Nvidia can't stop embarrassing itself, awful new RTX 4060 Ti 16GB makes the 8GB seem better

Around the middle of May, Nvidia unveiled its RTX 4060 series, namely the RTX 4060 Ti and the RTX 4060 GPUs. While the Ti began selling within a week's time, the non-Ti card was on shelves by the end of June.

The media reception of the 4060 Ti was absolutely awful, and rightfully so, as it was found to be just ~10% faster than the 3060 Ti, and still offering 8GB of VRAM like its predecessor, something which really is unacceptable for a $400 GPU in 2023. And much to Nvidia's torment, almost no responsible reviewer recommended purchasing this GPU outside of use cases that warranted the need for an efficient graphics card. It was clear that Team Green was greedy here as it wanted to maximize its profit by offering the bare minimum to consumers.

In response to this poor reception, Nvidia changed its marketing tactic with the RTX 4060 non-Ti as it tried convincing buyers of the power efficiency gains, and also made some pretty outrageous claims when comparing with the six-year-old Pascal-based GTX 1060. Luckily for Nvidia, the RTX 4060 wasn't as bashed as its Ti sibling since the $300 4060 definitely brought more to the table than the $400 Ti did.

Nvidia also announced a 16GB RTX 4060 Ti that would cost a hundred dollars more at $500 with no change in the core specifications. Early reports suggested Nvidia's AIB (Add-in-board) partners weren't too excited about the card, which was sort of expected as the company was essentially offering almost no performance gains over the 8GB SKU and the 16GB frame buffer would only matter in VRAM capacity-constrained situations or when a user wanted to run very-high resolution texture packs. The rest of the memory subsystem, like the bus width and GDDR speeds, see no upgrade over the 8GB variant.

Nvidia partner MSI published a preview of its RTX 4060 Ti GAMING X SLIM 16G model earlier today, and as if the situation couldn't get any worse, the new more expensive 16GB model of the GPU actually turned out to be slower than the 8GB card, at least in terms of the average framerates.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the MSI Slim 4060 Ti 16GB was measurably slower than the 8GB model in most of the titles except in CS:GO. This is really an embarrassing showing from the new 16GB model especially since it is supposed to cost $100 more than their 8GB counterparts. We understand that the card used here was a slim variant compared to the 8GB model, but taking into account the $100 (25%) premium, it gets pretty difficult to defend or recommend the 4060 Ti 16GB to anyone.

Source: MSI Gaming (YouTube) via momomo_us (Twitter)

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