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The RTX 4060 Ti 16GB costs $499, which makes Nvidia's assertions that it's mostly for 1080p gaming somewhat ludicrous. Even accounting for inflation, $499 sits firmly in the high-end category, and as such, we'd expect it to handle 1440p gaming and even 4K at reduced settings. Saying that it's for 1080p feels more like a way to try and save face, as relative performance tends to drop off at higher resolutions thanks to the 128-bit memory interface. But let's go ahead and start with the 1080p results, with both medium and ultra settings — ultra first, considering the price of the 4060 Ti 16GB.
Our new test regimen gives us a global view of performance using the geometric mean of all 15 games, including both the ray tracing and rasterization test suites. Then we've got separate charts for 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 that's possible. Mainstream and certainly high-end graphics cards need to be capable of running demanding settings, including ray tracing, at reasonable frame rates.
At 1080p ultra, ostensibly the target market for this card — it's the "most popular Steam gaming resolution," if such things hold any weight with you — there's little to no benefit to the extra VRAM in our test suite. That's not too surprising, as most games don't need a ton of memory at 1080p (see: Why does 4K require so much VRAM?). It doesn't matter whether we look at the rasterization or ray tracing results, either: both generally run within the margin of error on the 4060 Ti 8GB and 4060 Ti 16GB.
That's not the only takeaway, however. While the 4060 Ti 16GB card isn't clearly better (or worse) than the 8GB model, look at the other results. RTX 3070, which was originally a $499 card, delivers effectively the same level of performance. That's over 2.5 years later with no increase in performance (unless you include DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which is a different can of worms). The RX 6800, which now starts at around $450, also keeps pace, even with a lot of DXR testing included, and the RX 6800 XT, which only costs a bit more at $520, delivers superior performance.
There are workloads besides 1080p gaming, some of which can make use of the extra VRAM. They will mostly be special cases, however, rather than the rule. Gaming, in general, needs more than just 16GB of VRAM — if VRAM is a factor, then so is memory bandwidth and compute, and the 4060 Ti is somewhat lacking in both those areas.
Looking just at the nine rasterization games, the overall Nvidia versus Nvidia story doesn't change: The 4060 Ti 16GB card basically matches the 8GB variant, as well as the previous generation RTX 3070. Meanwhile, the Nvidia versus AMD story skews in favor of the red team.
The RX 6800 delivers 11% better rasterization performance overall, while the RX 6800 XT increases that to 26%. That's a pretty huge difference, and yes, the AMD cards do use quite a bit more power to get there. How important is efficiency compared to performance, though? That's more of a personal decision, and plenty of gamers would accept worse efficiency for more performance.
As for the individual game results, the 8GB model often beats the 16GB card by up to a few percent. That's probably due to variance between the card models, boost clocks, power limits, and increased VRAM — the same L2 cache size with double the VRAM may end up with slightly lowered hit rates. But it's all basically margin of error.
With AMD GPUs, there's a much wider level of variance among the games. Total War: Warhammer 3 ends up as the best result for the 4060 Ti 16GB: it's only 11% slower than the 6800 XT. We could also include Flight Simulator, but that's still hitting CPU limits and so the 3% difference isn't particularly meaningful. Elsewhere, AMD's GPU is up to 55% faster in Borderlands 3, which is a long-standing trend for that AMD-promoted game.
Naturally, the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB improves its relative standings with ray tracing games, at least relative to AMD GPUs. But the 8GB card and RTX 3070 are still equivalent in performance, while the 3070 Ti comes out slightly ahead. For AMD, the 4060 Ti delivers 5% better performance overall than the 6800 XT and 22% better performance than the vanilla RX 6800.
Turning to the individual game charts, there's a wide range of relative performance when looking at AMD and Nvidia GPUs. The 4060 Ti 16GB only beats the RX 6800 by 3.5% in Metro Exodus Enhanced, 7.7% in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and 6.9% in Control Ultimate Edition. But then you get stuff like the Bright Memory Infinite Benchmark, where Nvidia is 24% faster, Cyberpunk 2077, where it's 37% faster, and Minecraft, where the gap is a whopping 65%.
We should note that we have retested all of the GPUs in Minecraft for this review. Long story short, we found that vsync was still not fully disengaged even though forced off in the various driver options. Actually, Intel Arc doesn't have a "vsync off" option, with Smooth Sync being the closest alternative. But if you manually edit the configuration file (located in %LocalAppData%\Packages\Microsoft.MinecraftUWP_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\games\com.mojang\minecraftpe, open the options.txt file) and change gfx_vsync from 1 to 0, you can force it off.
We found that Minecraft performance improved by about 5–10 percent for AMD GPUs, around 20 percent for Nvidia GPUs, and 50–100 percent for Intel Arc GPUs. So, Intel benefited the most, but this also affected the other cards. If you don't play Minecraft and don't care about its full ray tracing graphics, the DXR gap narrows quite a bit.
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