Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 vs RTX 3060 review: higher frame-rates, less VRAM

Game benchmarks: Hitman 3, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Returnal.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on June 29, 2023

Our rasterisation benchmarks come to a conclusion on this final page of tests, where we continue to expect the RX 7600 to deliver a better balance of price vs performance up against its Nvidia 40-class rival. However, bearing in mind the power of the GeForce brand, it may well be the price-reduced RTX 3060 that is the new card's biggest challenger. It'll be slower - yes - but not always that much slower, and of course, it does have that 12GB framebuffer.

Once again, if you're jumping straight to this page without looking at prior results, we should stress that our benchmarking system offers a number of ways to get to the data you want, the presentation varying according to the device you're using. You'll get a basic overview of our findings on mobile, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat DF experience with embedded YouTube videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses. Below the real-time metrics is an interactive bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. All the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

Hitman 3

Hitman 3 is a highly performant game, to the point where the lowest average frame-rate at 1080p is a still decent 59fps on the GTX 1060, with RTX 2060 switching that up to 109fps. So, similar to F1 22, we're going to be seeing some extremely high performance here, to the point where the difference between the major contenders here will be hard to tell for the average player. Even so, there's just a nine percentage point lead for the 4060 over its predecessor, which isn't great, and a 36 percent lead over the RTX 2060. Hardly amazing results then, though at least the 4060 is able to outperform the RTX 2070 Super.

The RTX 4060 fares relatively poorly against its competitors in this test, with Intel Arc pulling ahead and the RX 7600 a clear 30 points clear of its new rival. If you're wondering why or how the RX 7600 is able to match the much more capable RX 6700 XT on this one, that's almost certainly the CPU limit. Switch to 1440p and you'll see a better test of GPU power - and the RTX 4060 (though still slower) gets closer to its AMD counterpart.

Hitman, Ultra, TAA

A Plague Tale: Requiem

We had to include this game in our test suite simply because it's so beautiful - a proper next generation showcase. It's also runs exceptionally smoothly bearing in mind that so much is being asked of the graphics hardware... and with RT disabled at least, it doesn't trouble the limitations of 8GB GPUs. We're testing like-for-like here, but do bear in mind that there is frame generation support for RTX 40 series cards and if you watch our video content, you'll see that this does dramatically improve fluidity.

In pure rasterisation terms though, the results will look familiar. The 4060 has a circa 15 percentage point lead over its predecessor, rising to a 35 point advantage against RTX 2060 and there's a 2.4x boost up against the GTX 1060. The RX 7600 noses ahead at like-for-like settings, while there's effective parity against Arc A750 and RTX 2070 Super.

A Plague Tale Requiem, Ultra Settings

Returnal

In our final rasterisation benchmark, the RTX 4060 delivers relative results are a cut above many of our prior tests in this category, where we find the new offering almost 21 points clear of its predecessor, which in turn translates into a 40-51 percent lead over RTX 2060 and a 2.4x performance multiplier up against GTX 1060 - and all of this is without frame generation factored in, which is a feature exclusive to RTX 4060 in this category.

In the last few tests, the RX 7600 has traded blows with the RTX 4060 - albeit at a considerably lower price - and it's the same here, though this time it's the Nvidia card that has a slight advantage overall, while also delivering a good chunk of extra performance against Arc A750. This table of results also demonstrates that AMD's RX 6600 is something of a price vs performance monster, bearing in mind it's routinely under $200/£200.