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If there's one GPU to sum up Nvidia's RTX 40-series so far, it's the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. Nvidia knew it wouldn't perform that well and that the extra VRAM was of questionable value. It said as much. But people have been complaining about the lack of VRAM on Nvidia GPUs, and so it attempted to address this by doubling the capacity to 16GB.
The problem, as we've reiterated throughout this review, is that VRAM capacity is only half of the equation. With the same amount of L2 cache and the same 128-bit interface, raw bandwidth remains a concern, and there are only select situations in which the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB can clearly surpass the existing 8GB card. If you happen to need a card specifically for one of those edge cases — for example, you want to run an LLM that requires more than 12GB but less than 16GB of VRAM — it might be worth purchasing. For everyone else, there are plenty of better options.
AMD's RX 6800 and 6800 XT generally win out on performance, especially if you don't intend to enable ray tracing in the games that support it. Even Nvidia's previous generation RTX 3070 basically matches the 4060 Ti 16GB, and it's now on clearance starting at $379 (though we don't expect that to last).
If you're not happy about the level of performance offered by the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB, spending $100 more to get double the VRAM isn't a good move. You'd be much better off moving up to the RTX 4070, as it hits the middle ground with 50% more memory and L2 cache, but also higher memory clocks give it 75% more bandwidth. Then for good measure, you also get a 32% boost in computational performance.
Does that make the 4060 Ti 16GB a horrible card? Not really. It's just overpriced for what you get, much like most of the rest of Nvidia's current RTX 40-series lineup. Decisions were made two or three years ago about what features and specs would deliver the most value — to Nvidia — and this is what we got.
Shift everything down a pricing bracket, and the Ada generation would be much better. RTX 4060 for $249 as a 3050 replacement, 4060 Ti 8GB at $299 to replace the 3060, 4060 Ti 16GB at $349, and so on. But that's not likely to happen, especially not when Nvidia can sell as many H100 GPUs at 1000% profit margins as it can produce. Even a $50 price cut would make this card more worthy of consideration, but it still feels like this should have been the 3060 Ti replacement at $399, rather than having that slot filled by an 8GB card with half the bus width of the previous generation.
Nvidia has put a lot of marketing effort into DLSS 3 and Frame Generation to try to improve the overall story. It's an interesting feature, for sure, from a technical view. But it's not without drawbacks. It needs Reflex to make it at all palatable, but you still get better responsiveness and latency by leaving Reflex enabled and turning Frame Generation off. Even if every game you want to play supports DLSS 3, the experiential benefits are more like 10–20 percent rather than the 40–100 percent increases in FPS that you'll see in Nvidia's performance slides.
The further along we get with the RTX 40-series, the more it feels like a generation that most people can skip if their current GPU isn't too old. The RTX 4090 is a great halo product, but every step down from there has been mediocre compared to the previous generation. With the 4060 Ti, we now get the choice of $399 for slightly better than RTX 3060 Ti performance (not counting DLSS 3), or $499 with double the VRAM but only similar performance to the RTX 3070. About the best thing going for the GPU market right now is that cryptocurrency mining hasn't made a comeback.
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