Andrew Cunningham
Last week, AMD announced what are probably the last major GPU launches of this generation of graphics cards: the $449 Radeon RX 7700 XT and $499 Radeon RX 7800 XT. AMD’s pricing and performance numbers pit the cards against Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (specifically the $499 16GB version) and the $599 RTX 4070.
AMD’s pricing is aggressive enough that Nvidia is quietly cutting the prices of some 16GB RTX 4060 Ti cards to $449, to match the RX 7700 XT. The announcement about the $50 reduction was buried toward the bottom of an email that Nvidia sent to GPU reviewers ahead of AMD’s launch next week; it also drew attention to Nvidia-specific features like DLSS upscaling and frame generation, which compete with AMD’s GPU-agnostic FSR, plus recent DLSS improvements that improve ray-tracing performance.
“Finally, as a reminder, market prices can vary from the original launch MSRPs,” Nvidia’s Brian Burke wrote. “Today, GeForce RTX 4070 is widely available at $599, and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is now available at $449. Both of these GPUs are great upgrade choices for gamers seeking their next GPU for the upcoming 2 to 3 years.”
If reviews for the 8GB version of the 4060 Ti were mostly of the damning-with-faint-praise variety, reviews of the 16GB version were pretty uniformly negative; Nvidia didn’t even send out any cards for review, and outlets like Tom’s Hardware and TechPowerUp said that Nvidia’s board partners weren’t interested in sending out review loaners either. When this kind of thing happens, it is often a sign that companies do not expect reviewers to be kind.
According to those reviews and Nvidia’s numbers, the extra RAM only helps boost frame rates in a small handful of games since the GPU is exactly the same as in the cheaper 8GB version. And at 1440p and 4K resolutions where more RAM could conceivably be of more use, the card’s relatively narrow 128-bit memory bus restricts performance—in some games running at 4K, the 4060 Ti is barely faster than the 3060 Ti from late 2020. Combine those dubious benefits with the $100 price jump, and you had a card that offered pretty bad value for the money. And that’s saying something, since pretty much every GPU in the RTX 40 series costs more than we would like it to.
If I were buying a new GPU for myself, I would still probably bypass both versions of the 4060 Ti entirely; the $299 RTX 4060 is a capable 1080p card already, and the $599 RTX 4070 is more expensive but it does a much better job than the 4060 Ti at higher 1440p and 4K resolutions (and that’s before considering any of the 6000- and 7000-series Radeon options). But we can all agree, at least, that spending $50 to get another 8GB of video memory is more palatable than spending $100.
We’ll take the 16GB 4060 Ti’s price tweak into consideration in our review of the Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT. The cards launch on September 6.