTX 4090.

Things of course won't scale perfectly, but the 4090 does have more than twice as many GPU shaders, Tensor cores, RT cores, etc. It also has exactly twice as much memory and memory bandwidth, but only 50% more L2 cache. There will be workloads — stuff like AI training and inference comes to mind — where the card that costs twice as much will deliver twice the performance while consuming twice as much power. But we'll get to the benchmarks soon enough.

What about AMD's RX 7900 series cards? The RX 7900 XT costs $100 more than the 4070 Ti, and at least in several areas it looks to have superior specs. The teraflops figures favor AMD's GPU by nearly 30%, for example, and AMD gives users 67% more memory with 59% more memory bandwidth. There's little doubt that Nvidia will still pull ahead when it comes to ray tracing performance — and deep learning workloads — but for rasterization AMD might come out ahead. But then we also have to ask: Do you want to spend nearly $1,000 for a graphics card that relegates ray tracing to second tier status?

Sure, we get it: There still aren't many games where ray tracing is required, and quite a few games that support ray tracing only seem to use it for modest improvements in image fidelity while dropping performance quite a bit. But there are games like Control and Cyberpunk 2077 where it can make a difference, so spending a bit more — or in this case, potentially saving money — to get a superior feature set is something plenty of gamers seem willing to do.

Besides all the usual graphics hardware, Nvidia's latest Ada Lovelace GPUs have a few extras. AMD still doesn't have a Tensor core equivalent — its AI Accelerators share the same execution units as the GPU shaders — which means in FP16 workloads the 4070 Ti has potentially triple the throughput of the RX 7900 XT. And for AI inference work that can leverage the FP8 hardware, Nvidia doubles performance yet again.

There's also the enhanced Optical Flow Accelerator (OFA), which powers the DLSS 3 algorithm and may be used for other video related tasks. Nvidia says that over 50 games with DLSS 3 are in the works, with about 15 currently available. Even better news is that every one of those games with DLSS 3 also supports DLSS 2 and Reflex, which means anyone with an RTX card can benefit — just not with Frame Generation.

If you're interested in AI research, especially without forking over the money for a professional workstation, Nvidia's GeForce cards certainly warrant a look. There are quite a few AI tools already available, including things like Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and more. It's possible to get those tools running on non-Nvidia GPUs, but after months of looking for a good AI benchmark, I can say that many of the open source tools focus on Nvidia while AMD (or Intel) GPUs are at best an afterthought. 

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Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Design, Featuring Asus TUF Gaming OC 

Unlike the 4080 and 4090 Founders Editions, Nvidia isn't making its own RTX 4070 Ti. That's an interesting development, as Nvidia has had Founders Editions of everything from GTX 1060 6GB through 1080 Ti (five models), RTX 2060 through 2080 Ti (seven models), and RTX 3060 Ti through 3090 (six models). Now, with the 40-series, it seems Nvidia may constrain its own-brand cards to just the two top solutions — and probably an eventual RTX 4090 Ti and 4080 Ti later this year. That or we'll get an RTX 4070 Founders Edition, which would just feel weird after skipping the 4070 Ti.

It's not necessarily a bad thing for Nvidia to only do Founders Editions on the upper echelon of GPUs, and perhaps EVGA's decision to exit the graphics card market has something to do with it. At the same time, we do prefer to do our initial reviews of any new GPU using a reference design where possible, which we can't do with the 4070 Ti.

Nvidia instead sent us an Asus RTX 4070 Ti TUF Gaming OC. This should be a fair representation of how the basic factory overclocked cards perform, but it will also be slightly faster than the slowest designs so we're no longer looking at the minimum level of expected performance. The Asus card isn't small by any stretch, though it's at least a bit smaller than the 4080 and 4090 Founders Editions. It measures 298 x 138 x 62 mm (from the bottom of the PCIe connector to the highest point on the card) and weighs 1342g.

That makes this a full triple-slot graphics card by any normal definition, as a PCI slot is about 21mm wide, but Asus' own specs list this as a 3.25-slot design. The extra 0.25 slots is presumably to give the fans some room to breathe, so you'll want a case with plenty of space for this particular model. Asus also conveniently includes a little support stand to help prevent GPU sag — just don't forget about it and tip your case on the side, though the magnet on the bottom might be enough to keep it in place.

Asus uses the now-typical triple fan cooling setup that we see in most high-end custom cards, with three 89mm diameter fans that include an integrated rim. Considering we've seen similar designs used on cards rated for far higher power consumption, the Asus card should do just fine and generally runs cool and quiet.

As we've also seen with other recent Asus cards, there are dual HDMI 2.1 outputs plus three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. While DP1.4a is technically worse than HDMI 2.1 and AMD's DP2.1 (54 Gbps), we now have a Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 that supports up to 4K and 240 Hz, and it also uses Display Stream Compression (DSC). We tested it out with the Asus card and it worked great, with both HDMI and DisplayPort connections. Having now also tried DSC in person, I'm also a lot more comfortable with the "visually lossless" claims — it's certainly better than 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, though even that generally looks fine at 4K with modern GPUs (not so much on an older GTX 10-series card, though).

One interesting twist is that all of the Nvidia RTX 40-series cards seem to be using a single 16-pin power connector, whether it's really needed or not. With a 4090 potentially consuming over 500W with overclocking, we could at least somewhat understand the desire to simplify connectivity, though the melting adapters didn't work out so well (even if it appears to have been at least partially user error). With a 285W TBP (total board power), Asus had no need to use a 16-pin adapter, but it did so anyway, with a two 8-pin to single 16-pin adapter included for those who don't have a newer ATX 3.0 power supply. We can't help but think the cost of the adapter has to be higher than the cost of putting two 8-pin connectors directly on the card, something we've seen for at least seven years, but Nvidia apparently doesn't want to walk back on using 16-pin connectors with the 40-series — I can't wait for RTX 4050 cards with a single 8-pin to 16-pin connector! [Note to Nvidia: That's sarcasm.]

Since the Asus card will serve as our "reference" RTX 4070 Ti for the foreseeable future, we're going to skip disassembly and teardown — we need to guarantee the card keeps working properly, and ideally not change any of the cooling or other factors. What we do know of the internals is that there are only six GDDR6X chips, 2GB each, which should be relatively easy to cool in comparison to the GPU. Also, there are GPS coordinates on the card that presumably match up with Asus' Taiwan headquarters — or something. Feel free to research that further and go visit if you happen to be in the area. 

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 Asus RTX 4070 Ti Overclocking 

In the above images, you can see our stock and overclocked test settings. Overclocking involves trial and error and results are not guaranteed — each card behaves slightly differently. We attempt to dial in stable settings while running some stress tests, but what at first appears to work just fine may crash once we start running through our gaming suite.

We start by maxing out the power limit, which in this case was only 110% — and again, that can vary by card manufacturer and model. We ultimately ended up with a 175 MHz overclock on the GPU, while the memory was able to go all the way to +1600 MHz with stability (1800 MHz crashed when we attempted it while running FurMark). We also set a custom fan speed that ramps from 30% at 30C up to 100% at 80C, though we never approached 80C in testing.

As with other RTX 40-series cards, there's no way to increase the GPU voltage short of doing a voltage mod (not something we wanted to do), and that seems to be a limiting factor. GPU clocks did break the 3 GHz mark in some tests while gaming, though the FurMark screen capture as usual ended up at far lower clocks. We'll include the 4K overclocked results in our charts.

Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Test Setup

We updated our GPU test PC and gaming suite in early 2022, but with the RTX 40-series launch we found more and more games were becoming CPU limited at anything below 4K. As such, we've upgraded our GPU test system again… twice! (Thanks AMD and Intel!) Our GPU benchmarks hierarchy still uses the older i9-12900K PC, as do the professional workloads, but we're working on shifting everything over to the new PCs.

We've now retested several more GPUs using the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers: 22.12.2 for the 7900 series, 22.11.2 for other AMD GPUs; mostly 527.62 for the Nvidia GPUs, though a few GPUs were tested with the previous 527.56 drivers — except for Forza Horizon 5, which we have now retested using the 4070 Ti's preview drivers.

AMD provided us with its latest Ryzen 7000-series and socket AM5 processor, which we're using as a secondary test system. As with the RX 7900 XTX and XT review, we've run the full gaming test suite on the RTX 4070 Ti using the AMD platform and we'll have the results in the charts. We will do the same tests on other future GPUs, and at some point we might do a second set of charts once we have enough data points. As you'll see, performance varies a bit from game to game, but overall performance tends to slightly favor the Intel platform. Anyway, we now have three test PCs, as you can see in the boxout.

AMD and Nvidia both recommend either the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X or Intel Core i9-13900K to get the most out of their new graphics cards. We're mostly going to focus mostly on our test results using the 13900K. MSI provided the Z790 DDR5 motherboard, G.Skill got the nod on memory, and Sabrent was good enough to send over a beefy 4TB SSD — which we promptly filled to about half its total capacity. The AMD rig has slightly different components, like the ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard and G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo memory with Expo profile support for AMD systems. Both power supplies are ATX 3.0 compliant, rated for 1500W, and are 80 Plus Platinum or Titanium certified.

Time constraints prevented us from retesting every GPU on both the AMD and Intel PCs, but we now have results for about a dozen cards on the Intel PC. We've also slightly reworked our benchmark lineup, thanks to some game updates invalidating our old results (looking at you, Fortnite). For reference, the RTX 3090 generally performs about the same (a few percent faster) as the RTX 3080 Ti, and the RTX 3080 12GB tends to be a few percent slower than the 3080 Ti. We'll retest those in the future as well, but we left them off for this review. AMD's RX 6900 XT likewise lands roughly between the 6950 XT and 6800 XT, while the RX 6800 would be 10–15 percent slower than the 6800 XT.

Also of note is that we have PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware from Nvidia on both the AMD 7950X and Intel 13900K PCs, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll have most of the details for power testing in a few pages.

For all of our testing, we've run the latest Windows 11 updates. Our gaming tests now consist of a standard suite of nine games without ray tracing enabled (even if the game supports it), and a separate ray tracing suite of six games that all use multiple RT effects. We tested all of the GPUs at 4K, 1440p, and 1080p using "ultra" settings — basically the highest supported preset if there is one, and in some cases maxing out all the other settings for good measure (except for MSAA or super sampling). We've also hooked our test PCs up to the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32, one of the best gaming monitors around, just so we could fully experience some of the higher frame rates that might be available — G-Sync and FreeSync were enabled, as appropriate.

In games that support the technology, we've also tested performance on the RTX 4070 Ti with DLSS enabled — including DLSS 3, where applicable. We're only using the Quality mode, which is 2x upscaling, as that's the only mode that mostly looks as good as native (sometimes better). We'll label the results "DLSS2" and "DLSS3" in the charts, though Minecraft doesn't allow you to specify an upscaling mode and simply uses Quality for 1080p, Balanced for 1440p, and Performance for 4K.

Besides the gaming tests, we also have a collection of professional and content creation benchmarks that can leverage the GPU. We're using SPECviewperf 2020 v3, Blender 3.30, OTOY OctaneBenchmark, and V-Ray Benchmark. Time constraints prevented us from finishing our video encoding benchmarks, but we'll revisit that topic in the coming days. 

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Given the price, the RTX 4070 Ti still makes the most sense as a 4K gaming solution, though naturally it can run at higher framerates at lower settings. We'll hit that next, but with performance landing roughly at the same level as the previous generation RTX 3090, this is as good a place as any to start. There's no overall result for DLSS performance, since quite a few of the games in our test suite don't use the feature, but the ray tracing test suite below will include an overall DLSS2 result.

Also, we're going to use abbreviations for the game names. For reference: BL3 is Borderlands 3, FC6 is Far Cry 6, FH5 is Forza Horizon 5, HZD is Horizon Zero Dawn, MSFS is Microsoft Flight Simulator, PTR is A Plague Tale: Requiem, RDR2 is Red Dead Redemption 2, TWW3 is Total War: Warhammer 3, and WDL is Watch Dogs Legion. Those are the rasterization games; for the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) tests, BMI is Bright Memory Infinite, CTRL is Control Ultimate Edition, CP77 is Cyberpunk 2077, MEE is Metro Exodus Enhanced, MC is Minecraft, and SMMM is Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

With ten of the fastest GPUs currently available, the RTX 4070 Ti lands basically right in the middle of our rasterization benchmark results. Despite Nvidia's claims of 1.8x the performance of the RTX 3090 Ti, without DLSS 3 as part of the equation, overall we're looking at less performance than the 3090 Ti and only slightly higher performance than the 3080 Ti — which by extension also includes the RTX 3080 12GB. Overclocking did make up the difference, though you can also overclock a 3090 Ti (and use a lot more power in the process).

Put another way, if you're not going to play games with DLSS 3 support — and that's most games right now — and you're also not running ray tracing games, performance is about 8% higher than the RTX 3080 12GB, for approximately the same launch price. (We'll discuss performance with DLSS a few paragraphs down.)

The individual game results show a decent amount of variation, as expected. Against the 3090 Ti, the 4070 Ti was only faster in one game, Forza Horizon 5 — and that's after retesting performance with the 3090 Ti (the previous driver had some performance issues with FH5). The 4070 Ti was 9% faster in that game, but it was anywhere from 6–7% slower (FC6, MSFS, PTR, RDR2, WDL) to as much as 19% slower (HZD) in the other games, with BL3 and TWW3 also showing double digit percentage point deficits.

Stepping down to the 3080 Ti (again, our stand-in for the 3080 12GB that was also selling for $800 or less a few months back), overall the 4070 Ti delivered just 6% more performance, with a spread ranging from 6% slower (HZD) to 22% faster (FH5) — HZD was the only game where it didn't beat its monetary predecessor. What about the 3070 Ti? There it's a clean sweep, with a 61% overall improvement, though at least one game (TWW3) exceeded the 8GB VRAM capacity of the 3070 Ti.

Things aren't quite as promising when we turn to AMD's cards. The RX 7900 XT managed a 10% overall margin of victory, with only FH5 and TWW3 favoring Nvidia's 4070 Ti. Most of the other games show double digit percentage deficits, with BL3 and WDL being the "loss leaders" at 22% and 18%, respectively. The 7900 XTX increases AMD's lead, obviously, while the 4070 Ti beats the previous generation 6950 XT by 7% overall. Also note that overall performance on the 13900K was just 0.2% faster than with the Ryzen 9 7950X, with the largest difference being less than 4% — MSFS favored the 7950X while BL3 favored the 13900K.

DLSS 2 Quality mode improved performance by 9% in FH5, 46% in HZD, 40% in MSFS, 49% in PTR, 29% in RDR2, and 48% in WDL. DLSS 3 is also supported in MSFS and PTR, where it provided 93% and 102% more performance, respectively. Assuming similar DLSS 2 scaling from the 3090 Ti, the 4070 Ti would still be 30% and 27% faster in those games, thanks to Frame Generation.

Our more demanding ray tracing test suite doesn't really alter the 4070 Ti versus Nvidia story much, though AMD's GPUs drop in the standings. The 4070 Ti came on 6% slower than the 3090 Ti, without DLSS 3 to help out. It was also 11% faster than the 3080 Ti, and just over twice as fast as the 3070 Ti. It swept the 7900 XT as well, leading by 24% on average, and also claimed a 7% lead over the 7900 XTX, though three of the games slightly favored AMD's fastest card.

All six of our DXR games support DLSS, and two of them support DLSS 3. DLSS 2 upscaling improved performance by 82% overall (again, note that Minecraft uses Performance mode upscaling and skews the geometric mean). Meanwhile, in CP77 Frame Generation boosted performance another 47%, and SMMM got a slightly smaller 34% uplift.

DLSS is certainly an important add-on for ray tracing games, as without it the 4070 Ti only averaged 32 fps, while Quality upscaling improved that to 59 fps. That's enough to get all six games above 30 fps, and only two of the games failed to break the 60 fps mark. 

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While Nvidia would like you to think the RTX 4070 Ti can easily handle 4K gaming — and it can, particularly if you turn a few settings down a notch and enable higher upscaling ratios — it really comes into its own at 1440p. We do start to encounter CPU bottlenecks, even on the 13900K and 7950X, but overall performance now ends up at nearly 120 fps, compared to just 69 fps at 4K.

The 4070 Ti also managed to tie the 3090 Ti this time, and there's a slightly larger performance advantage for the 13900K over the 7950X. It's a bit interesting that the 4070 Ti performance improves a bit relative to 4K, but that's likely due to the 192-bit memory interface and 48MB L2 cache — it's not quite enough to fully handle 4K gaming without some hiccups, basically.

The 4070 Ti ended up 12% faster than the 3080 Ti, but only 44% faster than the 3070 Ti. That's because we don't have stuff like TWW3 tanking the 8GB card's performance now. It's also only 6% slower than the 7900 XT and still edges past the RX 6950 XT by 6%.

Since we're at a lower resolution and starting to hit CPU limits, DLSS doesn't offer quite as much this time. MSFS ran 3% slower, FH5 was just 2% faster, but the other four games improved by larger amounts — 11% in HZD, 32% in PTR, 18% in RDR2, and 22% in WDL. DLSS 3 can help overcome those limits, however, and provides an additional 99% boost in MSFS and 48% in PTR.

Complex ray tracing games still remain pretty GPU limited, with the 4070 Ti still falling 4% behind the 3090 Ti at native resolution, and the RTX 4080 delivered 26% better performance overall. The 4070 Ti meanwhile led the 3080 Ti by 9%, 3080 by 21%, and the 3070 Ti by 62%. It was also 21% faster than the 7900 XT and 5% faster than the 7900 XTX — and again, that's without factoring in DLSS 2 or DLSS 3.

With DLSS Quality mode (Balanced in MC), the RTX 4070 Ti performance improves by 64%. That pushes performance from just over 60 fps on average to more than 100 fps. DLSS 3 Frame Generation tacks on another 49% in CP77 and 43% in SMMM, or about more than double what you get at native without any form of DLSS. 

We also tested "pure" DXR performance using the 3DMark DXR Feature Test, which runs at 1440p. We set the number of rays to the maximum of 20 per pixel, and compared performance with the other GPUs. Here the 4070 Ti came in third place, outperforming the RTX 3090 Ti by 12%. It's not a huge difference, but it does show that in cases where memory capacity and bandwidth are lesser factors, the 4070 Ti can beat the previous generation's top GPU. 

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We won't spend too much time on the 1080p gaming results. Yes, the RTX 4070 Ti can run 1080p ultra settings very fast — nearly as fast as any other graphics card in our rasterization test suite, where the 4090 only delivers 18% more performance on average. Basically, any of the GPUs in our charts work just fine for 1080p gaming, even with ray tracing turned on — well, maybe not the 6800 XT in a few of the DXR games.

Overall performance was 94 fps across our DXR test suite, and 145 fps in rasterization games. About the only games in the rasterization suite that didn't break 144 fps are CPU limited titles like MSFS — which conveniently also offers DLSS 3 support. The ray tracing games all broke 60 fps as well.

Want even higher frame rates? Yes, you can improve performance even more with medium quality settings. We're pretty much CPU limited across the rasterization suite — the 4090 is only 8% faster on average, mostly thanks to PTR that's still somewhat GPU limited. DXR games do still benefit from the faster GPU, but now the 4090 is only 36% faster overall, though BMI, CP77, and MC still see a decent boost.

Anyway, if you have a 240 Hz monitor with G-Sync support, you can get close to the refresh rate at 1080p and medium to high settings in a lot of games.

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GPUs are also used with professional applications, AI training and inferencing, and more. We still don't have a great AI benchmark, though we did test Stable Diffusion with output settings of 2048x1152 and it mostly seems to work — on Nvidia GPUs at any rate. We also have several 3D rendering applications that leverage ray tracing hardware (two of which only work on Nvidia GPUs again), plus the SPECviewperf 2020 v3 test suite. Let's start there.

SPECviewperf 2020 consists of eight different benchmarks, and we use the geometric mean from those to generate an aggregate "overall" score. Note that this is not an official score, but it gives equal weight to the individual tests and provides a nice high-level overview of performance. Few professionals use all of these programs, however, so it's generally more important to look at the results for the applications you plan to use.

Across the eight tests, Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti basically ties the RTX 3090 Ti, and trails the 4080 by 18% and the 4090 by 34%. AMD has improved its SPECviewperf results a lot with recent driver updates, which means the aggregate score has all of the tested AMD GPUs leading even the RTX 4090. That's largely thanks to the excellent performance in snx-04, or Nvidia's terrible performance on the consumer RTX cards. AMD also rates higher in catia-06, creo-03, and medical-03, while Nvidia GPUs do better in 3dsmax-07, maya-06, and solidworks-07 — with energy-03 being more neutral.

Moving on to 3D rendering, Blender is a popular open-source rendering application, and we're using the latest Blender Benchmark, which uses Blender 3.40 and three tests. Blender 3.40 also includes the new Cycles X engine that leverages ray tracing hardware on AMD, Nvidia, and even Intel Arc GPUs. It does so via AMD's HIP interface (Heterogeneous-computing Interface for Portability), Nvidia's CUDA or OptiX APIs, and Intel's OneAPI — which means Nvidia GPUs have some performance advantages due to the OptiX API.

The 4070 Ti ends up just ahead of the 3090 Ti this time, winning in two of three individual scenes as well as in the aggregate score. It's interesting that Junkshop favors the 3090 Ti, probably because it has a larger memory footprint and thus hits some bottlenecks with only 12GB VRAM. AMD's GPUs meanwhile fall far behind with the 4070 Ti basically doubling the performance of the 7900 XTX. The 4070 Ti also trails the 4080 by 22% in Blender performance.

Our final two professional applications only have ray tracing hardware support for Nvidia's GPUs. We reached out to the companies to find out why that's the case, and it largely comes down to reliability and stability — Optane dropped OpenCL support for example because the API was no longer seeing active development.

While we don't have the AMD GPUs, the performance rankings in OctaneBench and V-Ray both end up being relatively similar to the Blender results. Octane puts the 4070 Ti roughly on equal footing with the 3090 Ti, as does V-Ray, while performance trails the 4080 by 23% and 25%.

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We measure real-world power consumption using Powenetics testing hardware and software. We capture in-line GPU power consumption by collecting data while looping Metro Exodus (the original, not the enhanced version) and while running the FurMark stress test. We also check noise levels using an SPL meter. Our test PC remains the same old Core i9-9900K as we've used previously, to keep results consistent.

We also test on our newer 13900K and 7950X platforms using PCAT v2 hardware, which gives a wider view of power use and efficiency. We'll start with the gallery of our PCAT results — FPS/$ uses the official MSRPs for the RTX 40-series, and current "approximate" retail prices for the previous generation GPUs. That means $1,100 for the 3090 Ti (the cheapest price you could easily find for a few months before it was basically discontinued), $900 for the 3080 Ti, $700 for the 3080 10GB, $830 for the 6950 XT, and $640 for the 6800 XT.

There's a lot of data in the above tables, but we'll mostly focus on the 4070 Ti results. Maximum power use is officially rated for 285W on the reference 4070 Ti, but the Asus card may have a slightly higher limit. We didn't get anywhere close to 285W on average across our entire test suite, but PTR, MEE, and MSFS all got to that level at 4K.

Efficiency ends up favoring the RTX 4080 and 4090 still, with the 4070 Ti in third place. AMD's new 7900 XTX/XT cards come in a bit behind the 4070 Ti, while the RTX 30-series and RX 6000-series cards are relatively similar.

The value proposition meanwhile puts the RTX 4070 Ti at the top for 1080p, 1440p, and 4K — looking purely at GPU price versus performance. That's interesting and does perhaps put it in a slightly better light, as the $799 MSRP almost seems justifiable. Of course, the next best values are the RTX 3070 Ti and RX 6800 XT, and they're not too far behind the 4070 Ti.

Average clocks while gaming were consistently in the 2.8 GHz range, with quite a few of the results apparently hitting the maximum 2,850 MHz on the Asus card. As we've seen with other Ada Lovelace GPUs, Nvidia's rated boost clock is quite conservative and most games will exceed it by about 200 MHz. Temperatures meanwhile topped out at around 65C for the 4070 Ti, and in quite a few cases ended up below 60C. Lengthier gaming sessions might get closer to 70C after a while, though case and airflow will be a factor.

Our previous power testing results are still valid, though they're limited to two scenarios: FurMark and Metro Exodus. The RTX 4070 Ti ended up at the top of the power chart if we just look at power use for these high-end GPUs, with the 3070 Ti coming out slightly ahead of it in FurMark testing. We also measured 265W average power use at 1440p, though as you can see from the PCAT table, that's not the worst-case scenario.

Clock speeds and temperatures basically match our PCAT results as well, though we don't have fan RPMs from PCAT. The Asus 4070 Ti stayed cool and quiet, with the fans maxing out at about 1700 RPM in FurMark and staying under 1500 RPM for most games. More important than fan speed is the resulting noise level.

We check noise levels using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter placed 10cm from the card, with the mic aimed right at the center fan. This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources like the fans on the CPU cooler. The noise floor of our test environment and equipment is around 32 dB(A).

After running Metro for over 15 minutes, the RTX 4070 Ti settled in at a fan speed of 42% and a noise level of 41.2 dB(A). That's about as quiet as any high-end GPU we've tested during the past couple of years, with only cards rated at less than 200W producing less noise. We also tested with a static fan speed of 75%, which caused the 4070 Ti to generate 54.1 dB(A) of noise. 

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We have a lot of thoughts about Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti, some good and some not so great. On the one hand, you're getting better performance than most of the 30-series GPUs, including the 3080 Ti. At the same time, the price isn't really much cheaper than a 3080 Ti — you can still find a Peladn 3080 Ti on Newegg for $899, for example. Given the choice between spending $899 on a previous generation card from a relatively unknown Chinese company, or $799 for a new 4070 Ti from a known brand, yes, we'd take the 4070 Ti. But if we already had a 3080 Ti or similar card, this definitely isn't much of an upgrade.

At best, we saw performance improvements of up to 20%, with the average improvement being closer to 10%. Considering the 3080 12GB was selling for under $800 a few months back, with performance that often matched the 3080 Ti, that's a relatively minor upgrade at best. Toss in the new DLSS 3 support and things look better, but it's important to not get too carried away with the DLSS 3 framerates.

I've been playing games with and without DLSS 3 quite a bit over the past few months, since the 4090 arrived. In general, I'd say the experience can feel smoother with DLSS 3 Frame Generation, but it's not the same as "real" frame rates that are linked to user input. Take MSFS as an example. Without DLSS 3, you max out at around 80 fps using ultra quality settings. Turn on DLSS 3 and you can get almost double the FPS… but it feels more like a 10–20 percent improvement, not a 100% increase.

I get why DLSS 3 works the way it does, but ultimately you end up with having to choose between lower latency and lower FPS, or higher latency and higher FPS. Having a choice isn't bad, but certainly DLSS 3 is no panacea, and the emphasis Nvidia is putting on DLSS 3 performance gains really rubs me the wrong way for precisely that reason. "Up to 1.8X faster than an RTX 3090 Ti!" says Nvidia. Bollocks, says I! Slightly slower in many cases, and with DLSS 3 it can feel slightly faster at best, but nowhere near 50% or 80% faster.

Don't buy into the DLSS 3 hype, in other words. It can be a nice extra, but experientially it's often quite close to the threshold where you can actually feel an improvement. It can also cause artifacts at times — not something I really notice in normal use, but it's certainly not "perfect" rendering — and it needs a minimum level of performance to be useful. Portal RTX at 24 fps on a 4090 gets 42 fps with Frame Generation enabled, but without upscaling, but it still feels like 24 fps. That's because the user input is still running at 24 fps.

Beyond DLSS 3, the benefits Ada Lovelace has to offer become a bit more nebulous. Take AV1 encoding. Yes, it's definitely better than H.264, and Ada can do the encoding pretty fast. But from what I've seen, AV1 is no better than HEVC (H.265), and the only reason AV1 exists is to try and create a royalty free H.264 alternative. For personal use, it's basically a wash.

But pricing is where things really start to get messy. Yes, it's getting more expensive to manufacture GPUs on the latest process nodes from TSMC. How much more money does Nvidia have to spend to make a 4070 Ti and its associated AD104 GPU compared to the previous generation RTX 3080 12GB or 3080 Ti? I couldn't say for sure, but I'm sure it's more expensive, and Nvidia also has to recover its R&D costs. But we're still left with a 4070 Ti priced at $800 replacing the 3070 Ti that only cost $600 — and we didn't even love the 3070 Ti price in the first place!

Pouring salt on the wounds, inflation is real, and most figures will agree we've seen about a 15% increase over the past two years in the U.S. That means most people actually have less disposable income, which means spending even more money on a graphics card for gaming purposes becomes even less enticing. And with GPU cryptomining basically dead, you can't even use potential mining profits as an excuse for the upgrade.

At the same time, if Nvidia were to launch the 4070 Ti for $599, we can reasonably predict that scalpers would just buy up all the cards and then try to flip them for $800 or more regardless. I'd rather the additional $200 end up with Nvidia and its partners than give it to eBay and scalpers. Still, there's a lot of pain in seeing the previous "upper midrange" or "lower high-end" 70-class models push into $800+ territory, and a lot of gamers are going to simply say no.

So who is the RTX 4070 Ti for? Rich gamers that aren't too rich, maybe? Or rich gamers that didn't already upgrade to an RTX 3080 or faster card some time in the past year or two? People with enough disposable income to buy a high performance graphics card, but not enough disposable income to chase the RTX 4080 and 4090? These are all possibilities, but none of them seem like they'd describe a lot of potential buyers.

If you don't already have a high-end graphics card, or if you've been sitting on something like a GTX 10-series waiting for prices to come down and are finally ready to pony up for a new card, the RTX 4070 Ti at $800 is at least a reasonable option. Bang for the buck is a bit ahead of AMD's new RDNA 3 GPUs, and DLSS 3 may continue to improve. You also don't have to pretend ray tracing is bad, though we'd agree we still want to see more games where it really makes a noticeable difference in image quality.

The 4070 Ti isn't a bad card, and for some people it's probably not even a bad price. But it is expensive, and it doesn't offer a new level of performance. It's the same level of performance as the RTX 3090, more or less, with a lower starting price — over two years after the 3090 launched. It's the best $800 graphics card currently available, but we can't help but feel a lot of people won't really feel enticed to fork over $800 for this level of GPU. 

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One Redditor has unknowingly purchased an engineering sample (ES) of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titan X graphics card, which used to be one of the best graphics cards. While it’s common to find ES samples of Intel or AMD processors on the second-hand market, it’s not every day that you see an ES sample graphics card, much less one from the Titan family.

The rare GeForce GTX Titan X has all the dressing of a retail sample except for the display outputs. While the original has a DVI port, an HDMI 2.0 port, and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs, the ES sample only retains the HDMI 2.0 and one of the DisplayPort outputs. The lack of video outputs initially made the Redditor believe that someone had scammed him with a fake Titan graphics card. However, an Nvidia forum representative has clarified that the graphics card is an engineering sample, judging by the part number that begins with 699.

“I don’t know where this came from but we sometimes seed engineering cards to partners and unfortunately it occasionally winds up on some marketplace,” replied the Nvidia representative in the Reddit thread.

Launched in 2015, the GeForce GTX Titan X leveraged the GM200 (Maxwell) silicon, which measured 601 mm² and housed up to eight billion transistors. At the time, TSMC produced the GM200 for Nvidia on the 28nm process node. The Redditor's GPU-Z screenshot didn't reveal anything spectacular about the engineering sample. It still has 3,072 CUDA cores operating at 1,000 MHz and 12GB of GDDR5 memory at 7 Gbps. Being an engineering sample, the graphics card boosted up to 1,076 MHz, 13 MHz lower than on the retail GeForce GTX Titan X.

The GeForce GTX Titan X is too long in the tooth to be a gaming monster by today's standards. The graphics card performs roughly in the same ballpark as the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. The Redditor tested it in Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p (1920x1080) with maximum preset, and the graphics card only managed to deliver an average framerate of 37.95 FPS. The GeForce GTX Titan X makes for a nice collector's item and belongs on a wall. The Redditor didn't share the price he paid for the ES graphics card, only that he bought it on eBay.

Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX Titan X at $999 seven years ago. It's funny how times changed when one grand could get you a flagship graphics card back then. Nowadays, you can't even buy a GeForce RTX 4080 for the same amount of money.

The Steam Hardware Survey has updated its results for November 2022, and there are some interesting tidbits to pull from the data. Not only is there a new top desktop card, but it’s the first time this has happened for a long time. Caveats, of course, apply. Elsewhere, we see Intel and AMD integrated GPUs rising up the ranks, while there are more gamers using Linux than ever before.

The Geforce GTX 1650 now tops the GPU popularity contest. The low-end Turing card from 2019 had a 0.66% month over month increase, rising to the pinnacle of the graphics card rankings with a 6.27% share of gamers. Meanwhile, the GTX 1060 that was the former leader sank by 1.85% to 5.77%. The 1060 was launched in 2016 and had reigned since January 2018, the Pascal card proving popular for its price to performance ratio and relatively low power consumption.

There are of course lots of disclaimers we need to toss out. First, those are some large swings, which leads us to think Valve might have changed the way it samples, or it just got a very different sampling pattern. Second, certain GPUs have their figures combined while others do not — the Steam Hardware Survey combines figures for the 3GB and 6GB variants of the card, along with mobile and desktop variants, for example. That applies to the GTX 1650, which includes GDDR5 and GDDR6 variants, along with mobile and desktop versions.

If we do that same grouping of entries, the RTX 3060 would technically be in first place. The desktop card sits at 3.41% and the laptop variant accounts for another 4.63%, for a combined 8.04%. Still, if you ignore the finer details, this is the first time we've seen a different GPU atop the list in quite a long while.

The RTX 2060, a former contender for the top spot, also saw a rather massive drop in popularity of 1.46%, with 4.46% of respondents having one in their rig. Again, that's a rather massive swing for a nearly four years old GPU to have in a single month. In fact, many of the top 20 GPUs show rather large single-month swings, so it's more than likely that Valve's sampling methodology is to blame. Maybe it updated things to be more accurate; we can only hope.

As usual, the top 20 cards is a seriously Nvidia-heavy zone, with AMD’s Radeon Graphics integrated chip its only entry at number 13. Intel is also represented by integrated GPUs, the Iris Xe used on 11th and 12th-gen chips, and the UHD Graphics that came in with 2017’s Kaby Lake Refresh.

The only really top-end card in the top 20 is the RTX 3080, which saw a slight bump to 1.84% of respondents to the survey. AMD’s RX 580 sits at number 21, just ahead of the integrated Vega 8 GPU. The latest cards from all manufacturers (RTX 4090, RTX 4080, and Intel Arc A770/A750) are nowhere to be seen, though it usually takes several months for newcomers to show up.

In terms of CPUs, Intel still reigns with 67.1% of the users, though this has dropped by almost four percent from its peak in October. AMD gained all that market share, rising to 32.87%. The most popular Intel processor speeds were in the 2.3 to 2.69GHz range, suggesting laptops, while AMD saw its largest cohort running 3.3 to 3.69GHz CPUs.

Apple Silicon chips took over from Intel for the first time in Mac Land, a 1.04% rise just pushing the Arm-based CPUs over the 50% mark. Linux gaming also saw an increase in popularity, likely because of the Steam Deck, with a 0.16% rise meaning 1.44% of gamers who responded use the open-source OS, with the most popular distro being Ubuntu, though Arch Linux, on which SteamOS is built, sits in second place.

Overall, there are some interesting changes, but Valve's statistical methods remain, at best, nebulous. With no explanation on how data gets collected (some of us suspect "new" or "changed" hardware gets sampled more often than existing hardware, for example), we can only present the results as they stand and suggest people not read too deeply into things.

Nvidia has reportedly decided to phase out some of the last remnants of the Turing graphics card era, according to rumors shared on China's Bobantang tech forums. This means it has decided to "completely discontinue" the GeForce RTX 2060, the 2060 Super, as well as the GTX 1660 and 1660 Super. Removing these popular options will leave quite a void in Nvidia's budget to midrange offerings, a high volume segment.

This comes as we're seeing a few final gasps of life in the way of Turing-based graphics card deals. Amazon has the RTX 2060 for $179 right now, an all-time low. You can also find the Zotac GTX 1660 for $179 and the Zotac GTX 1660 Super for $199... but why would you buy those slower cards for the same or higher prices?

Earlier this month we reported about whispers from supply chain sources, stating that the GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2060 Super were about to be discontinued. Now that appears to have happened, if the latest rumors are to be believed.

All the above mentioned Nvidia Turing graphics cards remain available at US-based online retailers, but that could change quickly once the situation filters through to retailers looking to replenish stocks.

On the topic of stocks and inventories, the source also indicates that there remains a "small amount of inventory," of the GTX 1660/Super TU116 GPUs. However, Nvidia hasn't wielded the knife on the GTX1650 and 1630 TU117 GPUs, notes the forum poster. These continue to be supplied to graphics card makers.

If you check out our GPU hierarchy feature, you will see that all Nvidia has left to address a significant and popular consumer segment, in the wake of the alleged Turing cull, is the Ampere generation GeForce RTX 3050. Sadly for the RTX 3050, it lived in the value and performance shadow of the RTX 2060 cards and, even with this removed, it is roundly beaten by AMD's Radeon RX 6600 / XT cards.

Recently we wrote about how AMD's graphics cards offer the best value across the full gamut of performance segments, except for the very top halo graphics cards. Some Cyber Monday price probing reveals that the best RTX 3050 is still priced on a par with the RX 6650 XT (both in the $250–$270 range), but is completely crushed by the RX 6600 which can be found for $209.

There are signs of Nvidia shuffling around some GeForce RTX 30-series SKUs with the new RTX 3060 8GB and the new RTX 3060 Ti with GDDR6X. However, with the phasing out of so many midrange Turning cards, Nvidia needs to widen the appeal of the RTX 3050. Perhaps it can make a desktop RTX 3050 Ti and reduce the price of the current RTX 3050 to better suit its performance level.

Nvidia may be priming the supply chain ahead of some new Ampere choices for the rather neglected entry-level to midrange market segment. This appears to be logical, but please add salt to the Bobantang sourced news about it happening right now. We look forward to some compelling new options from Nvidia, in this supposedly vacated space, to fight back against AMD and the new competition from Intel.

Galax unexpectedly released a new mid-range part in its Hall of Fame graphics card lineup, the RTX 3060 Ti G6X HoF Pro. Interestingly, this new release marks the Hall of Fame brand's first entry into the mid-range segment since the GTX 1060. The RTX 3060 Ti G6X HoF Pro seemingly goes overboard with its cooling and power delivery setup, but this GPU could be your cup of tea if you are a fan of the brand or a hardcore overclocker. 

As is customary for Hall of Fame GPU products, this RTX 3060 Ti G6X model comes with a mammoth triple fan solution designed to cool well over the GPU's reference 200W thermal target. The cooler measures just over two slots in thickness and 319mm in length, making it one of the largest RTX 3060 Ti's we've seen so far. In addition, the shroud sits quite high above the card's PCB, allowing the three fans to push air easily out of the sides of the card.

The card features a white PCB, white fans, and even a white PCB to match. The only non-illuminated colors you'll find on the GPU are black and blue, accenting the card's white shroud.

The blue accents come from four slats circling the central fan on four sides. They are accompanied by black sticks on each fan, featuring the HoF logo. But, the card can change its color theme very quickly, thanks to an RGB-illuminated central fan and an RGB-illuminated Hall of Fame banner on the card's side.

Unfortunately, Galax neglected to share details on the card's power delivery setup or much of the cooling system. Other than the fact it uses 6mm nickel-plated composited heat pipes. But, the card does come with a greatly increased 260W power target by default, which is 60W greater than the card's reference specs.

We also expect the card to reach even greater power targets if you head into overclocking software and push the power limit slider as high as it can. Reinforcing the card's high power limit are dual 8-pin supplementary power connectors instead of one 8-in or a single 8-pin and single 6-pin combo - as seen on other AIB partner cards.

Backing up the card's high power consumption is the card's default clock speed which comes at a whooping 1800MHz, making it one of the highest clocked 3060 Ti's on the market. Not to mention the GDDR6X model that comes with significantly faster 19Gbps memory modules (vs. 14Gbps on the standard 3060 Ti).

Unfortunately, we don't know what pricing will be like, but undoubtedly this will be both the fastest and one of the most expensive RTX 3060 Ti models you can buy.

The monthly Steam Hardware Survey provides insight into the current gaming trends, showing which products are gaining steam, if you will, and which are losing it. The statistical methods may be somewhat opaque, but at present, it's the best we have. The month of August 2022 shows some significant milestones in the GPU realm, as well as some noteworthy trends in the CPU and OS areas. Sprinkle with salt as needed, but here's how things now stand.

Nvidia RTX 30-Series Takes the Pole Position

Starting with the best graphics cards, or at least the most popular options, we've used the data from Steam's API page as it's more granular than the main GPU page. We've also normalized the column values based on the total sum, so all columns add up to 100%. (Without that adjustment, the columns sum to anywhere from 90.05% to 92.92%, possibly due to different OSes or other factors that aren't immediately clear.)

There are two big pieces of news. First, the Nvidia RTX 30-series cards have surpassed any other GPU family in total survey share for the first time. All RTX 30-series GPUs combined now account for 21.65% of the August total, up 1.90% compared to July's data. On the flip side, the GTX 10-series dropped 2.15% and now sits at 22.09% — still the second most popular GPU family, though. AMD's RX 6000-series also saw a slight gain of just 0.03%, taking it to 1.84% overall. Every other family of GPUs saw a decrease.

(And before you ask: Yes, you could technically group the RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series under the Turing banner. The problem is that the feature sets are completely different. RTX 20 supports DXR and DLSS, GTX 16 does not, so we consider them as separate families.)

The other big news is that Nvidia's GTX 1060 no longer ranks as the most popular single GPU. Well, technically it still ties for first place at 6.88% of surveyed PCs, but the GTX 1650 has now climbed into the top slot as well — that's not even a GPU we liked, though it's undoubtedly helped by its use in budget gaming laptops. More notably, GTX 1060 dropped by 0.53% compared to July, while GTX 1650 increased by 0.07%.

The single GPU that saw the most significant jump in share over the past month is the RTX 3060, which gained 0.77%. "AMD Radeon Graphics" saw the second largest increase, of 0.44%, and that name likely applies to various integrated graphics solutions — probably including Valve's own Steam Deck. RTX 3050 came in third with a 0.31% gain. However, there's plenty of room for fluctuations, as evidenced by Intel's UHD Graphics 620 ranking fourth with a 0.23% gain in share.

Big Changes in OS Share and CPU Manufacturer

The other two interesting pieces of news come from the OS and CPU pages. Our list of the best CPUs for gaming has been dominated by Intel's Alder Lake offerings since they arrived, though the Ryzen 7 5800X3D also makes an appearance as a pure gaming solution.

Steam's CPU vendor share has been holding somewhat steady at around the 67% Intel, 33% AMD mark for a while now, give or take a few percent. This past month, things took a swing in Intel's favor with gains of 1.65% and a commensurate loss of 1.67% for AMD (those are relative percentages rather than absolutes, which is why they're not the same).

How meaningful of a change is that? It's probably more margin of error on sampling, as we've seen AMD gains in May and July, with Intel gains in April, June, and now August. It would make more sense if these figures were skewed toward new PCs, which are more prone to fluctuations than the PC market as a whole, but we'll take it as an interesting piece of data and move on.

Wrapping things up from the OS and API page, Windows 11 saw another decent bump in overall share, improving to 24.71%. Windows 10 still accounts for the majority of all PCs, however, with 71.76% of surveyed systems. It's also interesting that Windows 7 and Windows 8 saw slight gains over the past month. We doubt that many PCs are actually replacing Windows 10 with Windows 7, so these are likely just variations in sampling, but we can't say for certain.

Looking Forward

Over the past several months, there have been numerous reports of lower PC and component sales and inventory bloat. As a result, consumers and businesses aren't buying hardware as fast as it's being produced, and the near-term outlook isn't good. That comes from JPR reports and IDC reports. The result has been falling hardware prices, and retail GPU prices continued to fall.

The situation isn't helped by all the next-generation hardware slated to launch in the coming months. On the GPU side of things, Nvidia RTX 40-series cards are expected to arrive by October, and AMD RX 7000-series RDNA 3 GPUs will likely land in November. Intel's Arc Alchemist GPUs for desktops are also expected in October, with improved drivers relative to the Arc A380.

Things are just as exciting over in CPU and motherboard land. AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs using the Zen 4 architecture officially launch on September 27, accompanied by 600-series chipsets and motherboards. That will usher in the era of DDR5 memory for both AMD and Intel platforms, though Intel continues to offer DDR4 support as an alternative.

Intel Raptor Lake CPUs should also launch by October (rumor of October 17 launch), adding more efficiency cores across the stack and providing renewed competition for AMD's Zen 4 chips. The 13th Gen Intel CPUs will also have new 700-series chipsets, though they're also socket compatible with LGA1700, and existing 600-series boards should work with a BIOS update.

All of those changes likely won't show up on the Steam Hardware Survey for many months, but come next year, we should see the new hardware start to pop up.

Reddit user ascendance22 has bought a prototype GeForce 20-series graphics card carrying the "GTX" branding on eBay. The GeForce GTX 2080 sample appears to be a GeForce RTX 2080 with the same Nvidia Founders Edition cooler and TU104 die, as shown in the GPU-Z image. But apparently, Nvidia disabled the RT cores on this prototype, with the GPU holding a GTX badge and lacking any "GeForce RTX 2080" badging on the front.

The Reddit user bought the GeForce GTX 2080 on eBay -- what it was doing on eBay in the first place is anyone's guess. But it's safe to say that seeing a prototype like this in the wild is incredibly rare and is usually kept under wraps by Nvidia at all times. The eBay merchant sells these GeForce GTX 2080 as engineering samples of the GeForce RTX 2080 for $359.95 each. There were early rumors that Nvidia was contemplating launching a GeForce GTX 1180, so this GeForce GTX 2080 could be the Turing graphics card that never made it to the market.

The mysterious GPU appears to be a GeForce RTX 2080 variant. The Redditor uploaded the firmware to TechPowerUp with the website detecting the graphics card as a GeForce RTX 2080. Furthermore, the Redditor's 3DMark TimeSpy results that closely match the performance of the standard RTX 2080 graphics cards. So there's no question it's a prototype RTX 2080 of some sort.

This prototype proves that Nvidia was thinking about launching a GTX lineup of Turing-based cards beyond the GTX 1660 Ti. It would certainly make sense from Nvidia's position. At the time of the RTX 20-series debut, Nvidia's Turing-based architecture with hardware accelerated ray tracing cores was a bleeding edge technology never seen before on the consumer market.

As a result, support for Nvidia's new tech was completely scarce, giving gamers little incentive to buy a technology they could only take advantage of for months or years. The same also applied to Nvidia's DLSS technology, which first came out with the RTX 20-series -- it had poor image quality at the time, with the same lack of game support as ray tracing on day one.

If Nvidia went through with a full GTX 16-series lineup extending to the xx80 series GPU, this strategy would allow gamers to choose whether or not they wanted ray tracing technology. In addition, this could have been a potential business opportunity for Nvidia, as the company could take defective Turing dies with rotten RT cores and disable them entirely for a GTX 20-series counterpart.

This way, consumers could get a Turing graphics card for a lower price and still retain all the architectural enhancements Turing offered over Pascal. Unfortunately, that never happened, to the dismay of many gamers. But this prototype does give us a clue that Nvidia was at least thinking about an entire "RTXless" lineup for the Turing generation.

Last year, it was nearly impossible to find reasonable prices on the best graphics cards, never mind finding anything that would qualify as a "budget" or cheap option. The GeForce GTX 1650 Super and Radeon RX 6500 XT we're looking at today basically weren't available in 2021, despite the former having launched in late 2019 — it was selling for as much as $350, according to our historical GPU pricing data.

2022 has thankfully brought an end to the GPU drought, and AMD's Navi 24 cards are selling for less than their official MSRPs. The RX 6500 XT can be had for as little as $180, and the GTX 1650 Super is back in stock as well, at least in some places — the EVGA 1650 Super SC goes for around $200 now, at Amazon and Newegg as well. Which means we can put these two sub-$200 graphics cards up against each other to see which cheap GPU is the better choice.

We'll look at performance, price, features and tech, drivers and software, and power and efficiency in order to determine a winner. Those categories are listed in order of decreasing importance, in our view at least, so we'll start with the critical aspects and move on down the list from there.

Gaming Performance: GTX 1650 Super vs RX 6500 XT

Gaming remains the main draw for graphics cards, though they can also help with video encoding and other tasks — or at least some of them can. Budget GPUs aren't intended for high-resolution gaming, instead delivering performance similar to previous-generation midrange and high-end GPUs at substantially lower prices. We put the GTX 1650 Super and RX 6500 XT to the test with our updated 8-game test suite, looking at three different settings and resolution combinations.

1080p gaming is the real target for these cards, though some lighter games might manage 1440p at lower quality settings. 1440p ultra obviously pushes things too far, with sub-30 fps performance in most of the games we tested. So let's just ignore the 1440p ultra numbers and focus on 1080p performance.

It's a bit of a mixed bag, with wild swings in relative performance, depending on the game. Overall performance at 1080p medium basically ended up a tie, with the GTX 1650 Super holding a negligible 2% lead. In the individual games, the 1650 Super was anywhere from 4% slower (Borderlands 3) to a whopping 31% faster (Total War: Warhammer 3). But for the most part, the two provided a comparable experience.

Bumping the quality settings from medium to ultra creates problems in several of the games, which start to use more than the 4GB of VRAM that's available on these GPUs. Forza Horizon 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, Total War: Warhammer 3, and Watch Dogs Legion all see performance basically cut in half, sometimes more. Most of the games remained playable, meaning 30 fps or more, but TWW3 and WDL both dropped below that mark.

Technically, AMD's RX 6500 XT has the advantage of also supporting DXR (DirectX Raytracing), which the GTX 1650 Super fails to run (you need a 6GB GTX 10- or 16-series GPU for limited DXR support). However, performance in DXR games on the 6500 XT, even at 1080p medium, is typically so slow as to be meaningless. In our 6-game DXR test suite, the RX 6500 XT averaged 13.5 fps and failed to run Control (which requires 6GB or more to enable DXR). Fortnite was the best result, at 20 fps, while a couple of the games didn't even break 10 fps. Don't bother, in other words.

It's interesting what AMD is able to do with significantly less memory bandwidth, even with a relatively small 16MB Infinity Cache. The RX 6500 XT has just 144 GB/s of bandwidth, compared to 192 GB/s for the GTX 1650 Super, due to the 64-bit memory bus on Navi 24. However, the 232 GB/s of Infinity Cache bandwidth basically makes up the difference, most of the time. It starts to fall short at ultra settings, but those mostly aren't playable anyway.

Incidentally, while we're only showing average fps, the 99th percentile lows are mostly the same story, except Nvidia's lead is slightly larger. Overall, the GTX 1650 Super was 4.9% faster on minimum fps at 1080p medium, 10.0% faster at 1080p ultra, and 43.7% faster at 1440p ultra. In other words, the framerate consistency was slightly worse on the RX 6500 XT.

While the performance might look like a tie, that's using a modern test system that supports the PCIe 4.0 interface. We also tested RX 6500 XT with PCIe 3.0 speeds, and performance dropped by 9% overall, but there were instances where it was up to 40% slower. Testing the GTX 1650 Super on the same two PCs showed a 2% improvement in performance on the older Core i9-9900K system, so the drop in AMD performance can safely be attributed to the PCIe interface and platform. That gives Nvidia the overall lead for this category.

Winner: Nvidia GTX 1650 Super

Nvidia came out ahead at all three tested settings and resolutions, using a modern test PC. 1080p medium performance was pretty much tied, and we could throw AMD a bone for its ray tracing hardware. However, for budget hardware, we feel there's a far greater chance these cards will end up in a PC that doesn't support PCIe 4.0, which means Nvidia gets the lead. Neither one of these GPUs are particularly potent, of course. You're getting the equivalent of an RX 580 8GB (but with less VRAM), or a bit faster than a GTX 980, half a decade after those GPUs were in their prime.

Price: GTX 1650 Super vs RX 6500 XT

Prices have been all over the place for most of the past two years, though the RX 6500 XT only launched back in January 2022. The GTX 1650 Super originally debuted with a price of just $159 in 2019, and it was an excellent value at the time. Prices trended upward in 2020, and then spiked horrifically in 2021 when the GPU shortages and pandemic-influenced supply chain issues were at their worst. Even now, nearly three years after its launch, the lowest prices on the GTX 1650 Super are still $200.

Unless you're willing to take a chance with a used card, which changes things up slightly. The GTX 1650 Super can be had for around $130 on eBay, while the RX 6500 XT starts at around $150. Both of those prices are very much estimates, as eBay shows far more fluctuations than retail stores. Plus, buying a used graphics card represents a risk. The good news is that neither of these GPUs would have been a great option for mining purposes, due to having only 4GB of memory, so they probably weren’t run into the ground by their former owners.

What's not clear is whether Nvidia is still actively producing the TU116 chips that sit at the heart of the GTX 1650 Super. It hasn't officially discontinued production as far as we're aware, but the supply of budget-friendly GTX 16-series cards hasn't been all that great for a while now. The RTX 3050 meanwhile represents a large step up in price, performance, and features, so Nvidia doesn't have a direct replacement for the GTX 1650 Super. And no, the GTX 1630 is not the GPU you're looking for [waves hand].

Winner: AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT

Retail pricing trumps eBay pricing, and right now you save $20 by going with the AMD RX 6500 XT. Unless Nvidia starts providing a steady supply of TU116 chips — for the GTX 1650 Super as well as the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Super — AMD will likely maintain its modest pricing advantage.

Features and Technology: GTX 1650 Super vs RX 6500 XT

Normally, newer GPU architectures come with additional features. AMD's Navi 24 and Nvidia's GTX 16-series represent an exception to that rule, in different ways.

Despite using the Turing architecture, the GTX 1650 Super doesn't support ray tracing or DLSS — two of the biggest additions to Turing. It does support the improved Turing NVENC hardware, which promises higher quality streaming encodes with less of a hit on gaming performance, however, which does beat Navi 24.

AMD's Navi 24 GPU meanwhile represents some serious cuts to the basic RDNA 2 architecture feature set. There's no video encoding hardware, only video decoding hardware. The PCIe interface also gets trimmed to just an x4 link, which despite being PCIe 4.0 capable still has half the potential throughput as the GTX 1650 Super's PCIe 3.0 x16 interface. It's also limited to two display outputs, typically one HDMI 2.1 and one DisplayPort 1.4.

The one major feature AMD supports with RX 6500 XT that Nvidia does not is ray tracing, but as noted earlier, it's much more of a checkbox feature than something most people would consider using. Other competing features are mostly comparable, like G-Sync vs FreeSync, Reflex vs Anti-Lag, etc. You get the same amount of memory (4GB), and both GPUs require a 6-pin (or sometimes 8-pin) power connection.

Winner: Nvidia GTX 1650 Super 

We said in our initial review that Navi 24 represented too many cuts to the basic feature set. A 64-bit memory interface, x4 PCIe interface, and no encoding hardware make this a GPU that feels more like something from five years ago. Sure, there's RT hardware, but it's only a token effort and is largely useless with only 4GB of memory. This is a close call, but ultimately we give Nvidia a slight edge.

Drivers and Software: GTX 1650 Super vs RX 6500 XT

AMD and Nvidia release regular driver updates for their GPUs. In AMD's case, the company typically drops larger annual overhauls of its Radeon drivers, but the biggest changes in the past couple of years have focused on improving DirectX 11 performance in a few cases, and cleaning up bugs. Most major game launches tend to see AMD Game Ready drivers, though not necessarily WHQL certified drivers.

Nvidia maintains a similar release schedule for its GeForce drivers. It doesn't always have a monthly driver update, but you can count on having Game Ready Drivers on launch day for most major game releases. Nearly every Nvidia driver (outside the occasional hotfix) is WHQL certified. It's an extra step, though in practice we're not sure how much it really matters — we've seen UI bugs and other issues still slip through the WHQL process.

AMD and Nvidia have different approaches to their driver user interfaces. Nvidia splits its GeForce driver options into two applications. Nvidia Control Panel handles the GPU settings, such as resolution, texture filtering, vertical sync, low latency mode, power management, and more. The control panel also handles display configuration settings, such as color, rotation, and multi-display setups. Nvidia GeForce Experience handles game settings, driver updates, and includes game streaming and recording features as well as performance tuning options. To access the GeForce Experience features, you must log in with an Nvidia user account.

AMD takes a somewhat more streamlined approach in that the Radeon driver software is a one-stop-shop for all your Radeon GPU settings and features. The Radeon Adrenaline 2022 software suite includes automatic driver updates, game performance profiles, built-in broadcasting software to stream and record your gameplay, and performance metrics and overclocking options.

Winner: Tie

Both Nvidia and AMD have different advantages with their drivers and accompanying software, but they offer generally equivalent experiences. Driver updates come on a regular basis, and both companies are well versed in testing and tuning their drivers to extract good gaming performance. Nvidia might do a bit better on a selection of less popular games, but we already gave it the performance category so we're calling this a tie.

Power Consumption / Efficiency: GTX 1650 Super vs RX 6500 XT

The GTX 1650 Super and RX 6500 XT aren't particularly demanding cards, with official TBP (typical board power) ratings of 100W and 107W, respectively. As you can guess, real-world testing might show some minor differences, but any decent power supply should prove sufficient for these GPUs.

Some models might have a larger factory overclock and require an 8-pin connector, and all cards will need at least a 6-pin connector. That's enough for the card to use up to 150W (75W from the 6-pin and 75W from the PCIe slot), and even the largest factory overclocks are unlikely to push things that far.

AMD's previous generation GPUs often used far more power than their Nvidia counterparts, but that's not the case with the current lineup. In our testing,the RX 6500 XT used 90W of power in our Metro Exodus test and 113W in FurMark, while the GTX 1650 Super used 101W in Metro and 102W in FurMark. There's a good chance other games would have the RX 6500 XT using more power, which means overall it's a tie.

That's certainly an interesting outcome, considering Nvidia's GTX 1650 Super uses TSMC's older 12nm FFN node while the AMD RX 6500 XT uses the newer 7nm node. AMD's Navi 24 also has a 107mm^2 die size compared to Nvidia's TU116 with a 284mm^2 chip size (though a decent chunk of the TU116 chip is disabled on this card). But lower clock speeds and other architectural differences come into play, and ultimately power draw ends up being very similar.

Winner: Tie

A difference of 5–10W in real-world use cases basically doesn't matter, when both cards have the same PSU connectivity requirements. 100W of power, give or take, means your graphics card shouldn't need a massive cooler with lots of fans, and the fans should spin at relatively low speeds, leading to a quiet PC overall.

Bottom Line: GTX 1650 Super vs RX 6500 XT

Overall Winner: Nvidia GTX 1650 Super

The Radeon RX 6500 XT and GeForce GTX 1650 Super are relatively well matched cards. Frankly, that's more than a little surprising, considering the GTX 1650 Super is now almost three years old, while the RX 6500 XT hasn't even reached its first birthday yet. But AMD originally intended the Navi 24 GPU for mobile solutions, which means it would typically be paired with integrated graphics solutions that would provide some extra features.

That proves to be a limiting factor overall. If you want to save $20, certainly AMD deserves some thought. However, at $200 even, with features like video encoding (live streaming) support and slightly better performance in the majority of games, plus the ability to use the GTX 1650 Super with older PCIe 3.0 systems without tanking performance, Nvidia comes out ahead.

That's not to say the RX 6500 XT couldn't work just fine for a lot of people, but the same goes for the GTX 1650 Super. Frankly, we'd be more inclined to try and step up to the next level of performance and features, with the Radeon RX 6600 and GeForce RTX 3050 — or even the GeForce GTX 1660 Super. But that might be too big of a step for many wallets. GPU prices continue to fall, but Nvidia's "budget Ampere" cards still sell well above MSRP.

Pricing and relative performance are the key factors. Right now, the RX 6500 XT and GTX 1650 Super go head to head, but if the AMD card gets cheaper or supplies of the GTX 1650 Super dry up and prices increase, things could quickly change. Availability of older GTX 16-series has become somewhat unreliable, so if the GTX 1650 Super fades away and the GTX 1650 has to take its place in the sub-$200 market, RX 6500 XT would easily take the performance crown — and the GTX 1630 is laughable by comparison.

Despite the age of the GTX 1650 Super, we also don't expect a serious replacement to arrive any time soon from Team Green. AMD's RX 6500 XT is too new to need a replacement as well. That means even though next-generation Nvidia Ada and AMD RDNA 3 GPUs are on the horizon, it might be some time before the budget gets any love. 

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The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630 started popping up in rumors in leaks a few months back. Part of me thought, "Surely Nvidia won't release a new and pathetically slow Turing variant this late in the game." But the realist in me knew it was only a matter of time — the GT 1030 and GT 730 cards that started shipping again last year was the only evidence we needed.

Let's be blunt: The GTX 1630 isn't anywhere close to being one of the best graphics cards, and in fact it lands near the very bottom of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. The only slower GPUs that we've tested are the GTX 1050, RX 560, RX 550, and the aforementioned GT 1030. None of those are worth your time or money either, but at least they're not being released in mid-2022.

The only real contender for the GTX 1630 is AMD's recently launched Radeon RX 6400, but this new Nvidia card actually makes the lackluster 6400 look good. Actually, the real competition — and the reason no one should give the GTX 1630 the time of day — comes from the existing GTX 1650 and GTX 1650 Super. The latter basically doubles the specs of the 1630, and pretty much doubles performance as well.

Colorful sent us this sample for review, but there doesn't seem to be an official price from Nvidia. What we can find online suggests that the soft MSRP has been set at $199, which is just silly. EVGA lists its own GTX 1630 for $199, or you can also buy the far superior GTX 1650 Super for $199. The 1630 also nominally replaces the GT 1030, which had a launch price of $79 — $70 for the faster GDDR5 variant. It feels as though the GTX 1630 was priced according to mid-2021, but it's now laughably expensive.

Here's how the specifications for Nvidia's old-timer Turing TU117 GPUs stack up, with the RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT for comparison. 

AMD's RX 6400 basically tied the GTX 1650, so there's little question it will easily beat the lower spec GTX 1630. About the only advantage that the GTX 1630 has is the presence of video encoding hardware — the TU117 has Pascal-era hardware, not the improved Turing encoder, but it's still better than nothing.

What's particularly odd with the GTX 1630 is that Nvidia has been shipping the same TU117 GPU in laptops as the MX450 (and more recently MX550) for a couple of years, though granted NVENC is disabled on those parts. Apparently, there were enough chips that couldn't reach the required 14 SMs for the MX450 or GTX 1650, and Nvidia and its partners figured a cut-down 10 SM variant might still sell on desktops — to the uninformed, anyway.

You basically get all the same features as a GTX 1650, just with less performance. You don't even necessarily get a lower power card, as the GTX 1630 models we've seen still come with a 6-pin power connector. That might be because these were less desirable chips with defects, or maybe it's because Nvidia tried to make up for the lack of GPU cores with slightly higher clocks. At least the RX 6400 can be found in half-height models and doesn't require additional power.

The 4GB GDDR6 comes clocked at 12Gbps, with a 64-bit interface. As noted already, that's exactly half of what the GTX 1650 Super provides. Also note that, unlike AMD's RDNA 2 GPUs, there's no Infinity Cache to make up the difference, though the 512 GPU cores are already going to be a limiting factor.

With most modern graphics card selling at close to MSRP, the GTX 1630 feels like far too little, far too late. Last year we saw GTX 1650 cards going for $300 or more, and a $200 GTX 1630 might have made some kind of warped sense. Today, you can get the RX 6500 XT, RX 6400, GTX 1650, and even GTX 1650 Super for $200 or less. Maybe this was supposed to be for big OEMs, so they could toss in a weak GPU and claim to still offer dedicated graphics, but that's ultimately just going to lead to disappointed customers. 

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Colorful markets its GTX 1630 card under the Battle Ax name — surely a weapon to strike fear into the hearts of your opponents! If a name was all that was required to con unsuspecting gamers, maybe this would work. But, sorry Colorful, a tough sounding name does nothing to help the underwhelming GPU inside the box.

It's at least a small card, though it still has dual fans. It weighs 539g and measures 219x115x36mm. That's larger than the PowerColor RX 6400, but still small enough to fit in most mini-ITX cases.

The heatsink is milled aluminum, and it's more than sufficient to keep the GPU and memory cool. Judging by temperatures and fan speeds, though, it's not a high quality design. Cooling 75W is basically child's play these days, and throwing two fans and a larger heatsink at the problem represents a brute force approach rather than an elegant design.

The card itself is very barebones, with no lighting or other extras. The red and black plastic cooling shroud is as exciting as it gets, outside of the box artwork. Video outputs consist of one each for DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0, and DL-DVI-D — the last is for anyone still holding on to an older LCD. It would have been nice to get four HDMI/DisplayPort connections instead, since that would have at least provided a potential use case for people looking to cheaply add support for extra monitors. 

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Our 2022 GPU testbed consists of a Core i9-12900K processor, MSI Pro Z690-A DDR4 WiFi motherboard, and DDR4-3600 memory (with XMP enabled). We're running Windows 11 to ensure we get the most out of Alder Lake, and we're running the latest game patches and drivers for this testing — 516.93 for the GTX 1630.

Our gaming tests consist of a "standard" suite of eight games, and since there's no ray tracing hardware on the GTX 16-series GPUs, we can skip that portion of testing. We've tested at 1080p with medium and ultra settings, though as we'll see shortly there's little point in enabling maximum settings in more demanding games on such a slow graphics card.

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The GTX 1630 really only makes sense at 1080p low to medium settings, maybe high settings in lighter games. You can see by the overall average of just 36.5 fps that it's not going to win any performance awards.

But it does manage to beat the GTX 1050, which launched with a price of $110 back in 2016, and of course the GT 1030. It also beats the RX 560 4GB, and by extension the RX 550 4GB. Again, those were generally sub-$100 cards when they launched. On the other hand, it fails to beat the GTX 1050 Ti, a $140 card from 2016 with similar video encoding hardware.

In the individual games, nearly all of the games we tested at 1080p medium remained playable, breaking 30 fps. Flight Simulator came up just a hair short at 28 fps, but it's still playable at that speed, while Total War: Warhammer 3 fell far short of the 30 fps mark and averaged just 21 fps.

As you can guess from the 1080p medium results, bumping the quality up to 1080p ultra generally exceeds the capabilities of the GTX 1630. Average performance across the eight tested games was just 18 fps, and there wasn't a single game that broke the 30 fps mark.

Some of that might be due to only having 4GB VRAM, but the 64-bit memory interface and lack of bandwidth are also a problem. The GTX 1650 and 1650 Super also have 4GB VRAM, but they delivered mostly playable 1080p ultra results, outside of a few games.

But we're not suggesting anyone buy a 4GB card with the intent of playing games at ultra quality settings. More and more titles are pushing beyond 4GB, even at 1080p, and the days of such GPUs are limited., which is the big problem with the GTX 1630, as it's already near the bottom of the performance ladder and clearly doesn't have any legs left. 

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For our power, temperature, clock speed, and fan speed testing, we use Powenetics testing hardware and software. We capture in-line GPU power consumption by collecting data while looping Metro Exodus — this time at 1080p medium instead of our normal 1440p ultra, due to the underpowered GPU. We also test with the FurMark stress test at 1600x900. Our power testing PC uses an open testbed, as that's required for all the extra wires and riser card, and it's the same Core i9-9900K that we've used for the past several years.

Metro Exodus appears to have taxed the GTX 1630 in such a way as to limit maximum power draw to 55W or less. Some games will push higher power use, particularly at more reasonable settings (for example, Horizon Zero Dawn at its original quality setting broke the 60W mark). FurMark meanwhile was able to max out the card's power use at a steady 72–73W.

There's certainly room for overclocking, but the GPU and memory on the GTX 1630 will fall well short of the speeds that would be necessary to make it a worthwhile purchase. Again, GTX 1650 Super doubles all the important elements and currently costs the same $199 — less if you buy it used. An extra 100 MHz and 14 Gbps VRAM won't come anywhere near closing that gap.

Clock speeds on the GTX 1630 were in line with what we're used to seeing from Turing GPUs: about 100 MHz higher than the rated boost clock for gaming, and even FurMark beat Colorful's stated 1815MHz boost clock.

Temperatures peaked at around 67C in FurMark, while Metro only averaged 57C. Again, some games and settings will push the GTX 1630 a bit harder, but we've used the same test for consistency. Fan speeds also topped out at around 1800 RPM in FurMark, while lighter workloads dropped the fans below 1500 RPM.

We measured noise levels at 10cm using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter, aimed between two two fans. That helps to minimize the impact of the CPU cooling fans, and the noise floor (with the CPU fans running) of our test environment and equipment was <33 dB(A). Colorful's GTX 1630 does not have a 0db mode for the fans, so they're always spinning, and the idle noise was a bit higher at 35.0 dB(A). During our gaming tests, that increased to 39.9 dB(A) and 42% fan speed. Manually setting the fans to 75% resulted in 54.3 dB(A) of noise, though it's unlikely the card would hit such speeds during normal use. 

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It's hard to find things to like about the GTX 1630. If it arrived last year, at this same price, it might have had a few takers in the midst of the global GPU shortages. Today? It's too slow and too expensive. It's frankly absurd that some places like EVGA have GTX 1650 and GTX 1650 Super cards that cost less than the GTX 1630.

Maybe the pricing will correct, but realistically it needs to be cut in half for the cards to make any sort of sense. As a replacement in the product stack for the aging GTX 1050 — which hasn't been manufactured for a few years now, as far as we can tell — a GTX 1630 with a similar $110 price point would have been okay. You get double the VRAM at least, which means some of the games that choke on 2GB cards could still run. Alternatively, Nvidia could have made this a GT 1030 replacement, priced below $100. It still wouldn't be fast, but at least it would have the ultra-budget pricing angle going for it.

With AMD's Radeon RX 6400 delivering significantly better performance for $50 less, the only real selling point for the GTX 1630 would be its media encoding capabilities. If that's your primary consideration, waiting for Intel's Arc A380 to ship in the US would be a better choice. Gaming performance might be questionable, but the AV1 media encoding capabilities look quite promising.

The Turing TU117 GPU was never a potent chip, but disabling half of the cores and memory channels makes a relatively weak GPU into a solution that can barely hope to compete with integrated graphics. Yes, it's faster than the GTX 1050, but it's also slower than the GTX 1050 Ti, and both of those can readily be picked up used for about $100 these days.

You don't even get extra features compared to the 1050 Ti that would warrant the upgrade — it's the same NVENC hardware, more or less, with the same amount of VRAM, same video outputs, and worse performance. Power efficiency isn't an advantage either, as the GTX 1050 Ti only used 58W in our gaming test, and both are nominally 75W cards. So what's the point?

The point is to make something out of nothing, as far as I can tell. Nvidia probably had some TU117 chips that had functional NVENC hardware but with some of the memory controllers and SMs that couldn't hit the GTX 1650 or MX450 requirements. Just like there are GTX 1650 cards made using TU106 silicon, but with all the ray tracing and tensor core hardware disabled, and with only 14 of the potential 36 SMs enabled, now we have a GTX 1630 made with chips where 50% of the cores and memory controllers apparently failed.

If Nvidia or its partners priced this appropriately, some people would inevitably find a use for it. That means that it needs to cost significantly less than the pre-existing GTX 1650 cards, since those are universally faster. Even Intel's Arc A380 will likely deliver superior performance, though it's a gamble on whether or not Intel will ever get the drivers to fully functional status. We'll hopefully have a card soon that we can put through its paces.

• MORE: Best Graphics Cards
• MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
• MORE: All Graphics Content

Innosilicon has introduced its second-generation standalone graphics processor, the Fenghua II (aka Fantasy II). The new GPU has a power consumption between 4W and 15W, so it does not require either auxiliary PCIe power or active cooling, which is why it can target entry-level desktops and notebooks.  

Despite expectations, Innosilicon's second-generation discrete GPU does not offer higher performance than its predecessor. In fact, with raw compute performance of 1.5 FP32 TFLOPS/12 INT8 TOPS, the Fantasy II is actually more than three times slower than single-chip Fantasy I graphics card (which offers up to 5 FP32 TFLOPS/up to 25 INT8 TOPS performance), according to 163.com (via @Loeschzwerg_3DC) .The indisputable advantage of the new graphics card is its power consumption that ranges between 4W and 15W as opposed to 20W to 50W for single-chip Fantasy I. Meanwhile, performance-per-watt of the novelty remained at the same level with its bigger sibling.

Innosilicon's Fantasy I and Fantasy II Graphics Cards

Given the compute performance of the Fantasy II GPU, it will compete against Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1630 graphics board that uses the TU117 GPU originally introduced in April 2019. In fact, even AMD's Radeon RX 6400 might outperform the Fantasy II, based on its compute capabilities (and something tells us that this one will never find itself in our list of the best graphics cards available today). Meanwhile, Innosilicon does not publish performance results of its new graphics chip in real games. The only thing it says is that it hits 6500 in the outdated GLMark2 benchmark, according to ITHome. 

Innosilicon does not disclose which architecture powers its Fantasy II GPU, though we may speculate that the new graphics chip uses the same ImgTec's PowerVR architecture which is used for the Fantasy I GPU. That said, the new graphics processor supports DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenCL, and even OpenGL ES application programming interfaces (APIs). Meanwhile, the new graphics processor has a built-in RISC-V security core with physical unclonable function (PUF). 

The Fantasy II GPU can support 2GB, 4GB, 8GB LPDDR4/4X/5/5X memory configurations with an up to 10 GT/s data transfer speed. The chip supports a DisplayPort/eDP 1.4, two HDMI 2.0, LVDS, and D-Sub/VGA outputs, though there is no word how many display pipelines it has (i.e., how many monitors it can support simultaneously). As for host interface, the chip uses a PCIe 3.0 x8 bus. 

While Innosilicon's Fantasy II is definitely not the best entry-level GPU around, it has another advantage over discrete graphics products from AMD, Intel and Nvidia (in addition to its low power consumption): it supports the vast majority of Linux distributions (including those exclusively used in China), such as CentOS, Kirin, KylinOS, Tongxin, UOS and Ubuntu. Furthermore, it supports all Chinese CPU platforms (something that GPUs from leading vendors do not support), such as Loongson, Huawei Kunpeng, Hygon Dhyana, Shenwei (Sunway) and Zhaoxin Feiteng. Furthermore, Innosilicon plans to release Windows 10 drivers for its Fantasy-series GPUs.

As reported by hardwareLuxx, water cooling manufacturer Bykski has created a water block for Intel's new Arc A380 graphics card, known as the I-GNA380-X. For a graphics card that is about as power-hungry as a GTX 1650, this new water block is as overkill as it gets for a 75W card. Nonetheless, it is a compact block with single-slot support and will make the (mostly broken) Arc A380 look like a fast, premium graphics card - or one of our Best GPUs, with high-quality materials and RGB lighting. 

For reference, this block is only designed for the Gunnir Arc A380 Photon, and will not work with any other A380 AIB partner cards.

The block itself is made out of nickel-plated copper and sealed with an acrylic see-thru cover. The block will cool three components on the A380, the GPU core, video memory, and power delivery system. It also features a backplate which we presume will cool some of the rear side PCB components, and should add some additional bling to the graphics card. Speaking of which, the water block also includes RGB lighting, which lights up the entire acrylic cover to show off your water supply and the block inside.

As previously mentioned, the block does turn the Gunnir card into a single-slot card, so this block can be functionally useful for the very very few people who need to shoehorn an Arc A380 into a single-slot machine.

We don't know how well this water block will cool, but it's safe to say it is incredibly overkill, and temperatures will certainly not be a problem on the Arc A380 even with its stock Gunnir cooler. 

But, the first problem you will have is getting your GPU up to temperature in the first place. Intel's Arc GPUs are facing many problems, many of which include driver issues. In previous reports, we've seen benchmarks of Intel's Arc A380 where the GPU never hit its rated power specification, or anywhere close to that.

More recent reviews of the card seem to not have this issue, but the card still suffers stability issues, from immature drivers and the A380 still suffers from bad performance as well, depending on the game.

So for better or for worse, the Bykski block will be largely useless until the Arc A380 gets its reliability issues fixed and finally gets sold outside of China.

Chinese GPU maker Glenfly Tech Co., Ltd. has published an official product page outlining the features and specifications of the Glenfly Arise GT-10C0 graphics card. According to the information, it is the first product using a GPU developed and designed by Glenfly. It isn't potent, with its FP32 TFLOPS figure of 1.5, similar to the old Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti or AMD Radeon Vega 8 iGPU.

It is good to have an official product page now available in the wake of scrappy bits of information and imagery on Chinese social media. However, some of the important specs, and real-world performance indicators, remain elusive.

The Arise GT-10C0 competes in the category with discrete graphics card minnows such as the Intel Arc A380, AMD Radeon RX 6400, and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630.

The nearest competitor to the Glenfly card is Nvidia’s – if we consider the FP32 performance stats. By this same metric, the Chinese 28nm GPU is similar to the old GTX 750 Ti or AMD Vega 8 integrated graphics. We know very little about the underlying GPU architecture for the Chinese GPU, and even basic specs like the number of GPU cores and clocks are not shared. However, sharing these specs at this point wouldn’t be very illuminating, as we have no Glenfly Arise reference point that has been thoroughly independently tested as a base for extrapolation.

Last month we saw some Geekbench tests for what was reported to be a Glenfly Arise 1020 GPU. It isn’t easy to ascertain whether that was a Geekbench misreport of the Arise GT-10C0 or something else. However, it came with 2GB of VRAM, as we see it is an option for the Arise GT-10C0. Furthermore, the Geekbench OpenCL benchmark scores indicate that the Arise 1020 may be an even worse performer than the 10C0 if it isn’t the same GPU performing very severely due to drivers/software and similar lack of maturity issues.

In summary, the new information is encouraging, as it indicates that the first Glenfly Arise desktop graphics cards are getting ready for launch. Fingers crossed for an informative third-party comparative review published on a Chinese tech site, forum, or video sharing site like Bilibili in the coming weeks.

The best gaming laptops tend to cost at least $750, so finding a decent budget gaming laptop that packs in a GTX 1650, 512GB of SSD storage, and a 120 Hz 1080p display for just $550 on this Prime Day deal from AntOnline certainly warrants some discussion. Our normal pick for the best budget gaming laptop has similar components, but with a previous generation CPU and without the 120 Hz display, for $60 more.

The IdeaPad Gaming 3 won't set any records for performance, but it's a well-rounded budget system. It starts with a previous generation Core i3-11300H processor, a 4-core/8-thread part that runs at up to 4.4 GHz. That's plenty fast for gaming, and more importantly the CPU is joined by a dedicated graphics chip.

The GeForce GTX 1650 4GB represents Nvidia's budget tier, but it's still a step above the MX550 and other MX-series parts and should be good for 1080p medium to high gaming. In our desktop GPU benchmarks, the GTX 1650 still keeps pace with AMD's RX 6400. The laptop parts will be a bit slower, but not by much.

The graphics card powers a 120 Hz display, which will provide for a smoother user experience both in games and in general Windows use. You also get 512GB of M.2 SSD storage and 8GB of memory — not a lot in either department, but enough to get you started on PC gaming.

And if you're lacking in games to play, three months of Xbox Game Pass PC will give you access to hundreds of titles, including popular games like Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite, Sea of Thieves, and many more — there are 441 PC games on the service right now.

All that for only $549.99? We're not likely to see a better budget gaming laptop deal until Black Friday rolls around in November.

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Even before its launch, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630 grabbed headlines for the wrong reasons. Since becoming official, the news has become even worse; with China pricing revealed, by making the AMD Radeon RX 6400 look like a hero, and for making the six-year-old GeForce GTX 1050 Ti look like a contender in 2022. Now we have seen popular resellers in the US and UK price various GTX 1630 models at preposterous levels.

EVGA GeForce GTX 1630 SC Gaming - US pricing

The EVGA direct retail page clearly illustrates the absurdity of current GeForce GTX 1630 graphics card pricing. If you visit the EVGA sales page for its GTX 16 series GPUs, you will see the solitary GTX 1630 priced at $199, sitting alongside much more capable GPUs, some at the same or even lower price.

Of course, cards like the GTX 1660 Ti and 1660 Super are more expensive than the lowly GTX 1630. However, we see that a far more capable GTX 1660 is only $50 more than a GTX 1630, thanks to a $60 instant rebate. Meanwhile, you can purchase GTX 1650 models direct from EVGA starting at $179. With some patience, you could wait for a re-stock of a $159 EVGA GeForce GTX 1650 SC Ultra Black Gaming model. Lastly, an eyebrow must be raised at the "limit 2 per household" notice on EVGA's GTX 1630.

Zotac GeForce GTX 1630 Gaming – UK pricing

There is no need for UK-dwellers to feel left out concerning Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630 price gouging. Popular UK PC maker and components retailer Scan has listed the Zotac GeForce GTX 1630 Gaming at £179.99 (equivalent to $215, but UK prices include 20% VAT).

Zotac's card is definitely cheaper looking than the EVGA SC Gaming model. It is a compact single fan model, which is entirely acceptable given the TDP. But such designs are usually marketed at MSRP or slightly lower.

The GeForce GTX 1630 might find a home in many compact PCs that don't have a spare 6- or 8-pin power connector. However, if you look at the models available from MSI, for example, you can get compact ITX and low-profile versions of the GTX 1650 (and GTX 1050 Ti) fitting the same criteria on the new and used market.

The feeling that the GeForce GTX 1630 will likely be a misfire from Nvidia isn't helped by these prices. Before launch, we had it pegged as a "below $149" graphics card. However, after launch, we've seen the likes of the Radeon RX 6400 deliver almost 60% better performance. And you can buy these Radeon cards new for about $169 from several brands.

If you are looking for a graphics card this summer, please check out our regularly updated Best Graphics Cards for Gaming in 2022 feature. The Tom's Hardware GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy 2022 is another tool you should certainly check out.

According to a Weibo post by Inno3D, Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 1630 is an incredibly slow gaming GPU, with new benchmarks showcasing performance parity with the entry-level GTX 1050 Ti from six years ago. If Inno3D's benchmarks are applicable to most titles, this makes the GTX 1630 one of the slowest GPUs on the market right off the bat, and perhaps little more than a refreshed GTX 1050 Ti with newer video encoders and decoders thanks to the newer Turing architecture.

The GTX 1050 Ti came out in 2016 as Nvidia's entry-level gaming GPU powered by the Pascal architecture. The 1050 Ti features 768 CUDA cores running on a 128-bit memory bus with 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Power consumption peaked at 75W with clock speeds starting at 1290MHz for the base clock, and boost frequencies hitting 1392MHz for the reference model.

But even in 2016, we were not completely satisfied with its performance. In our original review, when compared to the vanilla GTX 1050, the 1050 Ti showed lackluster performance for the $130 price point it originated at.

The GTX 1630 is Nvidia's latest entry-level GeForce GPU, marking the first time Nvidia has ever used an xx30 series badge for a GTX GPU. As expected, this GPU features less memory bandwidth and fewer cores than the GTX 1650, with a grand total of 512 CUDA cores running on a tiny 64-bit bus with 4GB of GDDR6 (12Gbps) memory. Thankfully clock speeds have been increased over the 1650 to compensate for the reduced specifications, featuring a 1,785 MHz boost clock vs 1,590 MHz on the 1650. 

Benchmarks

Inno3D showed a benchmark chart comparing the GTX 1630, against the GTX 1050 Ti and the GTX 1050 in 12 titles. Some of these titles include popular AAA games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Control, Call of Duty Cold War, Assasins Creed Valhalla, Forza Horizon 4, and New World. 

On average, the GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1630 showed roughly equal performance, with the GTX 1050 being noticeably worse in most games. But there are a few exceptions where the GTX 1050 TI and even the 1050 were beating out the GTX 1630 in three of the twelve titles. Of course, game selection will absolutely affect the results.

This is some exceptionally slow performance for a brand new graphics card, even AMD's new but unexceptional Radeon RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT can outperform the GTX 1050 Ti.

This makes Nvidia's GTX 1630 truly the slowest modern GPU we've seen in a very long time and a GPU that almost no one will buy for gaming with its rumored price of $165. A year ago, a case could have been made for the GTX 1630 during the global GPU shortage. But with GPU prices now at MSRP and the used GPU market becoming a gold mine for PC gamers, the GTX 1630 is already obsolete before it hits store shelves.

The only saving grace for the GTX 1630 is in its multi-media prowess with support for VP8 and H.265 codecs. It also features a much newer NVENC encoder for recording gameplay or just screen capturing from your monitor, which cannot be said of the RX 6400 which lacks H264 encoding entirely.

If you think the Radeon RX 6400 was a disappointment, Nvidia's freshly baked GeForce GTX 1630 will truly blow your socks off. TechPowerUp's review puts the Radeon RX 6400 (Navi 24) nearly 60% ahead of the new GeForce GTX 1630. That's disappointing for anyone looking to buy an entry-level GPU, but hardly surprising considering how far specs have been cut.

Nvidia quietly launched the GeForce GTX 1630 today, and you can see why it didn't make much noise after seeing how the Turing-based graphics card performs. TechPowerUp tested the GeForce GTX 1630 at higher resolutions, but we'll be kind and focus on their 1080p results. Objectively, it's unlikely that consumers will pick up the GeForce GTX 1630 for 1440p or 4K gaming, considering that the Turing graphics card struggles at 1080p with demanding image fidelity.

The good news is that the GeForce GTX 1630 delivered up to three times higher performance than the five-year-old GeForce GT 1030. That's all the good we can say about it. Early rumors claim the GeForce GTX 1630 was supposed to replace the aging GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, but TechPowerUp unfortunately didn't include the Pascal graphics card in its tests. The GeForce GTX 1630 is the first "x30" SKU to carry the GTX branding, and it's the lowest-end model in Nvidia's ongoing GeForce GTX 16-series. There's a 61% performance gap between it and the GeForce GTX 1650, which nominally has the same price.

How does the GeForce GTX 1650 fare against its AMD rivals? It was 32% faster than the relatively archaic Radeon RX 560 2GB, which also turned five years old this year. The GeForce GTX 1650 can't keep up with the more up-to-date competition, however, and the Radeon RX 6400 delivered 57% higher performance than the GeForce GTX 1630.

The only thing Nvidia got right with the GeForce GTX 1630 may be the graphics card's power consumption. It has a 75W TDP, so the recommended power supply is a 300W unit. Some vendors have still added a single 6-pin PCIe power connector, which shouldn't be necessary. TechPowerUp recorded a maximum power consumption of 65W, and up to 71W if you like frying your graphics card in Furmark. The Radeon RX 6400 drew 56W at maximum by comparison. In gaming, the publication measured 48W for the GeForce GTX 1630 and 51W for the Radeon RX 6400. Unfortunately, the thermal limit is unalterable, so you can't raise it for overclocking, much like the Radeon RX 6400.

Turning to the features, the Radeon RX 6400 comes with ray tracing, but it's not something you'd typically use on a low-end graphics card. The GeForce GTX 1630 uses the TU117 chip, so it lacks the RT and Tensor cores. That means the graphics card doesn't have access to ray tracing or Nvidia's DLSS technology. It's a shame because that latter would be beneficial for a bottom-end graphics card like the GeForce GTX 1630. Furthermore, as TechPowerUp noted, the GeForce GTX 1630 can utilize Nvidia Image Scaling (NIS) for inferior results. However, AMD rides in to save the day. Team Red has embraced everyone with its FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 (FSR 2.0), so GeForce GTX 1630 owners can leverage AMD's technology to boost gaming performance. Ironic, isn't it?

Before its release, many speculated that the GeForce GTX 1630 would carry a $150 price tag. Although the graphics card is out now, we still don't know the MSRP. TechPowerUp highlighted that neither Nvidia nor Gainward provided any details on pricing. However, with EVGA pricing its GeForce GTX 1630 SC Gaming at $199.99 and Colorful with the GeForce GTX 1630 NB at $169, the rumored $150 minimum price tag looks plausible. The problem is that the Radeon RX 6400 has a $159 MSRP, and there are custom models that retail at that price. So for $9 more, you're getting a faster graphics card, making the Radeon RX 6400 the unsung hero.

For most people, we'd recommend stepping up to something better than either of those GPUs. Our best graphics cards list recommends the RX 6500 XT as a better budget solution, and it's about 25% faster than the 6400 and can be had for as little as $175. Alternatively, you could try to pick up a used GTX 1650 Super, which is a far better card and sells for around $160 on eBay. The GTX 1060 6GB, RX 570 4GB, and GTX 1650 are all faster than the anemic GTX 1630 as well.

Nvidia has stealth-launched the GeForce GTX 1630 graphics card without fanfare. The new GPU takes its place as the lowest-end GTX 16-series graphics card, outgunned by popular but already entry-level cards such as the GeForce GTX 1650. You can find full official details about the new GPU on the GeForce GTX 16 product pages. Moreover, a new GeForce Game Ready driver has been released with added support for the little GTX 1630.

Over recent weeks we caught some glances of the impending release of the GTX 1630 via the usual leaks and spills. It turns out the preliminary details we had from these sources were accurate, as you can see from the abridged GTX 16-Series comparison table below. We chose the nearest neighbor GTX 1650 and the very popular GTX 1660 Super for comparison.

Nvidia hasn't blogged about the new graphics card, which is thought to be positioned to replace the aging GTX 1050 Ti, as well as provide better price competition against up and coming entry level gaming GPUs like the AMD Radeon RX 6400 and Intel Arc A380.

The cuts to the already bottom rung GTX 1650 models look quite severe. The new GTX 1630 sports 43% fewer CUDA cores, and a narrow 64-bit memory bus, but it's based off the same TSMC 12nm TU117 die. On the positive side, the fast GPU clocks should help raise it up if you keep graphical quality/details/resolution low-ish or play mostly old titles and emulators. NVENC and NVDEC remain present for accelerated video codec duties (Nvidia's table says Turing but it should be Volta for TU117), and this little card can support up to 7680x4320 @ 60Hz and multi-monitors.

Nvidia says that partners including Asus, Colorful, EVGA, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Inno3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, and Zotac have lined up GeForce GTX 1630 models for your 'delight.' For your convenience, we have linked to the product pages and press releases that are live at the time of writing.

As for pricing, we don't have any US pricing at this time, but Colorful branded GTX 1630 GPUs have been spotted in China for the local equivalent of $165. Remember China includes 13% sales tax in consumer prices, but this still looks like premium pricing for the curious and early-birds. All indications are that the GTX 1630 will fall well behind the GTX 1650, which will also put it far below the RX 6400. Unless you want to do video encoding.

Intel recently shared performance metrics of its new Arc A380 desktop GPU in 17 gaming titles, with direct comparisons to the GTX 1650 and RX 6400 — which were all tested on the same PC. On average, the A380 lost in comparison to the GTX 1650 and RX 6400, which will make it one of the slowest entry-level GPUs when it arrives on the US market. Even as a budget offering, Intel will have a tough time making our best graphics card list.

The A300 series is Intel's entry-level desktop GPU, using the smaller "ACM-G11" Arch Alchemist chip. Unlike the mobile A350M and A370M, however, it does have all eight of Intel's Xe GPU cores and enabled alongside the full 96-bit GDDR6 memory interface. That's nearly the same core configuration as the entry-level Arc A370M mobile GPU, but with 50% more memory, 66% more memory bandwidth, and significantly higher GPU clocks that can reach up to 2.45 GHz.

TBP (typical board power) is also higher at 75W, perhaps more, and Intel's Arc A380 will come in several variants. Cards that run at less than 75W can get by without a power connector and have a 2 GHz clock speed, cards with up to an 80W TBP will require at least a 6-pin power connector and can run at up to 2.25 GHz, and cards with an 87W or higher TBP can run at 2.35 GHz or more.

We don't know what card Intel used for the tests, and the Gunnir card images shown here with the 8-pin power connector are for reference purposes only. The test PC was equipped with a Core i5-12600K, 2x16GB DDR4-3200 memory, an MSI Z690-A Pro WiFi DDR4 motherboard (actually the same motherboard we use in our GPU testbed), and a 4TB M600 Pro XT SSD, running Windows 11.

For now, the Arc A380 is the only desktop GPU available to look at on Intel's Arc website. But according to previous driver leaks, we should expect Intel's A500 series and A700 series of desktop GPUs to arrive at some point. Here are the numbers, and again these come straight from Intel's Arc A380 reviewer's guide — we're sharing them with permission while we attempt to get a card for our own in-depth testing. Take these figures with a healthy dose of skepticism, in other words, as most manufacturer provided benchmarks attempt to show products in a better light.

On average, the Arc A380 lost to the GTX 1650 by 19% and lost to the RX 6400 by 9%. When we compare each GPU on a game-by-game basis, the Arc A380 only beats the RX 6400 in four of the 17 titles and beats the GTX 1650 in one of them (Naraka Bladepoint). There's also a three-way tie in NiZhan, where all the GPUs managed 200 fps, though we're not sure why Intel would even bother to include that particular benchmark since it looks like there's a frame rate cap.

Regardless, it isn't exactly encouraging to see the new Intel GPU getting beat out by an entry-level Nvidia GPU released over three years ago, and an ultra low-level Radeon GPU that is literally a cut down Navi 24 mobile GPU slapped onto a graphics card PCB. Over the past few months, we've heard reports that Intel's graphics drivers are playing a significant role in gaming performance with these new A-series GPUs, with poor optimization being a big issue.

Perhaps Intel can turn things around and provide well-optimized gaming drivers in the near future once its A-series lineup makes it to rest of the world market. Intel also recently showed its expected performance for the higher tier A700M mobile parts, which looked at least fairly capable. But if Intel has the same driver problems on its mid-range A500 and flagship A700 series graphics cards, where gaming performance matters even more, Intel's GPU division is going to be dealing with serious challenges in a market that's already quite competitive.

For the entry-level and mobile parts, it's not just gaming performance that Intel is hyping up. Arc includes the Xe media engine, which supports up to 8K encode and decode of AVC (H.264), HEVC (H.265), VP9, and AV1 — and Arc is the only GPU right now with hardware encoding support of AV1. Comparing the A380 against a Core i5-12600K CPU encode of an AV1 video, the A380 took less than a quarter of the time (53 seconds versus 234 seconds).

Arc A380 was also faster in other video encoding scenarios, like an HEVC encode using DaVinci Resolve where Intel's Deep Link feature that leverages the CPU graphics and dedicated GPU allowed it to finish the task in 16 seconds compared to 25 seconds on a GTX 1650 card. Interestingly, just the UHD Graphics 770 or Arc A380 alone required 30 seconds, so encoding performance very nearly doubled thanks to Deep Link.

If you're more interested in the media capabilities, Arc might be a great option when it comes to the US market. For gamers, let's hope additional driver improvements can help narrow the gap that Intel's currently showing.

Tech news and Twitter rumor radar pings of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630 have become more frequent over recent weeks. Earlier today, Chinese graphics card maker Colorful added the GTX 1630 to its product roster, providing solid indications of an impending product launch. However, it has since seen the error of its ways and the product category has disappeared (but is preserved by Google's web cache). Images have also surfaced via NewFeaturesTech and Nael Grewther. While the category did show up, Colorful didn't give any specific card model details, so actual specifications are based on previous rumors. 

According to the latest information we have, the Turing architecture GeForce GTX 1630 is designed to replace the aging Pascal architecture GTX 1050 Ti. The new entry-level gaming graphics card from Nvidia will use the same TU117 GPU as the GTX 1650, just with a number of important spec and memory subsystem cuts.

The new graphics card from Nvidia will be competing against the likes of the AMD Radeon RX 6400 and the Intel Arc A380. Nvidia might have decided to go with this further cut down SKU to meet Intel better on price. A recent Chinese review of the first Arc Alchemist desktop graphics card showed it was consistently beaten by the RX 6400 and GTX 1650, so perhaps Nvidia is hoping to shut the door on any price undercutting competition from the blue team with its new model.

Our last report about Nvidia's newest budget gaming GPU highlighted multiple Gigabyte branded GTX 1630 models that had surfaced on the EEC regulatory website. Gigabyte appeared to have four models prepared, including low profile (LP) variants expected to use recycled GTX 1650 cooler designs.

We will try and test one of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630 models as soon as we can get one, but don't expect it to have the muscle to join the ranks of the Best Graphics Cards for Gaming in 2022.

Last week, Intel launched the Arc A380, with products initially available in China only. Today, several Chinese sites and social media users published their independent third-party reviews. We've taken a closer look at a video review published by Bilibili user Shenmedounengce to see if there is any insight to share before we can get our own A380 in the Tom's Hardware labs. In brief, Intel's first Arc Alchemist desktop GPU likely won't displace the best graphics cards, and it did much better in synthetic benchmarks than the suite of games tested.

The Bilibili user's test platform was relatively modest, which is a fair choice given the target market of the Arc A380. It's a Windows 11 PC based around an Intel Core i5-12400, 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, and an Asus B660M motherboard, which should be ample for supporting the likes of the new Arc A380. The Gunnir branded model was used, which appears to be the first one to be released. Intel's new hope was pitted against the following contenders in the same system: a GTX 1650, RX 6400, RX 6500 XT, and RTX 3050.

In synthetic tests, the Intel Arc A380 was fairly impressive, beating out all rivals except the RTX 3050 in Time Spy and Port Royal, but falling back a bit to best just the GTX 1650 in Fire Strike. Unfortunately, this marked the end of the good news for those hoping for an impressive Intel Arc debut.

In the six games tested at 1080p (League of Legends, GTA V, PUGB, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Forza Horizon 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2), Intel's Arc A380 was consistently the poorest performer. Above, we have shared a video screenshot of the detailed Red Dead Redemption 2 performance comparison. This is a fairly typical bar chart across all the games.

There's also a summary chart with all six games, though that omits the much better performance offered by the RX 6500 XT and RTX 3050.

With the performance comparisons above, it is worth looking at the differences in the underlying technologies.

Pricing of the Intel Arc A380 in China suggests US retailers will advertise these models at around $135, as we explained last week. At the moment, that would help Intel undercut its rivals in the above table for its lower gaming performance, which seems appropriate. However, with the Intel GPUs having better performance in 3DMark benchmarks and decent-looking stats, it's natural to wonder whether Intel's drivers could improve to provide significant uplifts in actual gaming.

We're looking forward to getting an Intel Arc A380 desktop graphics card for our own extensive tests. However, according to these early results, it doesn't look like Intel will rank too highly in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, unless drivers improve a lot in the coming months.

Nvidia graphics card partner Galaxy has teamed up with some cartoon character designers and publishers to create a doggedly different limited edition. The partnership between Galaxy, Dodowo, Bemoe, and Station B has precipitated one of the most bizarre-looking GeForce RTX 30-series (Ampere) graphics cards we have ever seen. The design pays tribute to a cartoon dog with the body of a vegetable.

If you were a fan of this dog, which we think is a character called Caigu in the Dodowo animations, then this will be a very appealing package. There are plenty of supporting accessories in the box besides the pastel yellow GPU with red flourishes on the front and a happy Caigu shouting encouragement on the back. The package includes a 360 x 275mm mouse mat, an intelligent device stand with clock, a 55mm square die with six facial expressions posted by Caigu and the gift box.

We should look at the graphics card more closely, as that is our job here, but it is nothing special under the dog/cabbage-themed paint job. The GeForce RTX 3060 is suitable for playing mainstream AAA games at 1080p with smooth frame rates and support for graphics technologies like real-time raytracing, DLSS, and Nvidia Reflex. Regulars will know from one of several reviews RTX 3060 we have published. Coincidentally, we reviewed a Galaxy-made model, the Galax GeForce RTX 3060 EX, in November last year.

This new limited edition model is a triple fan model but won't be much different compared to the twin fan models we have reviewed. An RGB logo provides additional eye candy on the cooling shroud and RGB fans. We guess Dodowo fans will set them to a cabbage green and leave them like that.

You are probably desperate to buy one of these cute Galaxy GeForce RTX 3060 designs. However, it looks like this limited edition will be limited to China, where the Dodowo animation is created and has an established fan base. 

The dog/cabbage gift boxed and themed set has a limited edition of 500 and went on sale at 8 pm. They sell for 3,099 yuan in China, and if we change that to USD directly, at the time of writing, it would be equivalent to $460. That isn't much of a premium over competing branded standard RTX 3060 graphics cards when we checked online retailers in China today. Happily, even with the not terrible pricing, we don't think many of these cute graphics cards will go to the crypto miners. Cryptocurrencies are further declining this weekend, with ETH, for example, valued at under $950 at the time of writing.

If you are after a serious graphics card, feel free to review our famous GPU Hierarchy of 2022 and our list of Best Graphics Cards for Gaming in 2022.

A quartet of Gigabyte-branded GeForce GTX graphics cards has appeared on the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) online regulatory database. However, bitter experience has taught us that an EEC listing doesn't always precipitate a shipping product. Even so, it may be the most solid evidence regarding Nvidia's covert preparation of this low-end GTX 16 series product.

Above, you can see a screenshot of the EEC entry with four unannounced graphics cards: the GV-N1630OC-4GD, GV-N1630OC-4GL, GV-N1630D6-4GD, GV-N1630D6-4GL.

Those familiar with Gigabyte nomenclature will look at these codenames and determine that they all relate to Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630 graphics cards. Moreover, all models come with 4GB of VRAM. In addition, the OC models will be overclocked compared to reference cards, the  GL models will be low-profile solutions, and the D6 models will come packing DDR6 memory (instead of DDR5). Lastly, the codenames point to these all being dual-fan cooled models, even the low-profile ones. If you check out the official Gigabyte product pages for the nearest neighbor GTX 1650 (with 19 models), you should get a good idea of the upcoming regular and low-profile GTX 1630 designs.

We have previously seen several rumors about the GeForce GTX 1630, and they were quite well fleshed out. Obviously, the new entry-level card sits somewhere below the existing GTX 1650. Its purpose is to replace the aging GTX 1050 Ti. Interestingly it might even be timed to battle with the new Intel Arc A380 desktop graphics card, which started its worldwide rollout in China earlier this week. However, we don't know the timing of this battle as Nvidia hasn't mentioned the GTX 1630, and the pace of Intel's Arc GPU rollout worldwide isn't known.

In the chart above, you can see how the GTX 1630 has allegedly been cut from the cloth of the Turing TU117 GPU, just like the GTX 1650 (and GTX 1650 Ti, and numerous mobile GPUs). The AMD Radeon RX 6400 provides some cross-architecture reference.

It looks like this entry-level sector of the discrete GPU market is where all the action has been recently (e.g., RX 6400 and Arc A380). However, making low-end GPUs and selling into the era that may become known as the 'second great crypto crash' risks the arrival of a flood of better-performing older-gen GPUs at desirable prices.

A mysterious GPU from China has been spotted in the Geekbench online results browser. The benchmarking app was used to run tests on a system that appears to be mostly based on technology from Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor Company. It has a Zhaoxin KaiXian CPU, Zhaoxin motherboard, and a "Zhaoxin Glenfly GPU." That last one is a new name.

Twitter's Benchleaks surfaced this OpenCL result, which can give some indication of GPU performance. We wouldn't put to much weight on the current score, however, as 579 for Geekbench OpenCL is quite terrible. For comparison, even the lowly GTX 1650 scores around 38,000, while an RTX 3070 scores in the 135,000 range.

The Chinese PC system sounds modern and capable enough on first impressions. Its CPU has 8C/8T and runs at approximately 2.7 GHz and is accompanied by a modest 8GB of DDR4 RAM. It has a discrete GPU called the Glenfly Arise 1020, with 24 compute units (even though that's an AMD GPU term) and 2GB of VRAM. These figures don't match up very well with the poor OpenCL score in Geekbench 5.

The Benchleaks comparison with an RTX 3070 seems pretty nonsensical, so we thought we would look through the full table of OpenCL scores maintained by Geekbench. One has to scroll down the page a long way to see scores in the 579 region. The only GPUs in this area of the table are vintage AMD iGPUs like the Radeon HD 6480G and Radeon HD 6410D from 2011. You can also find Arm-designed mobile GPUs like the Mali-G52 from 2018, and the Mali-T860 from 2016.

Better Contemporary Comparisons

Those old low-end iGPUs and Arm GPUs might not be very good comparisons either, for people living in 2022 and wondering about the Zhaoxin Glenfly Arise 1020 GPU's performance compared to contemporary PCs. So, looking at something more modern and relatable to PC enthusiasts, we see that the Zhaoxin GPU is about 20x slower than the AMD Radeon Vega 11 graphics, which were integrated into the AMD Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 5 3400G APUs. If that isn't a mainstream enough reference, the legendary GeForce GTX 1060 6GB was about 60 times faster than the Zhaoxin Glenfly Arise 1020 GPU in these tests.

Is the Zhaoxin Glenfly Arise 1020 GPU an Entry Level Member of the Family?

Of course, the "Glenfly Arise 1020" GPU might not be Zhaoxin's best option. The '1020' could be a low-power minimum spec member of the GPU family. Last June we reported on some information and images which provided some insight into a Zhaoxin GlenFly discrete GPU at sub-75W that was spotted running the Unigine Heaven benchmark (a 2009 DX11 test). We don't know if that was the same GPU as the one in the Geekbench OpenCL tests, but it appeared to be more capable.

In the Unigine Heaven tests shared last year, the Chinese graphics card managed 32fps on an FHD monitor. Unfortunately, we don't know the benchmark quality settings used, or if it was upscaling to 1080p or running at native resolution.

A perhaps more likely problem is that OpenCL testing with Geekbench can be highly variable, particularly with early drivers. Using it to gauge GPU performance can lead to very skewed results, even with comparisons between GPUs using the same architecture. Properly tuned drivers might boost performance an order of magnitude or more, but without direct access to the hardware and drivers, this is all we have for now. We'll withhold any final judgement until hardware and drivers become publicly available, and consider this early look more of a proof of existence than a reliable measurement of potential performance.

Nvidia's Turing microarchitecture is a little long in the tooth. Still, the chipmaker isn't ready to leave Turing behind. According to VideoCardz, Nvidia will reportedly give Turing the last ride in the shape of the GeForce GTX 1630, rumored to launch on May 31.

The GeForce GTX 1630 would mark the first time that Nvidia has relinquished the GTX branding to a lower-tier SKU. The x30-series, such as the GT 730 or GT 1030 models, have typically assumed the GT moniker. The model name alone is enough to tell you that the GeForce GTX 1630 is an entry-level graphics card that slots right below the GeForce GTX 1650, the previous rock-bottom GTX offering. The new Turing graphics card will share the battlefield with AMD's Navi 24-powered models, such as the Radeon RX 6500 XT and Radeon RX 6400.

The leaked specifications, which you should approach with caution, claim that the GeForce GTX 1630 will wield Nvidia's TU117 silicon, which sounds plausible. The TU117 is the smallest Turing die, and Nvidia has used variants for its other SKUs, such as the GeForce GTX 1650 or GeForce MX550. Nvidia will play surgeon with the TU117 die inside the GeForce GTX 1630 to avoid cannibalization within its ranks.

The TU117 has 16 streaming multiprocessors (SMs), equivalent to 1,024 CUDA cores. The GeForce GTX 1650 has 14 enabled SMs (896 CUDA cores), meaning the GeForce GTX 1630 will have far less. VideoCardz believes that the GeForce GTX 1630 only comes with 8 SMs or 512 CUDA cores. That's precisely half of what TU117 offers and 43% less than what the GeForce GTX 1650 has onboard.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630 Specifications

*Specifications are unconfirmed.

The GeForce GTX 1630 could sport a 1,800 MHz boost clock speed, but it's unknown whether the quoted value is the reference specification or an aftermarket model with a factory overclock. Single-precision numbers aren't the best metric to measure gaming performance. For comparison sake, the GeForce GTX 1650 delivers up to 61% higher FP32 performance than the GeForce GTX 1630, whereas the Radeon RX 6400 takes the margin up to 94%. Early reviews showed the Radeon RX 6400 on par with the GeForce GTX 1650 in terms of performance, so the GeForce GTX 1630 is likely slower than the Navi 24 graphics card. The question is just how much slower.

It's comforting to know that the GeForce GTX 1630 will reportedly wield 4GB of 12 Gbps GDDR6 memory. The sad part is that Nvidia will likely restrict it to a 64-bit memory interface. Therefore, the GeForce GTX 1630 can only offer memory bandwidth of up to 96 GBps, 25% lower than the GeForce GTX 1650 and Radeon RX 6400. The original GeForce GTX 1650 debuted with 8 Gbps GDDR5 memory, but Nvidia subsequently released three new variants with 12 Gbps GDDR6, bumping the memory bandwidth from 128 GBps to 192 GBps. So if we compare the GeForce GTX 1630 to the GDDR6 alternatives, we're looking at 50% less memory bandwidth.

Despite having fewer CUDA cores, the GeForce GTX 1630 may retain the same 75W TDP as the faster GeForce GTX 1650. The extra headroom is probably why the GeForce GTX 1630 could feature higher boost clock speeds. However, the GeForce GTX 1650 looks demanding besides the Radeon RX 6400's 53W rating.

The GeForce GTX 1630's exact MSRP is still up in the air, but the Turing-based graphics card will likely have a sub-$150 price tag. The GeForce GTX 1650 and Radeon RX 6400 have a $148 and $159 MSRP, respectively, so the GeForce GTX 1630 will have to go very low to compete. However, we would love to see the GeForce GTX 1630 retail between $100 to $120 since we haven't seen a GeForce GTX graphics card in that price range since Pascal (GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti).

Out of nowhere, rumors have emerged that Nvidia is reportedly planning to put together a GeForce GTX 1630 GPU to compete in the entry-level market, as reported by VideoCardz. Specifications are unknown. Still, the name does suggest it will leverage Nvidia's older Turing architecture rather than Ampere. If this information is accurate, the GTX 1630's sole purpose is probably to compete against AMD's Radeon RX 6400.

VideoCardz admitted that all its data surrounding the GTX 1630 is nothing but rumors; however, the news outlet has double-confirmed with its sources that Nvidia is planning to make this GPU. Apparently, that part of the story is genuine. Still, we have to take all this data with a grain of salt since we don't have direct access to the source material.

Nvidia's decision to make a GTX 1630 is surprising and unusual at the same time. If this is true, it will mark the first time Nvidia has cracked its decade-long running GTX nomenclature by making an xx30-series GPU a GTX product. In the past, the 10, 20, 30, and 40 series products were under Nvidia's entry-level "GT" branding, with the 50 series serving as the barrier to entry for the GTX lineup.

According to Videocardz's source material, the GTX 1630 supposedly replaces the aging GTX 1050 Ti with a lower price point than the GTX 1650. It is bizarre, considering the GTX 1650's mission was to do that and achieve that goal years ago. There's a minimal point to making a GTX 1630 unless Nvidia wants a redundant GPU in its 16 series lineup.

We don't have any leaked data on GPU specifications, but it's not hard to guess what it could be. Nvidia's current GTX 1650 is equipped with its smallest Turing die known as TU117 and cut down to 864 cores and 14 SMs. A potential GTX 1630 would presumably have a further reduced SM count of just 12 or even 10 SMs, cutting TU117's maximum SM count of 16 by almost half.

Memory will come either in GDDR5 or GDDR6 flavors and top out at 4GB. Nvidia is already using GDDR5 and GDDR6 in the GTX 1650 and its four different variants (not including the Super counterparts), so it's easy to guess Nvidia will use either of the two on a GTX 1630.

If Nvidia decides to keep using GDDR5 and only cuts the SM counts, this theoretical GTX 1630 will potentially have 80% or 90% of the performance of a GTX 1650.

Pricing will probably be similar to an AMD's RX 6400 since the current GTX 1650 and RX 6500 XT shares the same price bracket of $200. A price reduction by $20-$30 or more for a GTX 1630 would certainly make sense.

However, a GPU like this makes little sense in a market where GPU prices plummet every month. If we saw this GPU when AMD made its RX 6500 XT, it would make sense as a desperate attempt to get GPUs to gamers. But, that situation is quickly dying now that many modern GPUs are available at MSRP.

Super aggressive pricing will be the only hope for a viable GTX 1630 solution in the current marketplace. The last standing price bracket that lacks any modern GPU is the sub $150 market, where the most modern GPUs you'll find are the GT 1030 and RX 550. If it can beat the price of its GT 1030 right now with a faster, more modern GPU, the GTX 1630 could become a massive success as a sub $150 gaming card.

Star Citizen developers CIG (Cloud Imperium Games) have officially killed off support for Windows 7 and GPUs older than Nvidia's GTX 700 via its release of Alpha 3.17 which now requires DirectX 11.1 to operate. The API change was necessary as the massive game studio continues to transition Star Citizen to its new Gen12 rendering engine and eventually to the Vulkan API.

Star Citizen has been in development for a very long time -- in fact, the 700 series just launched when CIG first introduced a playable part of the game known as the Hangar Module back in 2013. Since that time, the scope of the Star Citizen project has increased massively, and as a result, changes made to its engine have been extensive. To the point where CIG's Star Citizen community began calling it the "Star Engine," due to how the sheer amount of features that have been added to the engine.

The New Gen12 Renderer & Why Windows 7 Support Stops With Alpha 3.17

Gen12, is what CIG is dubbing its new game rendering architecture (and should not be confused with DirectX 12). In layman's terms, the goal of Gen12 is to optimize the entire rendering pipeline within Star Citizen to make it more performance-oriented.

During CIG's CitizenCon2951 event, Gen12 was described as a more independent rendering architecture, allowing objects to directly communicate with the render pass responsible for it. This means Gen 12 can be seen as a renderer with multiple pipelines. With different rendering tasks operating on their own. 

This is quite a substantial change from the old "legacy" rendering system that is still being used today in Star Citizen, CIG describes it as having one universal pipeline through which all tasks and objects required for rendering an image have to travel through. This in and of itself creates a bottleneck, as work has to be done synchronously, or one stage at a time.

The engine Star Citizen originally ran on was Crytek's CryEngine, the same engine that powers the Crysis series. But in 2015, CIG swapped Star Citizen to the Amazon Lumberyard engine instead to advantage of Amazon's Web Services and the advanced networking features built into Lumberyard.

Gen12's feature set will be crucial for smoother gameplay in the Star Citizen universe as CIG continues to rely on streaming tech for the entirety of the game. Due to the immense scale of solar systems and planets and moons, Star Citizen's engine streams entire worlds in and out of system memory in real-life gameplay -- and soon that will expand to entire solar systems. This needs to be done with a stable frame rate and no loading screens, which is what Gen12 and Vulkan will help to do, among other things.

As a consequence of Gen12, CIG says it will be very flexible to develop, and best of all it will allow the engine to be highly optimized for multi-threading. This is not even counting Star Citizen's Vulkan API implementation coming later which should expand Star Citizen's multi-core capabilities even more.

The only bad news with Gen 12 is its implementation for DirectX, which requires the newer 11.1 feature set since Vulkan implementation is still in development. Partial DirectX 11.1 support did come to Windows 7, but the complete package is unsupported with the same applying to GTX 700 series GPUs or older. To play the game, you'll need a Maxwell class graphics card and Windows 8 or newer.

This requirement has only come up now because Alpha 3.17 is the first Star Citizen version to begin using Gen12 features. Previous patches were still based entirely on the legacy renderer which allowed people to use Windows 7 and older hardware.

Windows 7 Support Could be Coming Back

The good news is that Windows 7 support could be coming back to the game sometime in the future, thanks to Vulkan support. CIG plans to ditch Microsoft's DirectX API outright, and replace it with the Vulkan API which does support Windows 7. But Windows 7 isn't the only OS that could benefit from the API change. CIG has confirmed that native Linux support will be coming to the game aswell, which should improve performance immensely for the users who are running Star Citizen today through translation APIs such as Proton or Wine.

But, as it goes with Star Citizen development, we have no idea how long that will take. What we know right now is that Gen12 development is the priority, and Vulkan development will take a back seat until it is completed. Since Gen12 is only now being implemented into the live build of the game, we suspect it'll take over a year at the earliest before Vulkan becomes functional in Star Citizen's Alpha environment.

Leadtek has launched a GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card with a blower-style cooling shroud. It is the first Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 we have spotted with a blower cooler unearthed by Twitter user Zed Wang. This cooler style is sometimes frowned upon by PC gamers and enthusiasts, but they can have attractive qualities for small form factor and server systems.

The Leadtek GeForce RTX 3050 Classic has reference specs for an Nvidia retail partner card – 2,560 CUDA cores, a base clock of 1,552 MHz, and a boost clock 1,777 MHz, plus 8GB of GDDR5 14 Gbps memory on a 128-bit bus. In addition, it uses one 8-pin power connector, which is plenty for its 130W max power draw.

Nvidia didn't produce a reference design RTX 3050; it left it to its AIB partners to rustle up whatever they fancied. As a result, most just used the same coolers on near neighbor cards like the GeForce RTX 3060 or GTX 1660 Super. And this is the case with the Leadtek GeForce RTX 3050 Classic.