Introduction

We finally have with us the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB graphics card. This model, which doubles the VRAM size over the “standard” RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB, was announced to much fanfare back in May 2023, but NVIDIA, for reasons we’ll find out in this review, decided against sampling the card to reviewers ahead of its official July 18 launch. There is no first-party Founders Edition card, and NVIDIA’s board partners weren’t too keen on sampling their custom-design cards, either. So we spent north of $500, (€562.50 to be precise) to buy one of these cards from the market after launch, and it finally made its way to our labs. Technically, this is a Gainward GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB Panther OC, but we are treating it as a de facto NVIDIA review, because there is no FE available and we have no other reviews planned of this 16 GB model.

The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Ada is designed to consolidate the mid-range for NVIDIA this generation. It offers maxed-out gaming at 1080p, including ray tracing, and 1440p gaming is very much possible at high-thru-ultra settings. For 1440p with ray tracing, you might need to dial down some settings, or better yet, let GeForce Experience find the right settings for you. The best option would be to take advantage of features such as DLSS. Since it’s based on the latest Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, the RTX 4060 Ti gets DLSS 3 Frame Generation, a path-breaking feature to increase frame-rates with minimal impact on image quality.

The GeForce Ada Lovelace graphics architecture debuts the third generation of NVIDIA RTX, the technology that mainstreamed ray tracing for real-time graphics and gaming applications. By itself, ray tracing is a the holy grail of 3D graphics, as it’s the most computationally intensive way to generate photorealistic graphics. NVIDIA figured out a way to combine conventional raster 3D graphics with certain real-time ray traced elements such as lighting, shadows, reflections, global illuminations, and motion-blur; to significantly improve realism in games. Even this much of ray tracing requires tremendous compute power, and so NVIDIA innovated the RT core, a fixed function hardware unit to calculate ray intersections. NVIDIA leverages AI for de-noising, and hence the GPU has Tensor cores that accelerate neural network building and training, besides features such as DLSS. Ada introduces NVIDIA’s highest IPC CUDA cores that support shader execution re-ordering; 3rd generation RT cores that support displaced micro-meshes, and the new optical flow accelerator that enables DLSS 3 Frame Generation.

The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB is based on the 5 nm AD106 silicon, which it nearly maxes out, enabling 34 out of 36 streaming multiprocessors (SM) physically present. This works out to 4,352 CUDA cores, 136 Tensor cores, 34 RT cores, 136 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. In a bit of a controversial decision, NVIDIA reduced the memory bus width of the RTX 4060 Ti to 128-bit, compared to the 256-bit that the RTX 3060 Ti enjoys. The memory speed has generationally increased to 18 Gbps, but the memory bandwidth still falls a bit short. This shouldn’t be a problem, NVIDIA claims, as the company re-architected the memory sub-system to place greater importance on 8-12 times larger on-die caches, which should reduce the round-trips to the video memory. The 16 GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti is simply a doubling in memory size, using the same 128-bit GDDR6 memory interface, with a clamshell memory configuration, which puts the chips on both sides of the PCB. The memory speed is unchanged at 18 Gbps, as is the GPU’s core-configuration. You get the same number of shaders, and the same GPU clock speeds. Only the power limit has been increased by 5 W, to account for the higher power draw of the additional 8 GB memory.

NVIDIA is asking a steep $499 for the 16 GB GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, a 25% premium over the RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB. From what little we know about GDDR6 memory spot-pricing, the 16 GB variant is essentially a $10-20 increase in the bill of materials, but for whatever reason, it lugs that huge premium. At $499, this card is $100 shy of the GeForce RTX 4070, which is about 30% faster than the RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB. In this review, we’ll find out by just how much NVIDIA has managed to slim that gap with the 16 GB RTX 4060 Ti.