Overall and Final Verdict
With our testing out of the way and having taken a look at the Asus Dual RTX 4060 8GBs design we can sit back and reflect on everything. The Asus Dual RTX 4060 design, while very simple, looks good with its blacked-out styling and I was surprised how long it took me to even notice that the card has the smoked translucent section at the top of the fan shroud that gives a peak behind the covers. As an 80-90s child, translucent where you can see what is going on behind it is ALWAYS awesome. Asus’s design isn’t a giant card but with the RTX 4060’s power usage being low, the Dual design kept things running cool in all of my testing and was surprisingly quiet under load spinning the fans at just 34% fan speed. While still being an MSRP card the Dual RTX 4060 did still manage to get us a nice metal backplate and a small overclock over Nvidia’s original clock speeds as well. It doesn’t have lighting which helps keep costs down and depending on the person this might be a big pro or a con.
Looking beyond Asus’s design to the RTX 4060 itself. This is a card designed for 1080p which the 8GB memory is designed around. Like with the RTX 4060 Ti, if you have plans on upgrading to a higher resolution monitor during the time you have this card, this isn’t the card you should be looking for. But with 1080p having the largest number of users it makes sense for Nvidia to target the resolution. With that 1080p performance in all of our tests was great, and 1440p wasn’t too bad as well with the average across the games tested at 95 FPS. I know a lot of people are concerned with the lower memory, especially when you compare it against the 3060 which had 12GB. Nvidia’s larger cache does seem to help alleviate some of the load there with the 4060 outperforming the RX 7600 and 6500XT at higher resolutions while both of those cards have the same VRAM and are faster at 1080p. But we also know that some extra demanding applications like some emulators will struggle and for those the 3060 is still going to be the better option.
This brings me back to raster performance, like with the RTX 4060 Ti, the RTX 4060 does still run behind AMDs 7600 at 1080p and on par with the 6650XT with both being priced lower than the 4060. Nvidia does make up that difference once you get into DLSS and Ray Tracing performance. In games that support it, the 4060 punches well above its weight class. Performance compared to the 3060 and 3060 Ti do show a much smaller generation-to-generation improvement when it comes to raster performance. I think most people would have liked to see the 4060 land right in line with last generations RTX 3060 Ti and it falls short there. That isn’t to say it isn’t an improvement over the 3060, it is just smaller than I would like to see. The DLSS and ray tracing performance however did see a big performance jump.
I did also go a little beyond our normal testing with the 4060 to get a look at how it compares to past xx60 models but our RTX 2060 was eluding me so I have numbers comparing the 4060 with the 3060, 1660, and 1060. I did include average 3DMark scores for the 2060 when possible as well. The truth is 3060 owners aren’t and shouldn’t be looking at the RTX 4060 as an upgrade. But those cards that have been out for up to 7 years now (GTX 1060) that are in the top 10 of Steams hardware survey are the users who might be looking to upgrade. Without taking RTX or DLSS into account at all, for those users in game, they could be going from 31 FPS in Watch Dogs Legion at 1080p on ultra detail up to 80 FPS on the RTX 4060. The performance improvement in Blender is significant as well with the 1060 to the 4060 showing a 925% improvement.
With those huge performance increases the RTX 4060 is still averaging very close to the same power across our power tests (minus Speedway which isn’t supported on the older cards) with the 4060 averaging 138.4 and the 1060 averaging 130 watts. That is also reflected in the Time Spy Extreme score per watt results as well with the 4060 getting 30.9 points for each watt it uses whereas the 1060 is at 12.2.
I was curious about launch pricing for all of the xx60 cards as well so I put together a chart for that as well that shows the launch MSRP as well as a Time Spy Extreme score per dollar launch MSRP as well just to see how the 4060 compared. The $299 launch MSRP is in line with most of the other xx60 models except for the GTX 1660 which was an impressive $219. So Nvidia’s pricing isn’t really out of line, it’s the performance not at least surpassing the next model up from the last generation that hurts things. The GTX 1060 for example, when it launched, ran right with the GTX 980, the RTX 2060 was well ahead of the GTX 1070 and nearly running with the 1070 Ti. The 3060 on the other hand was a little behind the 2060 SUPER.
Overall the RTX 4060 does replace the RTX 3060 as the go-to card for 1080p gaming at a value except for emulation. Like with previous 4000 Series cards, the 4060 does struggle to keep up in overall value when it comes to just raster performance compared to the similarly priced AMD cards. Ray tracing performance and DLSS both help even that out assuming the games that you are looking to play support them and that list is getting longer almost daily. In the end, Nvidia faithful who loved their GTX 1060 or similar card are going to love the upgrade but they will pay a premium for the Nvidia-specific technology. Value-focused customers who blow whichever way the wind is blowing however will have to figure out if the games they are planning on playing have or will be getting DLSS and/or ray tracing, without that those customers are going to be looking at the lower prices and better rater performance at 1080p from the RX 7600 and the older RX 6650XT while it is still available.
Live Pricing: HERE
