Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Review: Does More VRAM Help?

Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Gaming OC

We purchased our RTX 4060 Ti 16GB sample at retail from Newegg. It sells at the base $499 MSRP and comes with a triple-fan cooler and a factory overclock, which we figured would represent something of a best-case scenario for performance. Whether that's correct or not, we can't say, as this is the only 4060 Ti 16GB we've tested.

Image 1 of 7

There's no Founders Edition, as mentioned already, so if you're interested in the 4060 Ti 16GB, you'll have to decide from among the various AIB models. The Gaming OC comes with typical Gigabyte packaging, with no extras to speak of in the box. There's a warranty pamphlet, padding around the card itself, and that's it.

One interesting bit of detail is that the card doesn't come with plastic cling-wrap covering the surfaces. That became a trend a decade ago, a trend that Nvidia and AMD generally skip on their reference cards. The idea is to keep fingerprints off the card, we think, until the end-user has unpacked and installed the card into a PC. Some people probably love peeling it off, but we don't miss it because the card is already protected by an anti-static bag.

The box is also relatively compact for a triple-fan GPU, which means less waste packaging material for the environment. As for dimensions, the Gigabyte Gaming OC measures 281x117x52mm, so it's a 2.5-slot width. It also weighs 830g, which is relatively lightweight. The fans are 74mm in diameter and not particularly large, and they lack the integrated rims found on higher-end fans. For a 160W TGP card, the three fans should be more than sufficient, but fan RPMs will end up slightly higher due to the design.

Image 1 of 9

There's very little in the way of RGB lighting on tap here, with the only lit-up portion of the card being the Gigabyte logo on top. That's perhaps to be expected from a base-price model, and some will appreciate the lack of extra lighting. Others will want to look elsewhere for an appropriately blinged-out graphics card.

As is typical these days for Nvidia's RTX 40-series cards, there are four video outputs. However, Gigabyte opts for a dual DisplayPort 1.4a and dual HDMI 2.1 configuration. DisplayPort 1.4a has a maximum data bandwidth of 25.92 Gbps, compared to HDMI 2.1's 42 Gbps (after subtracting encoding overhead), so theoretically, this is a win for higher-resolution display use. Still, both are capable of driving 4K at 240Hz with DSC (Display Stream Compression), which is what our Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 supports.

One final item of note is that Gigabyte opted for a single 8-pin power connector on top. That's plenty, and it avoids the often janky 8-pin to 16-pin adapters found on Nvidia's Founders Edition, plus many of the higher-end RTX 40-series cards. There's no need for a single 8-pin to 16-pin adapter, and we haven't really seen anything useful in terms of the four sense pins. It's good to see common sense at play here.

Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti 16GB 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 130% for the Gigabyte 4060 Ti 16GB Gaming OC — that varies by card manufacturer and model. 130% is on the higher end of what we typically see, and it does suggest that Gigabyte didn't increase the default TGP. Given that the card has twice as much memory, that might actually reduce performance at stock settings.

Next, we look for the maximum stable GPU core overclock. We were able to hit up to +225 MHz on the RTX 4060 Ti with our initial testing, but eventually settled in at +215 MHz after experiencing intermittent crashes. 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, and that's likely at play here.

The memory is rated for 18 Gbps, and we eventually settled in on a +1500 MHz overclock. (+1750 MHz showed display corruption followed by a game crash.) That gives a final 21 Gbps clock speed. As we've mentioned, Nvidia has error detection and retry for the VRAM, so you don't want to fully max out the memory speed. But with the 128-bit memory interface, pushing the clocks a bit higher might be beneficial.

With both the GPU and VRAM overclocks and a fan curve set to ramp from 30% at 30C up to 100% at 75C, we could run our full suite of gaming tests at 1080p and 1440p ultra without any issues. We'll include those results in the charts. Across our test suite, the manual overclock improved performance by about 8% on average.

Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti 16GB 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 shortly.) Our RTX 4060 Ti 16GB review uses 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 professional workloads.

Multiple games have been updated over the past few months. We tested the Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti 16GB using Nvidia's latest 536.99 drivers, and retested the 4060 Ti 8GB Founders Edition with those same drivers for good measure. The remaining cards use the previously tested results from the past few months, though we've updated and retested every card in Minecraft.

Our current test suite consists of 15 games. Of these, nine support DirectX Raytracing (DXR), but we only enable the DXR features in six games. At the time of testing, 12 games support DLSS 2, five support DLSS 3, and five support FSR 2. We covered DLSS performance in our initial RTX 4060 Ti review, and feel those results are sufficient for the 16GB model as well.

For this review, we're adding three additional games with limited testing: F1 2023, Hogwarts Legacy, and The Last of Us: Part 1. These are all using the latest patches and drivers, and we're mostly interested in seeing if a few recent games that are generally more demanding of VRAM show larger differences in performance than our existing and somewhat older test suite.

We tested the 4060 Ti 16GB 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 16GB 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.

Image 1 of 8

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

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 on 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
• MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
• MORE: All Graphics Content