New RTX 4060 leaked specs have me worried about Nvidia’s midrange offerings

Nvidia recently had a big win with its RTX 4070 Ti graphics card which makes me pretty optimistic about the future of Nvidia’s midrange offerings to come, but a new spec leak from a fairly reliable Twitter leaker has me seriously questioning what it company thinks.

For starters, it’s important to qualify spec leaks like this, as Nvidia hasn’t announced anything yet and any “leaks” online should be taken with a grain of salt. But kopite7kimi (opens in new tab) has been pretty good in the past, so these specs can’t be written off completely either.

For starters, it looks like the RTX 4060 will use the AD107 GPU, which is a step down from the AD106 we’d expect to find in the RTX 4060 since the RTX 3060 used the GA106 GPU. Even the RTX 3050 8GB used a trimmed GA106 GPU, so the AD107 GPU seems to be a regression here.

Additionally, the purported RTX 4060 specs (as well as some of our back-of-the-napkin calculations) are nearly identical to the RTX 4060 Mobile specs for which we have official numbers for comparison.

As you can see, the biggest difference in the leaked specs of the confirmed RTX 4060 Mobile is the major downgrade in the number of streaming multiprocessors going off the CUDA core count, from 3,584 in the RTX 3060 and 3,072 in the RTX 4060 – a 14.28 % decrease. Without the decrease, this is light years short of the best graphics card in Nvidia’s lineup, the RTX 4090, coming in just north of half that of the RTX 4070 Ti, so the decrease in numbers cores here will limit the RTX 4060’s potential.

There’s also the matter of the slightly higher effective memory clock than the RTX 4060 Mobile, giving the RTX 4060 desktop 12.5% ​​more memory bandwidth, but otherwise it’s more or less the same as its mobile counterpart in terms of memory.

A major unknown right now is what the final base and boost clock speeds will be for the RTX 4060, but given that the Nvidia Lovelace architecture is a 4nm process versus Nvidia Ampere’s 8nm process, we expect base clock speeds to be north of 2,000MHz, with the boost clock possibly over 2,500MHz if the approximately 56% faster base clock and 48% faster boost clock gen-on-gen pattern for the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 applies to the RTX 4060.

Two reasons why I’m concerned about these specs

Let me start with this first: the decline in streaming multiprocessors and CUDA cores is not that big of a deal. With 128 CUDA cores per SM, the leaked specs mean a decrease from 28 SMs in the RTX 3060 to 24 SMs in the RTX 4060. A 14.28% drop in tensor cores and ray tracing cores isn’t great, but also consider that these fourth generation tensor and third generation ray tracing cores. They’re just much, much better than Ampere’s third- and second-generation cores, respectively, so they’ll actually perform better despite being fewer.

What worries me is the memory. 8 GB of VRAM is rather meager at this stage, and while this technically should be a high end 1080p graphics card given how well the RTX 4070 Ti handles 4K and how well the RTX 3060 Ti handles 1440p gaming we hope the RTX 4060 would be a solid contender for the best 1440p graphics card . However, given the specs, I doubt it.

The problem here is that 8 GB of VRAM is fine for 1080p, since the size of texture files that can quickly fill VRAM is much smaller than at 1440p or 4K. And while the RTX 3060 Ti also had 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, it also had a much wider memory bus (256-bit), giving it an effective memory bandwidth of 448.0 GB/s.

That’s more than enough to efficiently load and process 1440p textures despite the smaller VRAM pool, while the RTX 3060 had 50% more VRAM (12 GB) and a larger memory bus (192 bits), so it clocked in at a 360.0 GB/s memory bandwidth, which also gives it decent 1440p performance. The RTX 4060, meanwhile, looks like it will have much lower memory bandwidth, so larger textures at 1440p will bottleneck much faster, limiting 1440p performance and pretty much limiting this card to 1080p gaming.

It’s also a matter of using the same base GPU as the RTX 4060 Mobile. We haven’t been able to test the RTX 4060 Mobile ourselves yet, but normally the mobile chips are about a tier and a half lower than their desktop counterparts in terms of the GPU used (so the RTX 4090 desktop’s AD102 is a tier above the RTX 4090 Mobile’s AD103 ), while also being smaller versions of those chips.

The RTX 4060 Mobile is definitely a slimmed down version of the AD107, but if the RTX 4060 desktop card is also an AD107 then you certainly can’t expect much more performance from the desktop version than from the mobile version. GPU. That’s not great for desktop gaming, even at 1080p.

Still, there’s a big reason why these specs could be good news for gamers

While all of this may be bad news for gamers in terms of performance, there’s a glimmer of hope here, and that’s the price. If Nvidia were to try and make an RTX 4060 that’s aggressively priced (less than $300/£300 I think), the trade-off here wouldn’t just be justified, it could very well be what gamers are asking for.

Most gamers still game at 1080p, according to the Steam hardware research (opens in new tab) with a growing number of upgrades to up to 1440p. While the memory limitations don’t bode well for 1440p gaming, it would certainly be a treat to get an affordable graphics card in the hands of gamers where they currently are.

Many gamers also still use GPUs from the GTX era so the performance upgrade with an RTX 4060 will still be substantial enough that I’m sure many gamers won’t care how much better it is could be be with an AD106 GPU, and in the end that’s all that matters – especially if Nvidia can get the pricing right on this card.