The GeForce RTX 4060 is the most affordable graphics card offered by NVIDIA under the Ada Lovelace desktop architecture and also the model that is most criticized. These criticisms mainly focused on two keys, the reduction of graphics memory to 8 GB and the small improvement in performance that it achieves compared to the previous generation.

It is true that the GeForce RTX 4060 has 8 GB of graphics memory and that its raw rasterization performance was not that great compared to what the GeForce RTX 3060 marked from a generational point of view, but that doesn’t mean the first one is a bad graphics card Neither is it better to buy a GeForce RTX 3060, in fact the opposite is true.

I know that despite the time that has passed and what I explained to you in my GeForce RTX 4060 review, many of you still have doubts about this topic, along with disinformation which was created in recent months can lead to serious errors which will ultimately affect your wallet and your gaming experience.

Let me give you an example, a few weeks ago an acquaintance told me that his friend bought a 12 GB GeForce RTX 3060 for 330 euros because it was a “deal”, but you actually made the wrong purchase, because at that time I could buy a GeForce RTX 4060 for less than 300 euros. It was hiding behind the fact that it has more graphics memory, and yes, that’s true, but that doesn’t change the fact that it has worse performance, more consumption, and is missing a key technology that makes a huge difference.frame generation.

GeForce RTX 4060 vs GeForce RTX 3060

In order to understand which graphics card is the best choice, it is necessary directly compare the specifications of both. This will give us the foundation we need to be able to thoroughly assess the key features these two graphics solutions present and how they can make a significant difference.

GeForce RTX 4060 specifications

• Graphics core AD107 in 5nm.
• 18.9 billion transistors.
• Cover area: 146 mm square.
• Graphics Processing Clusters (GPC): 3.
• Texture Processing Clusters (TPC): 12.
• 3072 shaders at 2.46 GHz.
• 96 texturing units.
• 48 raster units.
• 96 tensor cores of the fourth generation.
• 24 cores of the third generation RT.
• 128-bit memory bus.
• 8 GB GDDR6 at 17 GHz with a bandwidth of 272 GB/s.
• 15.11 TFLOPs of performance in FP32.
• 24 MB L2 cache (453 GB/s effective).
• TGP 115 watts, average consumption 110 watts.
• It uses the PCIe Gen4 x8 standard.
• You need an additional 8-pin power connector.
• Available from €309.90.

GeForce RTX 3060 specifications

• Graphics core GA106 in 8nm.
• 12 billion transistors.
• Cover area: 276 mm square.
• Graphics Processing Clusters (GPC): 3.
• Texture Processing Clusters (TPC): 14.
• 3,584 shaders at 1.77 GHz in turbo mode.
• 112 texturing units.
• 48 raster units.
• 112 tensor cores of the third generation.
• 28 second generation RT cores.
• 192-bit memory bus.
• 12 GB GDDR6 at 15 GHz with a bandwidth of 360 GB/s.
• 12.74 TFLOPs of performance in FP32.
• 3 MB L2 cache.
• 170W TGP.
• It uses the PCIe Gen3 x16 standard.
• You need an additional 8-pin power connector.
• Available from 289.90 euros.

This simple comparison allows us to see that the GeForce RTX 4060 is much more efficient than the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB because it has much lower consumption and Despite everything, it clearly offers more performance, both in rasterization and ray tracing. It also uses a more advanced architecture, though we’ll cover that in more detail in the next section.

Why the GeForce RTX 4060 is the better choice

Because it is more efficient and consumes less energy

It is a better choice to GeForce RTX 3060 12GB because it outperforms it in both rasterization and ray tracingand is so efficient that it can run on almost any type of power source. GeForce RTX 4060 consumes an average of 115 wattswhile the GeForce RTX 3060 can exceed 170 watts, a difference that can already force us to buy a more expensive and powerful source.

At the performance level, even the cheapest GeForce RTX 4060 on the market Beats the 12GB GeForce RTX 3060 by an average of 15% to 20% at 1080p, depending on the games we use in the comparison. If we increase the resolution At 1440p the GeForce RTX 4060 still wins by 12% on average, although again this result may change depending on the games we use.

Because it has more advanced technology and more support

The GeForce RTX 4060 uses the Ada Lovelace architecture and therefore supports all technologies that are exclusive that. These are the four most important keys at the technology level of the said architecture that are present in this graphics card and that represent a very important difference:

• Changing the shader execution order, which reorders work at the shader level in real time. This improves thread dispatch and avoids divergent execution issues.
• Third generation RT coreswhich double the calculation speed of ray intersections and triangles and have Displaced Micro-Mesh and Opacity Micro-Mask technologies.
• The fourth generation of tensor cores, which improve performance compared to the previous generation and can work with FP8 and INT8 operations.
• A new generation of optical flow acceleratorwhich doubles the performance and accuracy of the previous generation and provides access to hardware frame generation.

Thanks to all these advances, the GeForce RTX 4060 indicates a more significant jump than simple brute force suggests. Of all these technologies, frame generation is undoubtedly the most important, which is exclusive to the GeForce RTX 40 and is therefore not present in the GeForce RTX 3060.

The Optical Flow Accelerator fitted to the GeForce RTX 4060 allows you to activate frame generation, a hardware-accelerated technology that uses AI to generate fully independent intermediate frames on the GPUwhile resorting to information contained in alternating frames and taking into account both spatial and temporal elements as well as motion vectors.

This whole process and the use of specific hardware and AI make this technology something far better than classic frame interpolation, both for quality and overall image stability. Since these are independent frames generated on the GPU, there is no type of bottleneck derived from the CPU and they greatly improve the fluidity in games.

If we consider a value that indicates the generation of frames, The difference in smoothness between GeForce RTX 4060 and GeForce RTX 3060 is skyrocketingas we can see in the attached graph, which includes some specific performance data to better appreciate the jump represented by the generation of frames.

GeForce RTX 4060 is a better choice in 2024

There is only one “but” we can say about this graphics card, and that is the fact that it only has 8 GB of graphics memory. However, we must remember that we are facing dedicated 1080p graphics card it gives the best work with the specified resolution, and at this level It is very strange We come across scenarios where we may be limited by graphics memory.

On the other hand, we must also be clear that the use of NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution helps to reduce the consumption of graphics memory and that in the end most of the current games that are really new generation and that are very demanding work without problems. GeForce RTX 4060. Alan Wake 2 is a good example and Lords of the Fallen is another. It consumes an average of only 6 GB in 1440p resolution with ultra quality, and just over 5GB at 1080p with ultra quality (reflections and lighting in between, as they greatly affect performance).

If you bought a GeForce RTX 3060 knowing that its 12 GB of graphics memory will give you a longer lifespan I’m sorry to tell you that you were wrong. The GeForce RTX 4060 already offers a much better experience of current games and thanks to the support of frame generation technology It will age much better than that one.

You’ll only need one to move the GeForce RTX 4060 450W power supply, You don’t need anything more powerful because its consumption is, as I mentioned at the beginning of the article, very low. This allows you to save money compared to the resource you would need to power a GeForce RTX 3060. You also don’t need a very powerful processor, since from Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i5-10400F Experience would be good.