NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is a fast desktop graphics card. It is based on the GA106 Ampere chip and offers 12 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 192 Bit memory bus. It offers 3,584 cores and supports PCIe 4.0.

The performance is similar to the older GeForce RTX 2070 and therefore best suited for 1080p gaming of modern and demanding games in high settings.

The GA106 chip offers 3,840 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,920 INT32 ALUs). With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA106 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip). The TDP of the RTX 3060 is specified at 170 Watt and therefore slightly higher than the previous RTX 2060 (160 Watt).

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 is a mid-range desktop GPU manufactured using the 5 nm process at TSMC. The AD107 chip is used here. It combines 3,072 shader units and 8 GB of GDDR6 memory. The memory interface is 128-bit, resulting in a memory bandwidth of 272 GB/s in conjunction with the VRAM clock speed.

Features

The features that were introduced with the high-end models of the Ada Lovelace generation, such as DLSS 3.0 with frame generation, are also present in the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060. This sets the new mid-range card apart from the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 and provides a significant advantage in games that offer these features.

Performance

Without DLSS, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 performs slightly behind the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. Compared to AMD, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 often competes with an AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT. The GeForce RTX 4060 caters to the 1080p gaming range in terms of performance. At times, the performance is sufficient for 1440p gaming as well, although older games are more suitable for this resolution. Additionally, some compromises in terms of graphical fidelity might be necessary for the latest games. The performance is suitable for playable frame rates at high detail settings.

Power Consumption

The power consumption of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 is specified by the manufacturer at 115 Watts (TDP). This is significantly lower than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, which has a TDP of 170 watts. In comparison to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (200 W TDP), the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 performs well and delivers similar performance with significantly lower power consumption. Power is supplied through a PCIe slot and an additional 6+2-pin connector.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is a high-end desktop graphics card based on the AD104 chip using the Ada Lovelace architecture. The 4070Ti offers 7,680 cores and 12 GB GDDR6X graphics memory with a 192 bit memory bus and clocked at 22.4 Gbits. The card offers a good raytracing performance thanks to the 60 dedicated raytracing cores. For AI calculations (and DLSS 3 in games), the RTX 4070 Ti has 240 Tensor cores.

The gaming performance is well suited for 4k60 gaming in most games, but for very demanding games you might have to reduce to QHD resolution. With Raytracing, lower resolutions and DLSS are crucial for playable frame rates. The performance on average is similar to the old RTX 3090 / 3090 Ti.

The AD104 chip is manufactured in the modern 5nm process at TSMC (4N with EUV) and specified with a TGP (Total Graphics Power) of 285 Watt (compared to the 450 Watt of the RTX 4090).