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

The data on the prior pages allows us to fit the RTX 4060 into a hierarchy of modern graphics cards, it shows percentage differentials and allows us to calculate relative value propositions. However, what it does not do is give us much of a meaningful sense of how the GPU is actually going to be used, what it can achieve with optimised settings nor how it works sits within a more budget-orientated rig that matches its price-point. This is why I spent a weekend with the RTX 4060 plugged into a system consisting of a Core i5 12400F, paired with 3200MT/s CL18 DDR4 and running off a 1TB PCIe 3.0 Crucial P3 SSD. The aim was straightforward - to use gaming standards set by PlayStation 5 and to see if the RTX 4060 could get anywhere near to it.

Bearing in mind that the RTX 2070 Super has delivered broadly equivalent results to the current consoles - and that the RTX 4060 is in the same ballpark and actually faster with RT features active - it comes as no surprise to see that Nvidia's entry-level Ada Lovelace card is indeed broadly comparable. Starting with Fortnite on Unreal Engine 5.2, with settings on high at 4K resolution with TSR dynamic upscaling, a sample battle royale delivered performance in the 50+fps range, with a 59fps average across 11 minutes of play. Turning off TSR and running at native 1080p with unlocked frame-rates, the average increased to 70.4fps. This is a decent showing and the 8GB of framebuffer memory was not a limiting factor.

Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered was an interesting experience. We have a pretty close lock on PlayStation 5 equivalent settings in its performance RT mode, though an exact match is not possible and the dynamic resolution scaling formula used by PC and PS5 is quite different. With that in mind, I used DLSS DSR instead of the Insomniac reconstruction solution and found that initially, the 4060 worked just fine in delivering a reconstructed 4K 60fps experience - however, the more I played, the more performance dropped - and I believe this is down to the very high texture setting overwhelming the 4060.

By dropping down to the high preset and dialling back RT object draw distance a couple of notches (bringing us into line with Alex Battaglia's optimised settings), the 4060 worked well in delivering a similar 4K DLSS DSR experience, with superior image clarity. It's still not a 60fps lock - but to be fair, both PS5 and 4060 drop frames, just in different areas.

A Plague Tale: Requiem is interesting because its precise visual make-up on PS5 can be replicated on PC with an engine.ini tweak, but its recent patch appears to have increased PS5 performance - while I noted a circa five percent drop on ultra settings on PC. PS5 optimisations make our old bench sequence redundant now as we hit its 40fps cap, while RTX 4060 is 2-3fps off-pace.

I did find another test sequence where PS5 is benchable - and here, there's a 1-4fps deficit against PS5 in a bandwidth-intensive scene. This game operates internally at 1440p, using reconstruction to reach 4K. By dropping back to DLSS performance mode, the 4060 takes a small hit to image quality but delivers much higher performance - a 10-12fps advantage.

At native 1080p, however, our mainstream PC can run at full ultra settings at 50fps or higher, while DLSS 3 adds 30-40fps on top of that, which outstrips what the consoles are doing in their own 1080p performance modes on this title. A Plague Tale: Requiem is a truly demanding game but looks great running at very high frame-rates on a 1080p screen.

Looking at a couple of older games - Metro Exodus and Control - again, we can only approximate what the consoles are doing, but broadly equivalent (if not better) experiences are possible. Metro Exodus runs at a mixture of PC-equivalent settings on PS5, but aims for a reconstructed 4K image with heavy use of dynamic resolution scaling - even running under 1080p at points. I stuck with 4K DLSS performance mode and the ultra preset, finding that the most demanding stage in the game bottoms out at 50fps but generally locks to 60fps.

Control is an old game now, but generally runs on PS5 at the equivalent of the low preset with medium global reflections, with RT reflections and transparency reflections at 30fps. On PC, I opted to match those settings but increase draw distance, texture quality and texture filtering quality. Again, it's mostly a 4K 60fps experience on DLSS performance mode, with dips into the 50s on the most demanding areas. It's worth pointing out here that the consoles are checkerboarding their RT reflections, something we can't do on PC.

Either way, the 4060 delivers a transformative experience compared to the consoles - the caveat being that the PS5 and Xbox Series ports of the game were relatively low budget affairs and we won't see the Northlight engine at its best on this hardware until Alan Wake arrives. Meanwhile, at 1080p with high RT settings and DLSS quality mode, we're looking at 70fps minimums and a 100fps max on the RTX 4060, which looks and plays very well indeed - though the clarity of the reconstructed 4K experience is a class above.

Best Budget 1080p Gaming GPUs - Intel Arc Revisited + RX 7600 vs RTX 3060 + More

So, where does this leave us with the RTX 4060? It would be very easy to dismiss this as the RTX 4060 Ti experience scaled back to a lower price tier - and to be fair, all of the benchmarks back up that point of view.

Performance upgrades against the RTX 3060 can be impressive or they can be risible. The variation on a title-by-title basis is extraordinary, just as it was for RTX 4060 Ti. Either way, you're still missing out on the extra 4GB of framebuffer memory that the older product had and any regression in spec from one generation to the next is not great. Meanwhile, the RTX 4060's 8GB of memory puts it into the same class of product as the Intel Arc A750 and Radeon RX 7600, where the price vs performance ratios skew in favour of the cheaper offerings. The thing is, as my recent budget GPU testing revealed, there's no clear winner here. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses.

All of which means that the RTX 4060 joins an incredibly hotly contested market sector, where AMD's RX 7600 seems to have recently received a pricing haircut to $250, which makes it very compelling, especially for rasterisation. Intel's Arc A750 is the same price and can mix it up with the 4060 in RT performance, but falls short in legacy gaming. The RTX 3060? It's the only 12GB game in town at a time when too many games are shipping with poor texture quality management for 8GB GPUs. There is no one product under £299/$299 that delivers everything I think a gamer should have at that price-point.

The arrival of the RTX 4060 does not change that conclusion that much, it simply expands the range of possible areas of strength - because as much as the reduction in memory vs RTX 3060 is frustrating, there's no doubt that the RTX 4060 is generally faster than its predecessor, while DLSS 3 absolutely can be a game-changer in this sector of the market. Meanwhile, if Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive path-tracing is a vision for the future of gaming, right now only the RTX 4060 is going to open up that experience for the budget GPU sector. Especially with the RT optimisation mod in place, seeing a path-traced Cyberpunk 2077 play out at 1080p at 60-90fps was a simply extraordinary feat. The RTX 4060 can do things no other GPU can do, but it's one step away from being the definitive product for its market.

Nvidia RTX 4060 Analysis

• Introduction
• RT benchmarks: Dying Light 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Control
• RT benchmarks: Hitman 3, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, F1 22
• RT/DLSS/FSR2/DLSS3 benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2, Forza Horizon 5
• Game benchmarks: Control, Cyberpunk 2077, F1 22, Forza Horizon 5
• Game benchmarks: Hitman 3, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Returnal
• Console-equivalent testing, summary and conclusion [This Page]