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So far, the additional VRAM hasn't proven to be particularly helpful on the RTX 4060 Ti. But all the games in our standard benchmark suite are at least a year old, sometimes three or four years old. What about more modern games?
To check this, we picked three relatively recent releases: F1 2023, Hogwarts Legacy, and The Last of Us: Part 1. None of these are brand-spanking new, which was intentional. At launch, we've seen many cases over the past year or so where the launch performance of a new release was terrible, and future patches fixed things up quite a bit. But Hogwarts and The Last of Us at least still have a reputation for wanting more than 8GB of VRAM at maxed-out settings.
These three games have slightly different takes on graphics settings and APIs as well. For example, F1 2023 supports several ray tracing effects but doesn't enable them on the medium preset — only on ultra. Hogwarts Legacy has several ray tracing effects as well, but the presets never enable them. We opted to turn them all on, with lighting set to "medium" or "ultra" as appropriate. Finally, The Last of Us has no ray tracing effects and is an AMD-sponsored game. We also confined our testing to just six GPUs (RTX 4070, 4060 Ti 16GB, 4060 Ti 8GB from Nvidia, and RX 6800 XT, 6800, and 6750 XT for AMD).
We'll do a gallery of the benchmarks from each game, so swipe through the images to see the results at the various settings/resolutions.
F1 2023 mostly echoes what we saw in our primary gaming tests. For reference, we tested on the Australia track, in the rain, for one loop of the track (130 seconds).
At 1080p, the extra VRAM does basically nothing — the 4060 Ti 8GB slightly outperforms the 16GB model, possibly due to differences in card design, power, or other factors. At 1440p, the 16GB card at least gains a slight lead in 1% lows, and finally, at 4K, it ends up delivering 15% higher performance.
As before, the RTX 4070 represents a relatively large step up in performance, with about 30% higher performance than the 4060 Ti at ultra settings. 1080p medium is closer, but both GPUs are breaking 200 fps there.
Against AMD, the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB universally falls behind the 6800 XT: It's 23% slower at 1080p medium, and then about 6–7 percent slower at ultra settings with ray tracing. (Side note: The ray tracing in F1 2023 doesn't seem to be particularly impressive, at least based on what I've seen so far, but maybe other tracks would put it in a better... um... light.) The RX 6800 was still about 10% faster at 1080p medium, but the 4060 Ti 16GB takes a 7–12 percent lead in the ultra tests. The RTX 4060 Ti 16GB also has substantially better 1% lows when using the ultra preset.
Hogwarts Legacy can be a bit finicky about the settings you use. It explicitly warned us when it felt we exceeded settings that were viable for our hardware, which basically meant all of the ultra tests with maxed-out ray tracing effects were concerned with our choices. And for good reason.
At 1080p medium — with RT reflections, RT shadows, and RT ambient occlusion, plus the overall RT quality set to medium — there was again no real difference between the 16GB and 8GB RTX 4060 Ti. Bumping up to ultra settings, with RT quality also set to ultra, was a different matter.
You might look at the charts and think, "Big deal, a 2% or 8% difference." Except, on the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB card, we experienced repeated game crashes. 1080p ultra often allowed us to complete one or two benchmark runs (running a circuit through Hogsmeade village) before dumping us to the desktop. At 1440p ultra, the crashes were so frequent as to make the game utterly unplayable.
For the AMD GPUs, the RX 6800 XT basically tied the 4060 Ti 16GB — slightly higher average fps, lower 1% lows at ultra settings. Meanwhile, the vanilla 6800 ended up trailing the RTX 4060 Ti by 11–15 percent, depending on the resolution and settings.
Curiously, even the RTX 4070 crashed at 1440p ultra. The RX 6750 XT, also with 12GB VRAM, didn't have that problem. Regardless, VRAM clearly matters for this game, particularly if you're trying to run maxed-out settings. It may not directly boost performance all that much, but cards with less than 12GB VRAM were unstable.
The Last of Us: Part I wraps up our bonus coverage, with a game that's widely "known" to need a lot of VRAM. Except, more recent patches seem to have curtailed the demands somewhat. The initial launch (on a "new" GPU) still takes a long time to compile all the shaders, probably around 10 minutes on the Nvidia GPUs and 15–20 minutes on the AMD GPUs. I would literally launch the game and walk away while I waited for the shader compilation to finish.
For testing, I ran a circuit around an area with a pond (on the way to the city with Ellie and Tess), as that seemed to be fairly demanding and was also void of creatures that could cause variation between benchmark runs.
At 1080p and 1440p, the benefits of 16GB versus 8GB on the 4060 Ti are again negligible. 4K shows an 18% gain in average fps, and 1% lows are up to 50% better... but neither card delivers a great experience at 4K ultra, with performance in the mid-to-low 20s. The RTX 4070 manages to clear 30 fps, which means it's playable even if it's not 60+ fps.
AMD's GPUs, meanwhile, completely demolish the Nvidia options. The RX 6800 XT is about 45% faster than the 4060 Ti 16GB, with 1% lows showing similar gains (give or take — it's a 37–52 percent spread, though 1% lows tend to be far more variable to begin with). The RX 6800 likewise beats the 4060 Ti 16GB by around 25%. Even the RX 6750 XT generally matches or exceeds the performance of the Nvidia card.
Obviously, there's more going on here than just VRAM. As an AMD-promoted game, it's not too shocking to see better performance on AMD GPUs than on Nvidia. The question is why there's such a gap, and we're not certain what the game is doing internally that favors AMD this much. But we've seen similar results elsewhere (i.e. Borderlands 3).
Recent Games Summary
Bottom line: Even in more recent games, it's hard to make a compelling case for the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. It's never substantially worse than the 8GB model, but it's also not usually all that superior at settings and resolutions that make sense. The biggest differences inevitably come at 4K, but often with both GPUs running at unacceptably low framerates.
Could there be other games, or future games, where the extra VRAM proves more useful? Perhaps, but as usual, tuning your settings generally proves more important than VRAM capacity. Simply maxing out every setting in order to go beyond 8GB of VRAM use is possible, but at 1440p and especially 1080p in recent games — which is where a GPU with this level of performance belongs — there's not a massive benefit to having the extra memory.
Let's move on to the non-gaming tests.
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